Order by John Evans [Comp04]

IFDB page: Order
Final placement: 24th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

At this point, I feel like I could really save myself a lot of time and energy by just writing up a template for reviews of John Evans games. The basic gist of the template would be “This game has some cool ideas and a lot of potential, but it’s not really finished and it seems untested, so it sucks.” Then I could just fill in the blanks with some specifics about the game, and be done. Evans has submitted games to the last five IF competitions, and they’ve all fit this mold, so why shouldn’t I just keep writing the same review over and over again? I kinda have to.

I mean, I guess they’re improving. The first couple (Castle Amnos and Elements) were way too big for the competition, and that problem got corrected. Unfortunately, it got corrected by switching to total unfinishability due to scores of heinous bugs. I gave a rating of 1.0 to Evans’ last couple of games because they were just totally incomplete. Order isn’t as bad as that. It’s the right size for the comp, and it is finishable. But it is still not finished. See, if you’ve got a command called BUGS that lists out the bugs in the game, your game’s not finished. Actually, one of the funnier parts of Order is that even the BUGS list is buggy, as some of the things listed actually do work (though plenty don’t.) Also, if a crucial puzzle in your game rests on a piece of scenery that you don’t mention anywhere, your game’s not finished. A tester would catch that. That’s, y’know, what testers are for. Use them.

Actually, beta-testing seems particularly critical for a game like Order, because the game revolves around coming up with actions quite spontaneously, and the better sample you have of what actions people are going to come up with, the better you’ll be able to implement them. (Here’s where I start filling in the “cool ideas” part of the template.) I love the basic concept of this game — you’re some kind of magical spirit, and you’ve been set a series of tasks by your summoner. So far, still pretty bland, and strongly reminiscent of J.D. Berry’s The Djinni Chronicles. But the nifty twist that Order puts on things is that you have a CREATE verb at your disposal, and you must use it to solve every puzzle.

So, for instance, you find yourself faced with a locked door, and must CREATE a key. Done right, this could be an amazingly powerful device, giving the game a feeling of almost limitless possibility. And indeed, there are times when Order feels like that. Of course, there are way more times that it’s disappointing, and not just because I was trying crazy commands like CREATE PHASER and CREATE WETSUIT. Lots of much more reasonable attempts aren’t implemented, and I can’t help but think that some beta-testing would have greatly improved the game’s range of options. Still, there are multiple solutions to each puzzle available from creating various objects, and that aspect of the game is really fun. Too bad the other parts are such a drag.

Oh, there is one more good part — the hint system. These hints are nicely implemented, InvisiClues style, and it’s a good thing too, because nobody is finishing this game without the hints. As I alluded earlier, there’s a critical puzzle in the game’s midsection that is simply not solvable without hints, because its main components aren’t mentioned anywhere. Remember Bio, from Comp03, the game that starts out with gas seeping into your room and you have to get a gas mask out of an armoire, except the only place that says anything about an armoire is the walkthrough? Pretty tough puzzle, right? Well, Order takes inspiration from it with a puzzle where you must perform an action on an orb encased in a steeple. Problem is, nowhere in any room or object description are the orb and steeple mentioned. There is a dome mentioned, but like many of the scenery objects in room descriptions, it’s not implemented. Actually, even for some of the objects that are implemented, the descriptions aren’t exactly superb:

>i You are carrying a set of white robes (being worn).

>x robes A set of white robes.

Ooo, spellbinding. So okay, I’ve almost got my template ready. The only thing left is to figure out how to wind it up. I’m leaning towards a plea for the future: please help your cool ideas reach their fullest potential by finishing and testing your games! Please! I may have to edit that part out though, as its refusal becomes more and more certain.

