inform, >INVENTORY, Page 4

Skyranch by Jack Driscoll [Comp99]

IFDB page: Skyranch
Final placement: 37th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

In my head, I’ve started this review a dozen different ways and discarded them all. The unused versions were rejected for being too caustic, too angry, or too harsh. During this current attempt, I will try to keep a leash on these energies, though they’re chomping at the bit (if I may mix my animal metaphors.) I want for these reviews to be helpful, not hurtful, and I want to keep my criticisms constructive. In that spirit, I offer a couple of changes that could (and should) be made to make Skyranch a playable game:

The game should be reprogrammed until it meets a minimum level of coding quality. I would put this minimum level right around the functionality provided by, for example, an Inform shell game (i.e. the bare-bones version of the library before the game author has added any real code.) To detail all, or even many, of the ways in which Skyranch fails to meet this standard would take more time than I want to devote to this game. One example: the game should recognize verbs like “ask” and “examine”. The game’s error messages should be helpful, rather than flippant parser responses like “What?” or “So… what are you saying?” Many authors meet this minimum standard by using a text adventure creation tool such as Inform, TADS, Hugo, ALAN, etc. to create their game. This isn’t strictly necessary, of course, but if a game is programmed from scratch, it had better be at least as good as one that was created with such a tool.

The prose should be rewritten until it consists of correct English sentences. The current writing in the game is pretty abysmal. Mistakes are so legion that the text is often confusing, sometimes completely incomprehensible. Until a text game is written in English, it won’t be any fun for me to play, because English is the only language I read fluently.

Until these two basic conditions are met, Skyranch won’t even be worth discussing, let alone playing.

Rating: 0.9

Death To My Enemies by Jon Blask as Roody Yogurt [Comp99]

IFDB page: Death To My Enemies
Final placement: 29th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

I guess this is another ifMUD in-joke game. I make this guess partly based on my interpretation of the included readme file, which suggests that the majority of the author’s support came from MUD denizens, and partly on the fact that I recognize a very few references in the game, like “Eeagh!” and “Awwwk, want cork nut!”, as being from the MUD. I already talked about this kind of game in my review of Pass The Banana, so I won’t rehash all that here. I will say that the ifMUD in-joke game is rapidly climbing my list of least favorite competition entry genres. Right now it’s hovering just below the simulated-house and learning-Inform genres. I don’t know, I guess it’s funny if you’re in on the joke (though maybe not — not being in on the joke, I wouldn’t know one way or another), but to me it’s just really boring. There were some jokes that didn’t feel like they required outside knowledge, but I didn’t find them very funny. In addition, I can only believe that the solution to the game is another kind of in-joke, because I can’t see any logical way that players could come up with it on their own. This makes Death a slightly worse offender than Pass The Banana — at least the latter game was solvable for a MUD outsider. For outsiders to solve this one, they’d have to engage in quite a bit of random guessing, and spend a lot of time trying to do things with barely implemented red herrings. Being such an outsider, this is what I did for about 15 minutes before I gave up and looked at the walkthrough. I didn’t have fun.

Add to these flaws the fact that Death has quite a few spelling and grammar errors, and some really ugly formatting (the game seems to have an aversion to blank lines). Also factor in that the readme suggests that the game makes heavy use of “WHO IS ” and “WHAT IS “, but the game almost never seems to recognize such questions, responding instead with another irritating nonsensical reference. Did I mention that the solution doesn’t make sense either? Let’s not forget the fact that the game offers several objects to play with, but most of them don’t offer the slightest trace of interactivity. There’s a bottle that’s “not something you can open.” There’s an eggplant that’s “plainly inedible.” There’s a dustbuster that’s “not something you can switch.” The list goes on. Anyway, put all these things together and you’ve got one pretty tedious interactive experience on your hands.

The author announces that he plans to put out a “hopefully less buggy version of the game” after the competition is over. This is a good idea, of course, but I think that even after such a version emerges, it will only appeal to a limited audience. Basically, if you hang out on ifMUD a lot, you might enjoy it. If, on the other hand, you’re like me… you probably won’t.

