Tag: savoir-faire

Damnatio Memoriae by Emily Short [misc]

[This review appeared in issue #47 of SPAG, in the “SPAG Specifics” sections. Note: that means there are SPOILERS AHEAD. The issue was published on January 16, 2007.]

Damnatio Memoriae is a tiny game, but it’s got plenty of quality. There are a few multiple-solution puzzles and the skeleton of a story built around an “accretive PC” model, where a winning playthrough only comes from the lessons taught by a few losing iterations. The writing is reasonably good, as one might expect from Emily Short, and the setting puts her considerable knowledge of ancient Rome to use. It takes hardly any time to play, and repays exploration with a surprising depth of implementation.

All that said, I think I made two mistakes in approaching DM. One was assuming that because it shares a universe with Savoir-Faire, the details of its magic system would be identical to that game. The other mistake was forgetting that this game’s raison d’etre is to be example code for Inform 7, not necessarily to be a complete and satisfying game in itself. Consequently, I found myself feeling disappointed by finding only anticlimactic, abrupt endings, and so turned to the walkthrough after winning but still feeling unsatisfied. From there, I became confused and frustrated by the way this game’s magic differed from that of S-F. These factors combined to make my playing experience less than fun.

It didn’t help that the first winning ending I reached was, I think, buggily incomplete. There was a “time’s up” message and a “You have won” message, but no connective material between them, which of course felt bare and anticlimactic. I’m assuming this was a bug, but there were a number of places in the game where logical connections felt missing. For instance, in a branch where I had killed Clemens, left him in the study, and ducked outside, I thought I’d hide under a pile of hay. Here’s what happened:

>hide
What do you want to hide under?

>hay
Without some decoy, they'll certainly look hard enough to find you.

What, the corpse of my doppelganger up in the study isn’t enough of a decoy?

I chalk these lacunae up to the fact that the point here is not to create a perfect, polished game but rather to demonstrate Inform 7 rules within the context of a nominally game-like structure. Also, despite the fact that this game is tiny, the number of possible interactions between objects makes for a plethora of implementation details, so it’s natural that without extensive beta-testing (as a full-fledged game would have received), some would be missed. As I said, I mistakenly entered the game with the wrong expectation about that, and in any case, I feel like I’m beginning to cross over into the uncouth practice of airing bugs in a review rather than privately to the author, so let me move on to a different topic: the functional differences between this game’s magic system and that of Savoir-Faire.

I had never played S-F to completion, so I prefaced my approach to this game by playing through its larger cousin. Savoir-Faire is a marvelous game, with an internally consistent magic system of linking and reverse linking that enables both its puzzles and its story. However, the logic of linking in Damnatio Memoriae parts ways with S-F in several areas, so I found it a disadvantage to have S-F so fresh in my memory as I played DM.

For one thing, Savoir-Faire disallows linking anything to the PC, saying, “Linking yourself is generally considered a very bad idea.” In DM, however, linking the PC is an important tool. This hurdle is easily cleared, but it leaves the player to figure out how linkages between people operate, and their operations are in fact rather counterintuitive. On top of this, DM also adds a new kind of linkage: slave linkage. The differences between the three types of links can be subtle indeed. Consider these three messages:

>link clemens to me
(first unlinking Clemens)
You build a mutually-effective link between Clemens and yourself.

>reverse link clemens to me
You reverse link Clemens to yourself (son of Julia and Agrippa, who died before you were born). While one of you lives, so does the other.

>slave link clemens to me
You build the link, enslaving Clemens to yourself. It is an expedient Augustus has been using for years: now any attempt upon your life will instead kill your slave.

On the face of it, these messages would seem to indicate that the regular link allows you to control Clemens, the reverse link causes harm to both when anything is inflicted on either, while the slave link transfers that harm from you to Clemens. However, a simple link doesn’t allow you to control Clemens. Instead, a regular link behaves in the way I expected a reverse link to act, and vice versa.

The other significant difference between S-F‘s linking and that in DM is that DM is much less consistent about disallowing linkages. In Savoir-Faire, you could depend on the fact that unless two objects had some sort of common quality, they could not be linked. Damnatio Memoriae is a little more capricious:

>link window to pitcher
The window is insufficiently similar to the painted glass pitcher of water for the two to be linked.

>link letter to pitcher
You build a mutually-effective link between the old letter and the painted glass pitcher of water.

I was able to understand the first result a bit more when I realized belatedly that there’s probably no glass in the window, but that still doesn’t explain how I can link the pitcher to a letter. Similarly:

>link pitcher to clemens
This would work better if the painted glass pitcher of water were a person.

>link vase to clemens
You build a mutually-effective link between the vase and Clemens.

