Tag: rippled flesh

Symetry by Ryan Stevens as Rybread Celsius [Comp97]

IFDB page: Symetry
Final placement: 32nd place (of 34) in the 1997 Interactive Fiction Competition

Oh, man. When I saw the title, one misspelled word, I began to feel the familiar dread. When I read the tortured sentences of the introduction (“Tonight will be the premiere of you slumbering under its constant eye.”) the fear built higher. And when I saw the game banner, I knew that it was true: Rybread Celsius has returned! Yes, the infamous Rybread Celsius, author of last year’s stunningly awful Punkirita Quest One: Liquid and only slightly less awful Rippled Flesh. Rybread Celsius, who announced to the newsgroups that his games would suck, and proved himself extravagantly correct. Rybread Celsius: I hope it doesn’t hurt his feelings if I call him the worst writer in interactive fiction today.

See, he just doesn’t write in English. Sure, it may look like English, but on closer inspection we find that the resemblance is passing, perhaps even coincidental. Misspellings and bad grammar are just the tip of the iceberg. The sentences often just don’t make sense. (For example, “A small persian rug sits as an isolated in the center of the room…” I’m not making this up. In fact, this all comes before a single move can be made in the game.)

But OK, say you were smart and had a good translator, and could understand what the game is talking about. Then, my friend, you would have to deal with the bugs. The game world makes almost zero sense, even if you can get past the prose. Simple commands like “get in bed” thrust you into darkness, at the same time insisting “But you’re already in the Your Bed.” (you weren’t.) Perhaps you’d turn to the walkthrough in such a situation. No luck. In fact, the (twelve-move) walkthrough includes a command which isn’t even in the game’s vocabulary. The best you can achieve is “A Phyric Victory” (I think he means “Pyrrhic.”)

I don’t mean this as a personal attack. I really don’t. I would love to be proved wrong, to see “Rybread” come up with a great game, or even an understandable one. But I’m not holding my breath. Go ahead, play Symetry. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Prose: … oh, forget it.
Plot:
Puzzles:
Technical (writing):
Technical (coding):

OVERALL: A 1.4 (you’ve got to give the guy credit for persistence.)

Rippled Flesh by Ryan Stevens as Rybread Celsius [Comp96]

IFDB page: Rippled Flesh
Final placement: 24th place (of 26) in the 1996 Interactive Fiction Competition

Having already played the author’s other competition entry, I sincerely dreaded playing this one. Probably my low expectations contributed to my feeling that this game was actually slightly better than Punkirita Quest. Sure, the writing is still riddled with errors, and sure, the plot and premise still make absolutely no sense, and yes, the coding is very poor and the design even more so, but at least this time I had some faint grasp of what was supposed to be happening. Perhaps this derives from the fact that Flesh takes a more realistic setting and thus less needs to be explained by the author’s inadequate verbal skills. Of course, that doesn’t mean I liked it — just that it was less painful than the other game. Progress? Perhaps — I’ll just try to judge the game on an objective basis rather than on its dubious achievement of being a better piece of work than Punkiritia.

Prose: The descriptions were weak, and the overall feel of the game evoked walking through the brain of a mental patient — a series of non sequiturs, loosely tied together by an irrational framework. The writing suffered under so many errors that they seriously occluded the author’s ability to communicate, and this problem was compounded by the fact that many (most, actually) of the objects and rooms in the game seemed to have no real purpose or function.

Difficulty: I found it possible to move through the game without much trouble, which is a good sign; at least the language problems didn’t render the game so opaque that it was simply impossible to complete without a walkthrough. Mainly the point of the game simply seemed to be finding one’s way through a maze of rooms — the one real puzzle (the wardrobes) had its effect spoiled by the fact that one didn’t really gain much of anything by solving it.

Technical (coding): Coding problems abounded. Nothing fatal, but certainly plenty of the nonsensical and downright baffling. For example, how about those lights that get turned on so brightly that they blind the character, yet in the next turn the room is still dark?

Technical (writing): Really quite terrible. My only hypothesis is that the author is a student (rather than a speaker) of English, and a rather poor one at that. A dictionary and a spell-checker would improve things immensely — then the proofreading can begin.

Plot: No, there wasn’t one. A bunch of random events tied together by a whacked-out ending does not a plot make.

Puzzles: I mentioned the game’s only real puzzle above. Other than that, the game’s “puzzle” was just walking through the exit in each room until finally arriving at the “win game” room. Nothing much made sense, and so the whole experience ended up being unsatisfying. The real brain-twister is why the author chose to enter this piece into the competition in the first place.

OVERALL — A 2.0