Rating: 2.0

Outsided by Chad Elliott [Comp99]

IFDB page: Outsided
Final placement: 34th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

OK, I’m starting to get a little discouraged. Maybe Comp99 has just set me up for a really bad stretch, but I have to admit I’m starting to wonder what is going on with all these substandard games. Outsided had the misfortune of coming up in my game list after five other games that I scored as a 5 or below. It couldn’t help that, so I’ll try not to let it affect my judgement. However, it also had the misfortune of being loaded with spelling, grammar, and coding errors. It could have helped that, and you can bet the house it’s going to affect my judgement. Take, for example, the first paragraph:

A pretty, young woman walks quickly towards the far end of the resteraunt. Soon she dissapears behind two brass elevator doors. Your stare drops downward to the small note you had written for yourself, then back at your own reflection in the elevator doors. People momenteraly chuckle and mutter to eachother, then continue on with another important dinner...

That’s one sentence out of four without a spelling error. That is not a good ratio. (For those of you keeping score at home: “restaurant”, “disappears”, “momentarily”, “each other”.) I just don’t understand this sort of thing. It’s not as if spell-checkers are hard to find. Compile your game so that Inform outputs the game text, then run it through a spell-checker. Hell, you don’t even have to get that high-tech; run a transcript of your game through a spell-checker. This is a text adventure; all we get from the program are words. When the words have basic mistakes in them, those mistakes wreck any chance we have at immersion in your game! Don’t you even care about that? Aaargh! [Starting… to… rant. Must… get off… soapbox. Wipe froth from mouth. Continue with review.]

As far as I can determine, Outsided (and no, even after playing the game, I still have no idea what its title means) wants to be sort of a science-fictional high-tech thriller thing about a guy whose memories keep getting downloaded into new bodies, and some shadowy syndicate that wants to kill the bodies off. Or something like that. It wasn’t really all that easy to figure out what the hell was going on most of the time. The game’s use of these concepts is kind of cool, but it would be a lot cooler if it were more coherent. Many, many things just don’t make a lot of sense. For example, early on in the game, the PC is given his briefcase. It’s closed and locked. For some inexplicable reason, the PC doesn’t know how to unlock his own briefcase. In fact, he never figures it out. The briefcase is never useful for anything. Why does he get it? Who knows? There are lots of little things like this. Save-and-restore puzzles abound. In fact, the game reminded me of many of the more maligned members of the IF Archive, such as Detective and Space Aliens Laughed At My Cardigan. It might make a good candidate for a MiSTing, but it sure isn’t a good game on its own.

Aw, here I am being all harsh and I didn’t even mention one of the game’s main redeeming features: its author apologizes for it right up front. Before the first prompt of the game even arrives, we see this:

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Hi, first I would like to say 'sorry.' Good! Now that I have gotten that out of the way, Please 'enjoy' the game.

I laughed when I saw that, especially following as it did on the heels of the error-riddled opening paragraphs. And I appreciated it too, I really did. But I have to say it confused me a little as well. Obviously the author knows that the game isn’t up to par. So instead of releasing it with an apology, why not instead fix it, then release a good version that he wouldn’t have to apologize for? I would have appreciated that a lot more.

Rating: 2.9

[Postscript from 2020: I ended my review of A Day For Soft Food with a joke, saying “See, I have a great idea for the 2000 comp: you play this pet goldfish…” In response, Eric Mayer asked, “What’s the title? ‘Jump and Die?'”, to which I said: “No, that’s what Outsided should have been named. (Actually, ‘Jump and Die and Die and Die and Die and Die and Then Die Some More and Then Consult The Walkthrough.’)” That about sums up my feelings on this game.]

