Tag: roberto grassi

Beyond by Roberto Grassi, Paolo Lucchesi, and Alessandro Peretti [Comp05]

IFDB page: Beyond
Final placement: Tied for 2nd place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

Here we are again: I couldn’t finish this game in two hours. I found it quite absorbing, and with 20 minutes left, I really debated whether to turn to the walkthrough or just play out my 20 minutes with a bit less dawdling around examining things, getting as far as I could. I picked the latter, but with 5 minutes left, I really wanted to know how the story turned out. So I peeked at the walkthrough, hoping to speed through to the end. NOPE! Turns out I was midway through chapter 4 of 7 (plus an epilogue) — just about halfway through, I reckon.

Back in the day I used to penalize games like this in my ratings, hoping to discourage people from this behavior. But it’s not like whatever I put here will deter people in, like, Comp06. Plus, as Michael Coyne taught me, authors have a strong motivation to enter their too-long games in the comp, and nothing I did as a reviewer could have changed that motivation anyway. And I’m obviously not trying to go through all these Comp05 games in six weeks — I started on these almost three years ago! So while I am still stopping after two hours to write a review, I’m not going to specifically take points off anymore, except to the extent that having to stop prematurely affected my enjoyment of the game. Heck, in some games stopping after two hours feels like a gift.

Stopping Beyond was disappointing, though, because I was deeply involved with its story, being pulled along at multiple levels. At the higher level, there’s a frame story, in which the PC is the spirit of an unborn child, exploring the reason why it wasn’t born. I was very wary when I encountered this premise, fearing that it would veer into an anti-choice polemic, but I needn’t have worried. Instead this concept brings us into a compelling murder mystery, in which we play a detective looking into the murder of a pregnant woman.

Really, I shouldn’t call the unborn spirit piece a frame story, because it returns after every chapter, in interludes where we see the murder scene as a ghost, or experience a bit of what life might have been like had the mother lived, or watch different scenarios of how that night might have gone, from a godlike remove. In the prologue, the game makes clear that the PC (and thereby the player) cannot affect her fate. She will never be born, and can only learn the circumstances surrounding that fact.

Thus the game takes place under a heavy layer of inevitability, similar to Photopia — a game to which Beyond pays a neat, subtle tribute by replicating one room and item description. And yet, also like Photopia, Beyond weaves a deeply compelling story around this unavoidable death. As the detective, we’re able to investigate the scene of the crime, talk to a wide variety of connected characters, and make clever observations that lead us closer and closer to solving the crime.

As any good mystery should, the plot takes several unexpected turns, and who knows how many more were in store, given that I was only halfway through the story when I reached my time limit? Not only is the plot well-crafted, but the presentation of the game is excellent as well. The whole thing renders in tan text on a black background, setting a nicely somber mood, and fantastic illustrations appear throughout the traversal, in that same color scheme. These illustrations might appear at the top of the text window, or on either side, and the game handles their appearance, persistence, and disappearance very smoothly, in a way that always enhances the story and never disrupts it.

The one Achilles heel in Beyond, I’m sorry to say, is that the game sometimes demonstrates a rather shaky command of English. Every so often there’s a mention of a baby “wrapped in white clothings”, or a character who says, “I have took the water”, or a phrase like, “I feel like I’m bringed away.” All things considered the errors aren’t overwhelming — certainly not the trainwreck that some broken English comp games turn out to be — but enough to throw me out of the story when they happen.

Nevertheless, this bothered me much less than it might have, and that’s down to the overall outstanding craft that was put into the game. It was one of those that I wish I could give more time, and maybe someday I will, but for now, I leave the story unfinished, but with admiration.

Rating: 9.3

Interview from Terra d’IF [Misc]

[I was interviewed in 2004 for Terra d’IF, an Italian interactive fiction zine. Roberto Grassi was the interviewer. I’ve cleaned up the text and added some links as appropriate.]

Head shot of Paul O'Brian from 2004
(Me in 2004!)

> ASK PAUL ABOUT PAUL

I’m a 34-year-old computer programmer and father-to-be, living in Colorado and working for the local university. I’ve been married for 8 years, to a woman who isn’t an IF enthusiast herself but is unfailingly supportive of me and my kooky hobbies. I guess I’ve been hanging around the IF scene for about ten years now. Wow. I have very strong interests in writing, gaming, and programming, and since IF lies at the crescent between these, it’s a natural fit for me. The fact that I have warm memories of 1980s Infocom doesn’t hurt, either. My other interests include comics (as players of the Earth And Sky games have no doubt surmised), music, and trivia.

