Sweet Dreams by Papillon [Comp03]

IFDB page: Sweet Dreams
Final placement: 20th place (of 30) in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition

Ooh, it’s always so exciting to start into a new bunch of competition games, and what a start this was! Sweet Dreams has to be one of the more surprising comp games I’ve ever seen, because it’s not a text adventure. Instead, it’s more or less in the style of early LucasArts games like Maniac Mansion or the first Monkey Island — a fully graphical experience whose pixelated protagonist wanders around the landscape, picking up and using items, solving puzzles, and chatting with NPCs via a “TALK TO” sort of system. Over the years I’ve heard rumblings about work on a LucasArts type of engine for amateur games, and I’m not sure if this is the product of that effort or something Papillon did all on her own, but whatever the source, the product is fairly impressive.

I thought the graphics were pretty attractive in a low-res way, the music enhanced the setting nicely (although it tended to halt and restart abruptly rather than fading out and back in when it looped), and the interface was intuitive enough that I was able to use it right away without much attention to the instructions. Aside from a couple of irritating technical glitches (about which more later), I’d be very excited indeed to see more games of this type and quality. In fact, there was one moment, when I maneuvered the PC to a bookshelf and took down a book to read, that I got a jolt to my spine, feeling magically transported to those happy days I spent playing LucasArts’ Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, pulling down one hilarious joke after another from its bookshelves. That is, until I started reading the books in Sweet Dreams, which mostly tended to be something like this:

The Human Battery: How the power of positive thinking can be put to
work not only to cure disease but also to solve the energy crisis.

Or they were about fairies, or crystals, or the zodiac… et cetera. And there we have the factor that’s going to limit the appeal of this game. The characters, plot, and setting are all feather-light and sweet verging well into treacly. It’s set in an adorable little cottage, with adorable portraits of fairies and unicorns hanging on the wall, and serving as a tiny private boarding school to four adorable little girls. Actually, these girls are supposedly adolescents, but they look all of eight years old, save for the bizarre breastlike protrusions that they display in profile. The story involves giving your wonderful best friend a beautiful present for her sixteenth birthday, then making a magical journey into an enchanted land of dreams filled with colorful flowers and friendly animals and… well, some people are bound to find the whole thing just unbearably twee. I have a pretty high sugar tolerance myself, and was able to swing with the tone and enjoy it for the most part, but even I felt myself on the edge of diabetes too often. On the other hand, it would certainly make a great game for kids, so long as a couple of its major technical problems got resolved.

Primary among these problems is the main character’s unfortunate tendency to get stuck while exploring narrower parts of the geography. The first time it happened, I spent a frustrating five minutes trying to get her to budge from behind the piano, until I finally realized that the secret was to try to maneuver her using the arrow keys instead of the mouse. Three directions would fail, but one would get her to run in a tiny circle, and if I interrupted this circle fast enough, I could break her out of her self-imposed cage. This running-in-circles thing is something she does a lot, usually when you’re trying to maneuver her close to a boundary, and when it happens she seems more like a trapped insect than a charming little girl.

These boundary difficulties exacerbated the other problem with the game engine: its insistence on the PC being right next to an object before she can interact with it. Sure, it makes perfect sense that you can’t pull a book from the shelf if you’re across the room from it, but I’d have much preferred it if any command to interact with an object on screen was treated as meaning “walk over to the object and then…”, so that I could avoid the numerous times the game told me “You’re not close enough to it.” As for the rest of the game, I’d say it was above average. There were a couple of very satisfying puzzles, a couple of so-so ones, and a couple that just seemed arbitrary. The one I had the most difficult time with was one that exposes the limitations of graphical games — it was relying on somewhat subtle color shading differences, and my laptop monitor wasn’t making a clear enough distinction between them. The story was, of course, cute, and despite the rather cloying nature of the game as a whole, I ended up mostly enjoying it. Once it gets a bit more technical polish, and so long as you don’t mind a very high sweetness level, Sweet Dreams will make an outstanding piece of amateur graphical IF.

Rating: 8.2

Lovesong by Mihalis “DarkAng3l” Georgostathis [Comp01]

IFDB page: Lovesong
Final placement: 48th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

This game was my first introduction to the Quest development system, and I wish I could say I was impressed. I mean that. I’m all for people using their skills to create IF stuff that’s new, cool, and functional. What I can’t get very enthusiastic about, though, is people using their skills to create IF stuff that isn’t as good as stuff that already exists. Sure, Quest looks nice and everything. But unless the author of Lovesong broke or disabled something, its parser is less sophisticated than, say, that of the first Monkey Island game. Based on the help text, the parser seems to understand 19 verbs. Counting synonyms. And 9 of those are directional commands. And another one was (I think) added by the game’s author.

Such simplicity allows the game to be almost completely mouse-driven (or it would if the mouse support didn’t break halfway through), but really… what’s the point of that? It’s one thing to present a mouse interface in a graphic adventure, but a text adventure? Why? Legend tried it, but I can’t imagine that many people actually played all (or even most) of any Legend text game using the mouse alone. I guess it cuts down on guess-the-verb, but really, is the gain worth the price?

It seems to me that what Quest allows people to do is to create text games with the interface of a graphical game. To my mind, that’s a pointless endeavor — it deprives text games of one of their major strengths, and adopts a “hands-off-the-keyboard” aesthetic from graphical games that has a stultifying effect on game design. The worst of both worlds. No doubt Quest has some features unused by Lovesong, and those may go some distance toward making it useful. But ultimately, I don’t think that any nifty features are going to make a big difference. You know why? Sure you do: THE PARSER IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE NIFTY FEATURES. Same old song.

Of course, no matter what development system had been used to write this game, Lovesong would still be deeply troubled. The big problem here is English. Apparently, English is not the author’s first language. As the game’s author bio asserts, “Please forgive me, but me English are not fluent enough. I pray that some mistakes won’t ruin your gaming experience.” Well… sorry, but it’s really hard to enjoy a text game written in broken English. (Unless the English is broken on purpose, a la Gostak or For A Change, but that’s a different matter entirely.)

In fact, I have to wonder: if someone isn’t fluent in English, but wants to create a game, should that game really be a text adventure in English? I’ll probably get flamed for that, and really, I don’t mean to be some kind of Guardian of IF Purity, but a text adventure is a piece of prose, just like a novel, short story, or poem. If you’re not fluent in a language, how can you possibly craft a good piece of prose in that language?

Maybe it can be done, but Lovesong isn’t it. Its plot is sorta sweet, but the whole thing is so hampered by the twin burdens of its straitjacketed development system and its badly mangled writing that there’s not much opportunity to enjoy anything else about the game. In addition, it has its own implementation problems, though it’s always hard to tell what’s the game’s fault and what’s the system’s fault. Several times, the game just had no response at all to a command. About halfway through, the mouse buttons stopped working. Towards the end, the “save” command stopped working. Oh well — at least I can now say I’ve tried a Quest game.

Rating: 2.1