SNOSAE by R. Dale McDaniel [Comp99]

IFDB page: SNOSAE
Final placement: 32nd place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

By the time I hit the end of the two hour mark on SNOSAE I was just laughing. Most of my second hour I was basically cutting and pasting commands from the walkthrough, stopping only long enough to read the text and save the game from time to time in case I screwed up. Even so, when I reached the time limit I still had over half the walkthrough to go! If this is a two-hour game, The Brothers Karamazov was a short story. I doubt I could finish the entire thing in two hours even if I had already solved it once. Without the walkthrough I don’t think there’s a player in the world who could finish it in two hours. Now, whenever I make sweeping statements like this I always regret it, and no doubt somebody will follow this up with a post saying “Gee, I had no trouble at all. Finished it in 45 minutes flat!” But let me put it this way: I spent a half hour on the first puzzle (of about a zillion in the game), and only cracked it because of a pretty left-handed hint in the documentation.

That first puzzle reminded me of a game on the archive called +=3. Dave Baggett wrote that game to prove that a puzzle could be entirely logical but also completely unsolvable without hints or random guessing. The puzzle in +=3 is this [and spoiler warnings are beside the point here]: You have to cross a troll bridge, and nothing in your inventory satisfies the troll. The only thing that will satisfy it is if you remove your shirt and give it to the troll — not that the shirt was mentioned in your inventory or that the game gave you any hint the PC is wearing a shirt. A similar thing occurs in the opening sequence of SNOSAE — you have to cut some wires, but you have nothing in your inventory. There are also no takeable objects in the initially limited landscape. None at all. It was only in desperation that I was combing through the game’s documentation and saw that the game allowed the command “LOOK IN”; the docs suggested that the command was useful for pockets. For laughs more than anything else, I tried “LOOK IN POCKET” and what do you know, the game told me “In it you see: A small pair of nail clippers.” Turns out that I’m wearing coveralls, and these coveralls have a pocket — they just aren’t mentioned in the inventory anywhere. Sure, the coveralls are mentioned in the opening text included in the readme file, but I maintain that they are absolutely indistinguishable from a simple scene-setting detail, and that when they don’t appear in the game the player cannot reasonably be expected to know that they’re really there anyway.

Many of the puzzles after this are of the “save-and-restore” variety. “Oh, that killed me without warning. Well, let’s get a hint from this death message and restart.” These sorts of tactics really raise my hackles as a player, because they use the IF conventions I’ve learned against me, and give me no warning they’re doing so. When I solve one, I don’t think, “Aha! I feel so clever now!” I think, “What an irritating puzzle.”

Puzzle expectations aren’t the only IF conventions overturned in SNOSAE. For one thing, it’s a DOS-only program, a PC executable with an apparently homemade parser. Now let me be clear that I always believe in giving credit where it is due for these sorts of efforts. I can’t imagine wanting to build a parser and game engine from scratch, but I recognize that for some it’s a fun exercise, and I certainly understand that writing an IF game from “the ground up” is more work than writing the same game using an established IF language and libraries. On the whole, SNOSAE doesn’t do a bad job, but as usual it’s not up to the very high standard set by Inform, TADS, Hugo, and their ilk. There’s no “SCRIPT” capability, which makes the reviewer’s job much tougher. The “OOPS” verb is missing, which is a minor inconvenience. “UNDO” is also missing, which is a major inconvenience, especially considering how thoroughly this game is infested with instant-death puzzles. On the other hand, there are also some cool things about the interface. It uses colors to nice effect, putting room descriptions in light blue, commands in dark blue, inventory listings in white, etc. It also displays the available exit directions as part of the prompt, like this:

INTERSECTION OF FOUR HALLWAYS: You're at the intersection of four hallways. Down each of these hallways you can see a door. There's a ramp going up into the flying saucer. n,s,e,w,u>

I liked that, although I found it didn’t really add that much to the gameplay experience. There’s also a very cool command you discover about 1/3 of the way through the game which speeds navigation significantly. But all these frills didn’t make up for the missing “UNDO”, especially when the game kept cavalierly killing me off.

The one unblemished positive that SNOSAE has going for it is its sense of humor. This is a game that knows it’s a wacky romp and acknowledges it frequently, usually by breaking the fourth wall and displaying awareness of itself as an adventure game. This tendency is evident almost immediately, when the game describes a door thus: “There doesn’t seem to be a lock on the door! All adventures should start out so easy.” That isn’t anywhere close to the funniest example of the game’s writing, but I couldn’t make a transcript of the thing, and there’s no way in hell I’m slogging through 500 commands again just to find a funnier example, so you’ll have to just take my word on it. I was laughing for much of the time I played SNOSAE, and only part of the time was it at the ludicrousness of entering this game in a competition for short IF.