Rating: 4.9

The Recruit by Mike Sousa [Comp03]

IFDB page: The Recruit
Final placement: 7th place (of 30) in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition

Some games just feel like they come from deep inside the IF community. Take The Recruit, for instance: how many comp games not only include words of mine, but also go out of their way to compliment my work? Not many, I can tell you from sad experience, but not only does Recruit include pretty much the entire transcript from the 2002 XYZZY Awards ceremony, but when Another Earth, Another Sky is mentioned, this NPC message appears:

“I love that game,” says Fred. “I can’t wait for the third installment!”

Thanks, Mike! Er… Fred! I’m working on it! Anyway, I suppose that to avoid the illusion that sucking up to the judge gets you a good review and score, I should say here that I thought Recruit stank, but I just can’t do that. It was a fun game, if slight, whose puzzles are the star attraction. In fact, more than anything, it feels like a love letter to IF.

The premise, such as it is, is that you’ve been recruited (with the offer of a $50 reward) as a tester for “Real Life Interactive Gaming Simulacra” — in other words, IF puzzles constructed and brought to life. That puts Recruit in the unique position of being an IF game pretending to be reality pretending to be an IF game. In any case, the whole thing is more or less a hook on which to hang a series of puzzles, each of which has its theme: light source, NPC, attention to detail, and so forth.

The game is much more imaginative than this thumbnail description makes it sound. Each of the puzzles felt fresh to me, and the fact that they were explicitly molded around familiar IF concepts made their uniqueness stand out all the more. They also felt pitched at just the right level of difficulty — enough to make me think creatively, but not so hard as to send me running in circles and finally running to the hints, at least not for long. More importantly, each of the puzzles has fun with the concept it embodies, which makes the game a particular pleasure for those of us who have endured many far drearier versions of the same things. I’m not sure how well the game would work for somebody who was new to IF — it might make a fine learning tool, but I have a feeling it would feel more frustrating than educational to somebody who didn’t share its frame of reference — but for me it was a kick.

A great deal of the fun comes from the game’s writing, and I noted with admiration as I played through the game just how much Sousa’s writing has improved since his debut game Above And Beyond. [I’m about to spoil something, though I have no idea why it’s a secret to begin with.] Then I found out in the afterword that in fact, much of the writing wasn’t his, but was in fact done by collaborators like Robb Sherwin, Jon Ingold, and J.D. Berry. Why Sousa doesn’t simply acknowledge these co-authors upfront is a bit of a mystery to me — maybe he just doesn’t want players distracted by going through the game trying to figure out who wrote what.

Anyway, like every Sousa game, Recruit is coded very well, though not as exquisitely deeply as some of his past works have been. It was certainly bug-free, in any case, and quite responsive to most of the things I wanted to try. It also provides a fun list of AMUSING things to try after you’ve finished the game, which is a touch I always appreciate. After finishing The Recruit, I found myself just smiling, and thinking, “Cool!” Like several of the other games in this comp, it was IF about IF, but this time about just how much fun IF can be. It doesn’t provide much in the way of atmosphere or emotion, but it does pack the pleasures of good writing and interesting, interconnected puzzles, and that’s enough for me.

Rating: 9.3

When Help Collides by J.D. Berry [Comp02]

IFDB page: When Help Collides
Final placement: 18th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

I already knew that J.D. Berry is funny. Even setting aside his sardonic posts to the IF newsgroups, who could forget The IF Chive? For those of you who have, in fact, forgotten (or never knew), the Chive was an IF-themed version of satirical newspaper The Onion, full of wacky features like an editorial by an impassable steel door, and headlines like “IF-Comp author feels own work should have finished several places higher.” (It’s currently archived at http://www.igs.net/~tril/if/humor/chive/, and is worth checking out.) I also knew, from games like The Djinni Chronicles and Sparrow’s Song, that Berry is a skilled game author, too.

What I hadn’t yet seen was a really funny Berry game. Oh sure, there are some humorous bits in all his games, and no, I’m not forgetting Chico And I Ran — it’s just that the humor in that game was specifically targeted to song and TV show parodies, and much of it fell rather flat for me. So I hadn’t yet seen the game where I felt Berry unleashed his full comic powers… until now. When Help Collides is a strange, exuberant, wildly funny piece of work that hits the ground running and then sprints into some places that are very weird indeed. Actually, that’s not quite accurate — it’s pretty weird from the beginning.

