IFDB page: The Plague – Redux
Final placement: 22nd place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition
The Plague (Redux) wants to be an intense survival horror game, with a grim atmosphere, terrifying scenario, horrific scenes, and tough heroism from the Final Girl who manages to struggle through it all towards the slimmest shard of hope. Sometimes, it is all these things, or at least one of them at a time. However, far too often, this game is its own undoing, for reasons that range from mild to excruciating.
The mildest problem, surprisingly, is the writing. Much of the time, it’s effective, and in fact there are a couple of standout techniques. First, the entire game is told in past tense, which is an interesting choice for a game that seems to have death around every corner — the use of past tense (e.g. “Stunned, the four of us ran from the platform back up the walkway.”) tells us that the narrator did in fact survive, and is recounting what happened. The other powerful technique is the best thing in the game: narrating the PC’s thoughts in italics alongside the usual IF descriptions, like so:
>DOWN
What were those creatures? What had happened on the train? How had it spread so quickly onto the streets...?
Steps
Shadows danced across the darkly stained walls. Blood dripped with eerie plops. I could move up (steps) or down (corridor).
This mixing of internal monologue and sensory reportage is a good simulation of how we really move through the world sometimes, especially when something intense is happening.
Unfortunately, the writing has plenty of clunkers and errors too. For instance:
>EXAMINE ANDREA
With that micheiovous smile and bubbly eyes you couldn't help but adore Andrea. She stole every man's hearts and brightened the dullest of days.
“Micheiovous”? “Bubbly eyes”? “Every man’s hearts”? The men have multiple hearts? Too bad — the zombies were hoping for multiple brains.
In any case, more problematic than than the writing is the structure and puzzles. There are long non-interactive sequences, where only one choice makes sense, and we’re shepherded through the narrative canyon. There are some fairly baffling “solutions” along the way through these, for example a puzzle that requires you to be subjected to a pretty horrible scene of sexual violence in order to get up the gumption to do something icky that the game won’t let you do before that. Similarly, you can search an area and be told there’s nothing of use, but if you later find yourself in need of an item and search that area again, it’ll turn up there.
Along these lines, there’s an awful lot of reading the author’s mind required. There’s a puzzle where you can examine something, look in it, and search it, and be told you’re wasting your time, but if you look behind it, you acquire a crucial object. There are many first-level nouns and they’re all described, which is awesome, but maybe 1 in 20 descriptions provides you an ingredient for a puzzle solution, which starts to feel like a text version of hunt-the-pixel. By about the halfway point, I was going straight from the walkthrough, because I’d determined that far too frequently I’d never guess the intended action, and it wouldn’t really be clued.
Worse than all this, though, by far the worst sin of The Plague (Redux), was the damned, damned, damned inventory limit. First of all, the PC finds a handbag and actually discards it. What IF character does this? But fine, if you won’t let me carry a bag, you’d better not hassle me about my inventory.
NOPE! At some point I found a jacket to wear (much better than the evening clothes I had on), but was told it was “too heavy”. Sigh, okay, DROP ALL. I put on the jacket. But then, half of what I’d been carrying was actually “too heavy”. Like, a lighter? Too heavy. A packet of cigarettes? Too heavy. A handwritten note? Too heavy. Seriously, I know the PC has had a rough night and I’m sure she’s exhausted, but a handwritten note is too heavy for her to carry? Was the jacket somehow causing this? If so, too bad, because the jacket is required. (Sorry, Phil Collins.)
As a result, I ended up with my inventory strewn all over creation, and inevitably I’d find myself in need of some object that I’d had to shed 200 turns earlier as ballast, forcing me to remember where I’d left it, trudge back there, and then juggle inventory until I could carry the necessary object alongside the objects that were always necessary. It became absolutely insufferable very quickly, not to mention a total tension and pace destroyer. Far better to face a horde of zombies than the enforced annoyance and boredom of trudging around the landscape because the PC can only carry three items at a time. Especially when, once again, she had a bag and threw it away!
Oh, and at some point the ADRIFT interpreter started right-aligning all my inputs, and mixing my punctuation around. Cherry on top, ADRIFT!
Anyway, while there are some things to recommend about The Plague (Redux), it sadly succumbs to a lumbering horde of writing problems, weird design choices, and utterly maddening inventory shenanigans. It will not rise again.
Rating: 4.3