Rating: 5.0

Strangers In The Night by Rich Pizor [Comp99]

IFDB page: Strangers in the Night
Final placement: 20th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Strangers In The Night starts out with a cool premise: You are a vampire, and you awaken with a terrible thirst for blood. You must feed on at least three different victims (draining each only a little, so as not to arouse undue attention.) However, it’s the summer solstice, the shortest night of the year, [The longest day, and therefore the shortest night. Thanks to Daphne Brinkerhoff for helping me through my apparently immense confusion on this issue. –Paul] and so you have only a limited time to slake your desires. Done well, this could be a sort of undead Varicella, where with every iteration of the game you figure out more and more about how to satisfy your needs. Unfortunately, Strangers In The Night turns out to be more of an undead Fifteen. You wander around an extremely minimally described cityscape (most rooms have no description at all) solving rudimentary puzzles, most of which just amount to unlocking a door, then walking in and typing “BITE “. What little writing is present has some nicely gothic moments — I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of the PC’s apartment. On the other hand, it is also riddled with a goodly number of errors, including two in the first two sentences. Misspellings, plural/possessive errors, awkward phrasings — they’re all there.

Compounding this problem is a generous serving of bugs. The game credits no beta testers, and the lack of testing definitely shows. Some locations (restaurants and the like) are described as closed when they definitely (at least, according to the information you get from the doorman) should be open. My first time through the game I failed to find any victims before the sun came up, mostly because I was exploring the gridlike map to see if it was really as empty as it seemed, and as the sunrise approached the game started giving me warnings. This is great, although giving them EVERY SINGLE TURN NO MATTER WHAT I DO might be considered a little excessive. In addition, the warnings describe the sky getting pinker, etc., even when I’m inside locations like a dank night club or my own windowless apartment. Anyway, heeding the warnings I returned to my apartment and got back in bed, but when the sun came up, the game told me I was trapped where I didn’t belong. It then helpfully chided me “Pity you never made it home.” In addition, there are lots of spots where the game displays the default response abutting a specialized response. If this were an Inform game, I’d say the problem is a lack of “rtrue”s. I don’t know what causes it in TADS, but I suspect it’s something roughly equivalent. Here’s an example:

>ask bouncer about bouncer You have no interest in or use for the bouncerThe bouncer is in a rather public place; that kind of interaction isn't advisable.Surely, you can't think the bouncer knows anything about it!

After hitting a long stretch of bugs and writing errors, the novelty of the premise wears off pretty quickly.

It’s that much more frustrating, really, because an IF game from the point of view of a vampire is just a really cool idea waiting to be done well. It just seems that nobody quite gets to it. Infocom had one in the planning stages before they folded. (It was to be written by Plundered Hearts author Amy Briggs). A guy named Sam Hulick made a big announcement that he was going to write one — even got a piece of it included as an example in the Inform manual — but it never materialized. Now there’s Strangers In The Night, which definitely has some nice conceptual elements but whose execution (no pun intended) is sorely lacking. The vampire PC is so rife with possibilities — it can have unusual goals and vulnerabilities, as demonstrated in this game. It can have unique modes of travel. It can allow the author to play with all sorts of interesting questions of moral ambiguity and complicity within the player/PC relationship. Even better, it gives the writer access to a wealth of popular and canonical allusions, and allows the kind of rich gothic writing practiced by Anne Rice and any number of Victorian writers. Frankly, I think it would be awesome. Hey, all you IF writers out there: write that great vampire game! I know it doesn’t exist yet, but I very much want it to, because Strangers In The Night really got me itching to play it.

[I just reread this and something in the back of my mind said “Horror of Rylvania.” I haven’t played that game yet, and the only review I’ve ever seen was very brief. Somebody care to review it for SPAG so I know if it’s what I’m looking for?]