It seems you’re the consciousness of a hint system, or something like that. People come to you for hints with various games, and you use some very simple technology at your disposal (like pressing a button labeled (H)ELP, which broadcasts the hint) to aid them. However, your easy job has recently been made less easy by the fact that your Help Ship (yeah, I’m not sure I understand either) has recently collided with a Self-Help Ship, resulting in exchanges like this:

A beautiful woman looks up and asks, "Is there a better ending that the one I achieved?" >h "Another idiotic thing women do is questioning if they could have done better. Hello? Where were you before you got married? Did you not ask yourself such questions? You've made your ending, and now you have to lie in it."

or this:

A man in a 19th century suit looks up and asks, "How do I get past the prospector?" >h "Early in my career, I spent much of my time getting past people who want to talk your ear off and waste your time. I call such people prospectors. They have tunnel vision. They have an axe to grind. They know exactly what they want, but they don't know exactly where to find it, so they'll dig wherever's closest. It was a tiring game, going out of my way to avoid these people. Usually, my ten-mile bypass left me worse off than if I had just talked with them. I complained about this to my mentor. He said, "there are going to be prospectors in everyone's life. The trick is to make them realize early that there's no gold inside you. Once they realize you have nothing to offer, they'll ignore you." And then it hit me. My mentor was mocking me."

Each terrible hint is followed by the asker reacting in disgust, and leaving negative feedback for the hint system. Too much of this negative feedback can result in the hint system’s immediate demise, which lends a strong sense of urgency to the sequence. I cannot express how much I loved these bad hints. Some of them parody adventure game hints. Some of them parody self-help books, and self-help culture. Taken together, they deliciously skewer not only those two things, but IF conventions as well. Even facing the destruction of the PC, I had a difficult time actually getting motivated to fix the problem, because I found the results so extremely funny.

I’m glad I did fix it, though, because after this sequence the game becomes something entirely else. It’s rather difficult to talk about, because When Help Collides turns out to be several games in one, of which I only played one-and-a-half (in addition to the starting game puzzles). Those separate games are worthy of their own reviews, and I can’t help wondering how they would have done had they been released separately. Still, from what I saw they were thematically tied, if rather loosely so.

There is a problem, though, with the structure that presents these interconnected games. They’re quite sealed off from the initial game, so much so that in fact it isn’t obvious at all that other games even exist until the initial game ends. The feelies suggest the presence of multiple scenarios, but the method for accessing these is obscure enough that I ended up having to go to the walkthrough for it. I find it easy to imagine someone missing the boat entirely, and therefore missing out on a great deal of the fun. Something a bit more straightforward to introduce these other scenarios would have been welcome. The subgame that I finished, a parody of a Dungeons And Dragons tournament, was also very funny, and an interesting game in its own right. Like the initial game, it has some problems here and there, but is overall a lot of fun.

I seem to have written quite a bit already, and I need to wrap it up, so: lest I forget, I do have some complaints about When Help Collides. First, as I mentioned above, the method for accessing the subgames is too obscure. Second, it does that thing where it pauses waiting for a keystroke, but doesn’t tell you it’s doing so, and consequently I ended up missing a bunch of text several times because I was already typing my next command. I don’t like when games do that. Finally, it’s too big for the comp. Sort of. It’s like three or four smallish comp-sized games in one. I got a little more than halfway through in two hours. Individually, the games are an appropriate size, but together, they’re far too much for the judging time. Those quibbles aside, When Help Collides is a clever, innovative, and fiercely funny joyride.