> ASK PAUL ABOUT HIS IF (with particular reference to IFComp Winning)

Of course, I’m thrilled and proud to have won the competition. It’s been interesting to watch the mini-controversy that the win has caused on the newsgroups, with some people voicing the opinion that my game didn’t deserve to beat its closest competition. To some degree, I can sympathize with this point of view — Luminous Horizon‘s writing doesn’t measure up to the dazzling prose and evocative themes of Blue Chairs, and its puzzles feel pretty desultory next to something like All Things Devours.

I don’t think it’s for me to say just what qualities enabled the game to win despite these shortcomings, but I can tell you that I really try to put a lot of craft into my work. Part of why it takes me so long to produce each game is that I pour a great deal of effort into providing dozens and dozens of NPC quips, unusual parser responses, and situation-appropriate text. I like to think that effort makes a difference in how people receive the game. In addition, I try to make each game I release an improvement over the last one, which is why Luminous Horizon lets you switch between PCs and contains an integrated hint system.

As for my earlier stuff, I still get nice email about LASH, and overall I’m happy with the way that game turned out, though of course with another four years of experience, I now look back at some parts of it and wish I’d done them a little differently. This is even more true of Wearing The Claw, my rather cliché-ridden debut. At that point, I was so excited to even be able to produce IF at all that I wasn’t paying enough attention to producing interesting writing, though given my nascent writing skills at the time, I’m not sure I’d have been able to do much better even if that was my focus. Lately, I seem to have stumbled into a groove for producing games that have a fairly broad appeal, and I’m pleased that lots of players seem to be having a good time with them.

> ASK PAUL ABOUT OLD IF

The first game I ever played was Zork, and it’s still one of my favorites. However, I played its predecessor Dungeon a few years ago, and found myself going crazy with frustration. Some parts of Zork may seem capricious, but compared to the way Dungeon tangles its map connections, snuffs light sources, and gleefully confounds the player at every turn, Zork feels infallibly logical. This experience gave me some insight into what I see as one of the most important shifts that’s happened in IF development: the shift from antagonism to collaboration.

Old-school IF does everything it can to undercut and frustrate the player, and the pleasure of playing it comes from the challenge of triumphing over all these obstacles. As time has gone on, though, we’ve seen more and more IF that tries to work with the player to create an experience of fun or drama. That’s why things like mazes and hunger timers have fallen out of favor — the few current games that include them tend to be strongly informed by the games of fifteen or more years ago. Of course, both approaches can be useful, but personally, I find participating in a story much more pleasant than slogging through restart after restart to overcome arbitrary barriers, so I prefer that even puzzle games eliminate the tedious parts to let me focus on the interesting parts. All Things Devours is a great example of a game that does this.

> ASK PAUL ABOUT CURRENT IF

I’m rather embarrassed to admit that I have difficulty finding the time to play most current IF. I’ve managed to keep up with the competition, both because it only takes place once a year and because I know I won’t be spending more than two hours on any given game. However, given that next year at competition time I’ll have a four-month-old child around the house, I’m trying to shift my focus to non-comp-games, which I can approach under a little less pressure. I got a copy of Kent Tessman’s Future Boy! for Christmas, and I’m looking forward to playing that and Andrew Plotkin’s The Dreamhold soon. Of course, I’ll have to balance them with work on SPAG and on updating the Earth And Sky games, not to mention the other demands of actually having a life. Sigh.

> ASK PAUL ABOUT FUTURE IF

I’m not much of a prognosticator, so I don’t have any grand predictions about where IF will go in the next ten or twenty years. I don’t even have a wish list, really. I do think that right now, several different strands of IF are healthy and growing, from outright literary games to sophisticated puzzlers, and I don’t expect general IF development to lurch suddenly towards one side or the other. The use of pictures and sounds in IF is growing too, and that may continue to expand as the tools to produce multimedia content get easier and easier to use. I guess my basic expectation is that IF will continue to thrive as an underground niche hobby, with occasional eruptions into tributaries of the mainstream.

> ASK PAUL ABOUT HIS FUTURE RELEASES (and commitments, i.e. SPAG for instance)

I don’t have any new games on the drawing board at this point. I do plan to continue with SPAG for the foreseeable future — the 2004 comp issue will come out as soon as I receive the last interview I’m waiting for. Aside from that, my first priority is to update my rather dusty web page, then to produce an updated version of Luminous Horizon that takes into account all of the feedback I’ve received during and since the competition. Then I want to go back and update the first game to include the same kinds of graphical sound effects that the other episodes use, and from there I’m thinking of trying to package them in some quasi-seamless way and maybe promote them a bit beyond the IF world. I really have no idea how long all that will take, so I haven’t really formed any plans beyond that point.

Paul O’Brian’s games are here. [I took the liberty of replacing a defunct link to Baf’s Guide with one to the IFDB.]