Rating: 3.5

Calliope by Jason McIntosh [Comp99]

IFDB page: Calliope
Final placement: 23rd place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

I had a sinking feeling when I read the “info” text for Calliope. Some dreaded phrases were dropped: “My prime goal in writing Calliope was to get comfortable with the Inform language…”, “…autobiographical portrait of myself confusedly hacking away at a going-nowhere Inform program…” The whole thing sounded uncomfortably like it was describing a combination of my two least favorite competition entry genres, the “I wrote this game to learn Inform” game and the “this is an IF version of my house” game. Previous entries of this nature have, on the whole, not been stellar, so after I read the description of Calliope, my expectations were decidedly low. But I guess that’s the beauty of the Low Expectation Theory, isn’t it? Because once I expected Calliope to stink, I discovered that it’s not such a bad little game after all. Sure, it’s a trifle, but that’s OK. It’s done reasonably well, is not redolent with references only the author could understand, and its idea is (I can’t believe I’m saying this) actually pretty clever. Yes, despite the fact that you begin the game sitting at your desk, in your apartment, on your chair, staring at your computer and your proposed competition entry therein, Calliope turns out to be pretty fun rather than really boring. It seems that exhaustion is approaching for you, the prospective author, and that your previous efforts whacking away at that competition entry have been rather uninspired. But the Muse (the game’s title is a whopping hint) can strike at unexpected times…

One of the things that makes the game an unexpected pleasure to play is that unlike most of its learning Inform/house simulation brethren, it is relatively free of errors in both coding and writing. The prose is nothing special, but it did give me a vivid picture of the setting, through little details like your desk showing its age “by the camouflage patterns of divers dark beverage stains covering… its cheap white Formica surface…” “Divers” looked like a typo to me, but something in the dim recesses of my brain is suggesting that it may just be a culturally specific spelling of “diverse.” Actually, what it really looks like is a Renaissance spelling, but since my wife is a grad student in Renaissance lit., the boundaries tend to blur for me. The game’s one puzzle makes sense and is well-clued, and its multiple endings are enough fun that I went back and played through all of them. Many first games feel like prologue, and Calliope is no exception. Where it differs from the pack, though, is that the prologue it provides is promising and exciting. I’d be very interested in seeing a full-length game (or even a full-length competition entry) by the author based on the ideas presented in Calliope. Heck, I wouldn’t mind seeing three such games. Jason McIntosh shows enough promise in Calliope that his next release should be highly anticipated.

Of course, none of this means that the game is worth keeping long. You’ll probably spend a few minutes noodling around, a few more solving the puzzle, and the rest of your time will go to replaying through to see the various endings. Perhaps if you’re really dedicated, you’ll try out the author’s suggestions (provided in the walkthrough) for all the various ways to lose the game. The whole thing shouldn’t take much more than a half-hour, after which Calliope goes into the recycle bin. These “short-short” games are becoming a more and more prominent competition trend. They make sure to meet the “two-hour” rule by ducking far under it — so far, in fact, that you can exhaust most of their options in a quarter of that time. The first time I remember seeing a comp entry of this ilk was Jay Goemmer’s E-MAILBOX in 1997, which consisted of about four moves and no puzzles. The trend continued in ’98 with games like In the Spotlight and Downtown Tokyo. Present Day. Now it’s so prevalent that out of the six comp games I’ve played so far, three are of the “short-short” variety. Of course, this may just be the vagaries of Comp99’s randomizer, but I suspect it goes a little deeper than that. Tiny games like this allow an author to get exposure and experience without making a huge time investment. They create an evolving example which pushes the author’s developing knowledge in an IF language, both by providing a space to try out examples and by nudging research into the manual to implement that latest and greatest idea. Perhaps most important of all, tiny IF makes for one more line in that all-important “Things I’ve finished” list. Thankfully for its audience, Calliope does it right.