Rating: 9.4

The Djinni Chronicles by J.D. Berry [Comp00]

IFDB page: The Djinni Chronicles
Final placement: 14th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

A favorite trick in Interactive Fiction, especially short works like those that appear in the comp, is to make the PC some kind of unusual or non-human creature. We’ve seen it with animals, as in Ralph and A Day For Soft Food. We’ve seen it with monsters, as in Strangers In The Night or Only After Dark. We’ve seen it with children, as in The Arrival and On The Farm. A Bear’s Night Out did it with a plush toy. In the freaky realms of Rybread, we’ve even seen it with things like car dashboards.

When the game is written competently and sufficiently debugged, this trick often works remarkably well, even better than its static fiction equivalent might. Why is that? I think it’s because IF has an advantage over static fiction in the area of character identification. When you’re reading a book, you may read third-, first-, or even second-person accounts of a particular entity’s exploits, and with sufficiently effective writing and characterization, you may even identify with that entity quite strongly despite its non-human traits, but no matter what you are still watching that entity from a distance. IF, however, literalizes the process of identification one step further. Not only does the prose put you in someone else’s head, you actually have to guide the choices of that someone.

I’d submit that when a reader is compelled to guide a character’s actions, especially if there are puzzles involved, that reader will try to think like that character would think. When this happens, the identification process has reached a place where static fiction can rarely take it.

It is exactly this place that The Djinni Chronicles limns with skill and imagination. The game puts the player in charge of a succession of spirits, each of whom has a unique method of interacting with humans and the physical world. These spirits perceive reality quite differently from corporeal beings like ourselves, and the game leaves it to the player to figure out just what those differences are. Luckily, it provides enough clues (and sometimes even outright explanations) that if you’re paying attention, you should be able to get the basic gist of how the system of djinni magic works.

This system is ingenious in several ways. First, it is quite alien from conventional portraits, which only makes sense, since those portraits have always been from the point of view of the summoner rather than the summoned. Second, despite its unfamiliarity, it makes perfect sense, or at least it did to me, as a plausible explanation for spirit magic. It uses the logic of “undercurrents”, in the game’s terminology, to explain things like why a djinn’s blessing can so often be accompanied by a curse — humans always ascribe a malevolent motive to such curses, but the game suggests that this may be just because we’ve never known the djinn’s side of the story. Finally, the system works well on a gaming level — Djinni Chronicles tells an interesting story that fits many folktale motifs, but doesn’t forget to be a computer game at the same time.

If it sounds like I was impressed by the game’s magic system, that’s because I was. To my mind, it did an excellent job of combining story and game into a seamless unit, providing fertile ground for puzzles that always made sense within the context of the story. Best of all, the system really made me feel like I understood what it was like to be a magically summoned spirit, and also why it is so difficult for humans to understand why such spirits so often bring more misery than happiness to their human summoners. The writing helped further this character identification, such as in this passage:

Vault Entry Room The location of my summoner was a room between the surface of the world [physically west] and a complex of vaults [physically east].

The room was a trap for physical beings. On one side of the room, a portcullis barred the way to the outside. To the other were the vaults for storage. A patterned stone wall blocked their unauthorized access.

This description does a lovely job of tracing the outlines of a location, because the spirit wouldn’t care about the details, while still giving its human reader a fair impression of the location’s real purpose. The game also indulges in judicious use of made-up synonyms for familiar concepts, thereby deepening our sense that the djinn population sees what we see, but through very different eyes.

I mentioned that the puzzles are integrated well into the story — they are also pitched at just the right difficulty level, or at least they were for me. I often found I had to think carefully, to think like the djinn I was directing, and that when I did so, I was properly rewarded. This experience added further to my sense of immersion in the PCs, since I never had to break the spell by consulting the walkthrough.

The game wasn’t perfect — a few typos lurk here and there, a section of verse has badly broken meter that jars against the elegance of the spirit world, and the routine that causes death when a certain point score drops too low is always one turn behind. Overall though, Djinni Chronicles puts a new spin on a well-loved IF gimmick, and makes it work like a charm.

