Persistence of Memory by Jason Dyer [Comp98]

IFDB page: Persistence of Memory
Final placement: 9th place (of 27) in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition

NOTE: Because of the nature of Persistence of Memory, it’s difficult to talk about it without revealing a key secret. Therefore, be warned that any and all of the following review could be considered a spoiler.

Memory is a new twist on the one-room game. The setting is war; could be Korea, could be Vietnam, but it’s never really specified, and it doesn’t really matter. It’s a war in a foreign land, with villages, dense foliage, helicopters, rifles, and land mines. Especially land mines. In the first move of the game, you step on one, and realize that if you remove your weight from it, it will explode. Thus the potential paths which the game appears to have at its outset are reduced to one: wait. This restriction of freedom is a recurring theme in Memory. In incident after incident, the scope of action contracts until it becomes clear that there is only one action which will lead to your survival. Sometimes these actions are rather horrifying, but the game demands them if you wish to finish. I have mixed feelings about this kind of forcible plotting. On the one hand, it makes for an extremely linear game, and it curtails interactivity quite dramatically. This obstruction seems to fly in the face of the conventional wisdom about IF — it violates one of the Players’ Rights in Graham Nelson’s Craft of Adventure: “To have reasonable freedom of action.” In Nelson’s words, “After a while the player begins to feel that the designer has tied him to a chair in order to shout the plot at him.” On the other hand, I also think that interactive fiction can be a very good medium for conveying a sense of futility or entrapment. Because IF by its nature seems to require at least to a certain degree freedom of movement and action, and because it also creates a sense of immersion in the story’s world, when a piece of IF chooses to violate that perceived requirement the player’s sense of identification with the trapped character can be very strong indeed. Something about the frustration of having so few actions available to me which would not result in death made the equation of my situation with the character’s feel more intense than it would have were I just reading a story about this character.

Because of the game’s premise, you don’t seek out the puzzles; the puzzles come to you. And each puzzle must be solved if the character is to survive. Luckily, all of the puzzles make sense and have intuitive solutions, though in some of them it’s not clear what the deadly moment is until it arrives, and sometimes I found myself resorting to a save-and-restore strategy in order to defeat a puzzle’s time limit. I don’t think I could have solved the game straight through, because some puzzles had rather unexpected and uncomfortable solutions. This is where I found myself ill at ease with the game’s lack of interactivity — there’s a fine line between identifying with a trapped character versus simply feeling trapped into an action because the designer allows you no other choice, even though more options might have been available in reality. It’s hard to explain without revealing more spoilers than I already have, but some pieces of the plot felt rather forced, as though only one solution was provided because only that solution would create the game scenario desired by the designer. However, the choices worked in the end, and I found I only needed to look at the hints once, and in retrospect I think I probably could have avoided that had I spent more time on the puzzle that was stumping me.

The writing could get a little histrionic at times. Some descriptions tiptoed along the line between what works and what doesn’t. For example, the mud around your feet is described as “torpid”, a word which usually refers to a sluggish mental state. I suppose the mud’s thickness and viscosity could be compared to slow mental processes, but it’s a stretch. There weren’t too many moments like this — for the most part the prose did a fine job of conveying the situation, and in fact sometimes was quite good indeed. The description of the hairs rising on the back of your neck as you try to conceal yourself from enemy soldiers was chilling and engrossing. I found no technical errors in the writing, nor in the code. Overall, Memory does a very good job with an unusual choice of subject matter, and when it was over I felt not triumph, but relief. I suspect this is what the game intended.

Rating: 8.3

Phlegm by Jason Dyer as Adjacent Drooler [Comp96]

IFDB page: Phlegm
Final placement: 17th place (of 26) in the 1996 Interactive Fiction Competition

A thoroughly whacked-out romp through realms of surrealism only barely touched on by Nord and Bert, Phlegm is pretty low on logic, but quite high on goofy gags. Perhaps its funniest moment comes in its opening screen, where it bills itself as “An Interactive Interactive”; it’s the kind of joke that’s only funny the first time, but since it is the first time, it worked for me. Also, in spite of the author’s assurance that it is impossible to make a mistake that renders the game unwinnable, I managed to do it, and I wasn’t even trying! (For the record, it’s because I put the toy elephant in the cart and then torched it with the flame-thrower.) Phlegm wasn’t really hilarious, but it provided a number of smiles, and even its puzzles were logical in an illogical kind of way. In many ways, the game is like its opening joke — lots of fun at the moment, but not anything you’d ever want to repeat.

Prose: Lots of cleverly funny little touches, from Leo the lemming whispering “Rosebud…” to the “Lil’ Terrorist brand Flame-thrower.” The prose was generally lots of fun to read, even if at times the silliness became a wee bit more irritating than amusing.

Difficulty: Well, I found myself looking at the hints quite a lot, but I’m not sure whether that’s because the puzzles were simply difficult, or difficult to take seriously. For some reason, I found myself unwilling to agonize about how to handle the guitar-playing lunatic, and wanted to look at the hints in order to see more of the jokes, since a game like Phlegm suffers quite drastically from a reduction in pace. So I suppose you could say it was a difficult game, but then again I’m glad I approached it the way I did — a plotless work like this one begs to be finished rather than battered.

Technical (coding): The coding was on the whole quite strong. I only found one weak spot, which was the fact that I discovered that I could carry the powder as long as I was holding the grail — it didn’t need to actually be inside the grail. Somehow I don’t think this is what the author intended.

Technical (writing): The writing was pleasantly error-free, which made the humor much more accessible and easy to digest.

Plot: Well, I couldn’t really say there was much of a plot, but on the plus side I don’t think much of an attempt was made at one either. So the game was plotless (aside from the very most basic “get-the-treasure” motivation), but it didn’t suffer all that much from being so.

Puzzles: Some of the puzzles were quite funny, and extremely reminiscent of Nord and Bert, especially those involving the needle. Then again, some others (the flame-thrower, for example), failed to be a lot of fun in their irrationality. In general, though, I’d call the puzzles successful in what I deduce to be their aim — parodying typical IF problem (the references to Balances were especially funny) and providing nutty goals in an off-kilter universe.

OVERALL — 8.5