Rating: 6.8

The Commute by Kevin Copeland [Comp98]

IFDB page: The Commute
Final placement: 26th place (of 27) in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition

Imagine if this was your day: You start out in your kitchen, where you drink your coffee and eat your toast. Then you try to figure out the layout of your two-room house (the two rooms are a kitchen and a hallway). All the while you’re experiencing one epiphany after another about how much you love your life, except for having to go to work. Then you get your motorcycle helmet (which you think of as a “helmut”) and your keys and head off to your important meeting on your motorcycle. Unfortunately, you get a flat tire almost immediately. Then you wait around while your hands get busy and fix the flat, a process which takes 30 seconds (I think you worked in an Indy 500 pit crew before you got your office job.) Then you get another flat tire, which you fix in an amazing 14 seconds. You get 8 more flat tires in the space of 6 minutes. Then you decide to make up for lost time by driving “just above the speed limit,” and wouldn’t you know, you get pulled over. The cop notices that you don’t have your wallet, and kindly sends you home to fetch it. The drive home takes 7 seconds, and you drive your motorcycle through the house, because you have no idea how to get off of it. You haven’t a clue where your wallet is, and when you try to get it, you think to yourself “I may not need that. I may, in fact, have it already.” So you drive back out of the house and onto the road, but the same cop finds you, and sends you back home again, because you of course do need your wallet and don’t have it already. But something about your hallway just makes you think otherwise. So back you go, and the cop pulls you over 5 more times before you decide to point your bike at an embankment and end your “leisurely drive” by smashing into the concrete at 98 miles an hour. OK, so maybe that last part doesn’t happen, but you sure wish it could.

This is the experience simulated by The Commute, an incredibly frustrating DOS game. The first difficulty I had was with the interface, which looks like a traditional parser, but isn’t. A typical interaction with it goes something like this:

What shall I do? > GET ALL I'm sorry, I don't quite understand (my mind is elsewhere). What shall I do? > X FLOWERS I'm sorry, I don't quite understand (my mind is elsewhere). What shall I do? > EAT I'm sorry, I don't quite understand (my mind is elsewhere).

It goes on, but you get the idea. Traditional commands, abbreviations, and disambiguation are replaced by the same markedly unhelpful error message. What’s worse, sometimes it pretends to understand things it doesn’t. For example, in the Hall you can say “GET KEYS AND HELMUT” (yes, the game forces you to misspell the word “helmet”,) and the parser will respond “Yes, I’ll need these.” Fair enough. But when you get out to your bike and try to “WEAR HELMUT”, it says “I’m sorry, I don’t have that here.” Turns out the parser only pretended to put it in your inventory — all you really picked up were the keys. Other times, it seems to willfully misunderstand you. My favorite example is when I typed “GET OFF BIKE” and Commute responded “I’m assuming you want me to get on the bike. OK, I’m on!” The game is full to brimming with this kind of frustrating stuff — it’s clear that the lack of an interactive fiction tool like Inform or TADS really hurt this game, much more than it hurt the other DOS game in the competition, I Didn’t Know You Could Yodel.

OK, so it had a lousy parser. This can be overcome, right? What I couldn’t overcome, at least without a walkthrough, was the “road from hell”, where every few seconds you either get pulled over or get a flat tire. At first, this was very frustrating. Then it just became funny. The point of the game seems to be that going to work sucks. This is a point on which I didn’t need much convincing, but if I got pulled over 6 times and got 8 flat tires on the way to work, I would be thinking that LIFE sucks, work or no work. Especially since all I get at home is a partner who keeps urging me to get out of the house, which I don’t mind doing since I can’t even go back to bed, seeing as how I don’t have one. Finally I consulted the walkthrough and found out how to get past the road from hell. Turns out some rather non-intuitive commands are necessary. For example, not to spoil it or anything, but the command to find your wallet is “HUG DAUGHTER.” Why didn’t I think of that? Unfortunately, even with those gentle nudges (OK, violent shoves), I got to work and couldn’t open the gate because I didn’t have a parking pass, even though the pass was in the wallet I had with me. Once I figured out that I just couldn’t see the pass because the only place I know how to look in a wallet is in a hallway, I deleted the game. My life has sucked much less ever since.