Rating: 9.4

Jacks Or Better To Murder, Aces To Win by J.D. Berry [Comp99]

IFDB page: Jacks or Better to Murder, Aces to Win
Final placement: 10th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Jacks or Better to Murder, Aces to Win is a great title. Based on that title, I expected the game to be a dark detective story in the Raymond Chandler mode. I thought perhaps there’d be a gambler who owed money to the mob, or shady dealings at a poker game, or a crime ring run out of a casino, or something to do with playing cards. This, however, turned out not to be the case. Instead, the game centers on an arcane hierarchical religion, which is never named. The head of this religion is called The Power, and divine authority spreads downward from there, pyramid-fashion, following the letters of the alphabet. The highest lieutenants are called “A”s, the next step down “B”s, and so on all the way down to E. Apparently these church officials spend most of their time engaged in Machiavellian scheming of how to claw their way up the stack, and to prevent threats from those below them. The PC is an A, an old hand at all the tricks and conniving that are necessary to survive in this structure, and therefore almost preternaturally aware of life-threatening situations. As the game begins, the old A believes that an assassination plot is afoot — as the game puts it, “You have the feeling you are being set up and that your chair should have a bull’s-eye painted on it.” It’s not the game I expected, but it’s an interesting premise nonetheless.

The results are mixed. The prose can get rather florid — long, long sentences one after another — but is mostly pretty good, and it can in fact be argued that the prose style matches the baroque structure it describes. I have more conflicted feelings about the design. In an earlier review, one where I was complaining about scenes that only make one option available, I asked “Why even give me a prompt at all?” It appears that Jacks is the answer to my question. At a number of junctures in the game, it only takes a very minor action, such as moving in a particular direction, to impel the PC to perform a long sequence of actions, all of which are out of the player’s control. In a way, this is fine, since most of the actions performed would be very difficult to communicate to an IF parser, not to mention difficult to guess. However, this design choice once again tips the balance away from interactivity. Every time the PC makes a bunch of independent choices, I feel more and more like I’m not really involved in the story, like I’m just there to hold up the cue cards so that the plot can continue.

Still, of all the minimally interactive games I’ve played in this year’s competition thus far, Jacks is one of the most successful. It’s worth examining the game more closely to find out why. For one thing, the milieu is involving enough that just seeing the plot unfold is interesting. This gives Jacks a leg up on games that are set in a cardboard cutout genre world, or whose plots are a string of nonsensical non sequiturs — even though I didn’t have much influence on the plot, I was interested in it. Another factor which helps to counterbalance Jacks‘ lack of interactivity is the fact that it doesn’t make its puzzles too difficult, and it allows for multiple solutions at the most important juncture.

When there is only one way to advance through the game, the action (and the fun) grinds to a halt pretty quickly if that route is difficult to find. Jacks never falls into this trap, instead opening the next scene from fairly minor actions on the part of the player (usually involving examining everything or doing the obvious thing with the few items to hand.) Moreover, at the one juncture where the action might be difficult to guess, the author wisely provides for a number of actions that will resolve the situation, and gives each one its own lengthy text. In fact, I was interested enough in the situation at that after I finished the game I consulted the walkthrough and tried out the alternate solutions. For each action, I was rewarded with a different series of clever machinations on the part of the PC.

Oh! How could I forget? Jacks also features a really cool technical feat, which makes for some very funny moments in the beginning of the game. In the opening scene, an E is making a lengthy speech that uses lots of words, and says basically nothing. The game accomplishes this effect through the use of a random doubletalk generator. Each turn, the E comes out with randomly generated phrases, all of which perfectly mimic the kind of empty speech that often fills long orations. A sample: “One part of the whole must be that you should sing each song as if it will personally show others each other.” The mechanism for this doubletalk generator is complex and masterful — frankly, it’s worth the download time just to see this thing in action. And you’ll have no trouble lingering in the first section, since the author has provided a number of things which must be examined before the action can continue. Jacks is another fairly non-interactive entry into this year’s competition, but through technical innovation, fresh milieu, and shrewd design, it partly makes up for what it lacks in gameplay.

Rating: 7.3