Rating: 2.0

Informatory by William J. Shlaer [Comp98]

IFDB page: Informatory
Final placement: 11th place (of 27) in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition

Every year I’ve been writing reviews for the IF competition, I’ve seen several games which are their authors’ first attempt at learning Inform. These usually aren’t the better games — I find that most of the really good Inform games in the competition are not the first pieces of code ever hacked together by their authors. Informatory, however, gives a twist to this tendency — it is the author’s first attempt to teach Inform. Rather than replicating its author’s apartment or dorm room, Informatory instead replicates a number of familiar scenes and objects from various canonical IF games, and allows its player to peek at their source code in order to give some insight as to how Inform could be used to create them. It does this through a handy device known as the “Codex Helmet” — whenever the player character wears this helmet, source code for all objects becomes visible. Of course, a couple of elementary puzzles must be overcome in order to gain access to this miracle of technology, but hints are provided for those puzzles. Once the Helmet is acquired, Informatory presents a new kind of puzzle: to progress in the game, you must decipher the Inform source code of its objects so that you may use their special properties to your advantage.

For me, this kind of puzzle worked well, because it relied on information I had already acquired through working on my own Inform creations. However, for someone who did not know Inform and wasn’t particularly interested in investing much time to learn it, I think those puzzles would be a major nuisance. In fact, if you’re not interested in learning Inform, my advice would be to give this game a pass. Its interests are much more in helping novices to learn Inform in a fairly fun and ingenious way than to provide a fun gaming experience for everyone. This is a perfectly acceptable goal, but it makes Informatory more educational software than entertainment software. The game invokes the genie from Andrew Plotkin’s Lists and Lists, and the reference is quite apt — that game also didn’t much care about entertaining, instead giving the focus to its own (remarkable) z-machine implementation of Scheme. Informatory didn’t feel quite as oppressive as Lists to me, probably because I’m already familiar with Inform, an advantage I sadly lacked when it came to Scheme. However, the two share a common theme: they are not so much games as teaching tools, and if you’re not interested in learning, the tool isn’t for you.

Having thus limited its audience, Informatory does its task rather well, I think. The author bills it a “not-very-interactive tutorial,” and I think he’s only half-right on both counts. Depending on how you define the term “interactive”, I think Informatory is quite interactive indeed. It’s probably the only game I’ve ever seen that actually assigns outside reading to its players so that they have a better chance at the puzzles. This obviously doesn’t work in the competition context, but someone might find it a little useful when used as a tool in its own right, especially if that person is already in the process of learning Inform. Furthermore, Informatory‘s source-code-oriented puzzles are much more interactive than the typical tutorial style of “announce the concept, show the concept, now you try it.” Now, this is a double-edged sword too: sometimes the lack of guidance can really be rather frustrating. I sometimes found myself wishing for the genie from Lists to keep hanging around, giving me clues when I needed them. Consequently, I didn’t find Informatory to be “not-very-interactive”, but I didn’t really find it to be a “tutorial” either. Instead of teaching Inform piece-by-piece, it assigns reading in the Designer’s Manual, and in fact those assignments are only reachable after solving a number of source code puzzles. Informatory therefore isn’t much of a teacher, but it’s a good quiz for those who are already learning. As a competition game, it’s no great shakes: at its best, it’s about as much fun as taking a really interesting test. However, I can see it becoming one useful tool for people who are beginning to get their feet wet in the sea of Inform.

Rating: 6.8

Fifteen by Ricardo Dague [Comp98]

IFDB page: Fifteen
Final placement: 25th place (of 27) in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition

Is there a genie at work? No sooner did I wish (in my review of In the Spotlight) for a “storyless” game which strung together a number of logic puzzles, than along comes Fifteen. Fifteen takes its name from the traditional slide puzzle, with fifteen tiles arranged in a 4 x 4 grid, with the sixteenth spot left empty for tiles to move into. Fifteen also includes an odd-even puzzle (similar to the sentient stones in Spellbreaker) and a more traditional IF puzzle of rescuing a cat from a tree. All the puzzles are quite well-implemented, and the slide puzzle is done especially well; its interface allows for commands which string a number of moves together quickly and easily. This was much appreciated. In fact, Fifteen is almost the sort of thing I was musing about enjoying in my previous review.

Still, I finished the game feeling like I ought to be more careful what I wish for. See, Spotlight was “storyless IF” in the sense that there was really no plot, just a puzzle. However, what little prose there was in the game was richly written, and often funny. Contrast this with Fifteen, which (according to its author) takes its cue from Scott Adams’ Adventureland. Adams’ games are models of brevity, and Fifteen is just as terse, if not more. Here’s a typical room description: “Kitchen: Exits are south, east and north.” Now that’s brief. Don’t get me wrong — I recognize the nostalgia value of such an atmosphere, especially if you were raised on Scott Adams adventures, but it’s just not my cup of tea. I like to have at least a little feeling of immersion in my IF rather than unadorned puzzles. I find it very telling that even though Fifteen includes many more rooms and several more puzzles than Spotlight, the Inform file for Fifteen is actually 8K smaller than the Inform file for Spotlight. Fifteen is basically raw puzzles; it’s all the way over at the extreme end of the puzzle to story spectrum, and that’s too far for my taste.

Nonetheless, Fifteen is clearly quite well-done, for what it is. I found no bugs in the code, and what little prose there is is error-free. The puzzles, as I said, are implemented well, and the author’s ability to make me feel like I’m playing a Scott Adams game is nothing short of remarkable. But Fifteen is still not that all-puzzle game that I’m looking for — it’s too spare and empty, and because of this it fails to create the interest needed to sustain its intense puzzle-orientation.

Rating: 6.2

About my 1998 IF Competition reviews

When the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition came around, the indie IF scene in rec.*.int-fiction was well-established, and me in it. By that time, I’d written a game, written lots of reviews, and become a regular in newsgroup conversations. The groups themselves had established clear dynamics, with authorities, troublemakers, helpers, jesters, you name it. The community even pulled together a massive April Fool’s joke called Textfire, a fake IF sampler from a fake IF company. Comp98, though, brought us all up to a new level.

It kind of blows my mind to reread my reviews from that year, knowing the future as I do now. I’d love to tell my 1998 self that decades on, I’d hike in the Grand Canyon with one of the authors, see the sights of Austin with another, collaborate on a game with a third (for a company created by a fourth), and so on. I have relationships with some of these folks going way back to those formative days, thanks especially to the IFMud, founded the year prior. One Comp98 author even became a professional game designer, scooping up a bunch of BAFTA awards a few years ago.

The competition itself had by this time evolved its own set of tropes. Rybread Celsius was one of these, a surprisingly beloved figure with a cult following I never quite grasped. Another was the prevalence of Inform, followed closely by TADS, alongside the “first attempt” and homebrew games that appeared in every comp. The competition itself had become an institution by this point, inspiring lots of mini-comps throughout the year — Chicken-comp, the IF Fan Fest, etc — and these in turn fed into the main competition.

My own reviewing style reached maturity this year, settling into the format I kept for the rest of my comp reviews: basically three paragraphs and a score. Sometimes more, if the mood struck, but my comp reviews had evolved from basically filling out a form to writing a little mini-essay about each game. I more or less took my Comp97 review format, got rid of all the bold headings, and massaged those categories (plot, puzzles, prose, technical writing/coding) into the rest of the review. The artificiality of the headings still sticks around to some extent — sometimes I can see myself going out of my way to cover each base — but my voice was getting more natural the more I wrote.

I also evolved in my approach to spoilers. Where tons of my Comp97 reviews had spoilers in them, always flagged with big capital letters, I managed to mostly avoid them in the Comp98 reviews. There are a couple of exceptions, where a point I was making really demanded a concrete and accurate example, but more often I’d file the serial numbers off the game’s specifics so that I could provide an example that fulfilled the spirit of my point without giving away any of the goods.

Finally, I worked to keep in the front of my consciousness the fact that this is an all-volunteer endeavor, done by enthusiasts who should be rewarded for their enthusiasm wherever possible. I tried to find something to appreciate even in games I really hated, or at least offer some constructive criticism for how the next one could be better. It didn’t stop the occasional flame, but that was reserved for when I felt like a game really should have known better.

I originally posted my reviews for the 1998 IF Competition games on November 16, 1998.