I’m not sure how much these inconsistencies would have bothered me if I hadn’t just played Savoir-Faire, but that game sets a standard that Damnatio Memoriae fails to meet. Consequently, I felt a lot of annoyance at seeing solutions in the walkthrough that never would have occurred to me, since I was expecting DM‘s magic system to be more like that of S-F.

This is a whole lot of kvetching over a sample game, and in a way, it’s a nice problem to have: Emily’s work, even other samples like Bronze, is of such impeccable quality that I’ve begun to hold even her slightest output to what may be a ridiculously high standard. When a game like Damnatio Memoriae fails to meet that standard, I’m more disappointed than I would be in another author’s work, and linking (sorry) this game to one of her real masterpieces only aggravated the problem.

I guess all this is to say that I’d love to see other games set in the various historical periods of the Lavori d’Aracne universe, but I hope they’re created as games rather than as samples. That way, the focus can be on story and craft, rather than on teaching the features of a system. That’s my selfish desire as a player, mind you — no doubt when I’m working on learning Inform 7 I’ll wish just the opposite.

Bronze by Emily Short [IF-Review]

[I originally reviewed this game for Mark Musante’s site IF-Review, in 2006.]

IFDB Page: Bronze

Alloys and Allies

The unveiling of Inform 7 is hugely exciting for many reasons, not the least of which is a sudden bounty of new games by Graham Nelson and Emily Short. These example games are meant to show off various capabilities of the development system, but the designers being who they are, the games are likely to be eminently playworthy in their own right. This review begins what I hope will be a series [Welp, that didn’t happen. — 2021 PO] that illuminates the value of these example games to players, quite aside from what they demonstrate to authors.

First on the list is Bronze, an adaptation of Beauty and the Beast and an old-fashioned puzzlefest, though only old-fashioned in the good ways. There are no mazes, no hunger puzzles, no expiring light sources; for such favors I thank the author sincerely. What we have instead is a large landscape (in this case the Beast’s castle), a well-paced plot punctuated by clever puzzles, and a variety of endings that allow for varying interpretations of the main character. The PC herself goes unnamed, but she is clearly the Beauty of the story, known as Belle in many versions, including both the Disney and Cocteau films. The tone of this game is much closer to the latter, pleasantly. In fact, Bronze reminded me often of Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête — its gloomy, echoing chambers, its magical aura, and of course the wounded, romantic figure at its center.

Bronze‘s castle is less wildly inventive and evocative than Cocteau’s, though of course this is a rather rarefied standard to apply. What it does have over any other adaptation I’ve seen, however, is dimensionality. This game cannily exploits the strengths of IF to use its landscape for multiple ends. At the most basic level, it arranges the map in three dimensions, and at several points forces us to think not only of what is around us but what is above and below. A further (and more interesting) depth accretes as the PC’s memories surface in connection with certain rooms and objects. This is not a new trick in IF, but it’s very well-wrought here. Later in the game, we are shown yet another dimension via a magical item that allows us to hear the memories that other characters attach to various places. In addition, the game lays in a great deal of history to the castle, the Beast, the Beast’s family, and so forth — indeed, learning this history is essential for completing the game. The historical information is nicely woven, mostly avoiding infodumps and cutscenes in favor of memory-freighted objects and consultable items.

On the down side, though, the need to CONSULT X ABOUT Y so often was perhaps Bronze‘s greatest weakness for me. I got rather impatient with having to plumb so many sources about so many topics, especially when only one of the sources was portable. No doubt I’m rather spoiled by small competition games. Perhaps more to the point, I squeeze IF into the corners of my life and thus am not only unable to remember many details from one play session to the next but also reluctant to take notes while playing. I’d imagine that someone in a different mindset would find all the research opportunities quite rewarding. I did not.

Another choice that stymied me was the structure of the endings. My first attempt at Bronze terminated rather abruptly, at a less-than-optimal ending, and it was not immediately apparent why I couldn’t keep proceeding to complete the other goals that would have led to a more satisfying conclusion. The answer had to do with my failure to consult a particular item about a particular topic before that item disappeared, but I did not put this together until after I had turned to the walkthrough. Even after I understood the problem, it still felt a little unfair to me — I wish there were a bit more space in the design to prevent such accidental losses. Finally, there were one or two aspects of the magic system that took me a long time to figure out. Some of this may have been due to haste on my part, but I think they were also a little underdescribed.

Enough whinging. An area where Bronze really shines (uh, no pun intended) is in its technical prowess. Its blurb text promises “a number of features to make navigating a large space more pleasant,” and those features are lovely. GO TO <location> navigates the best path from the player’s present location to the target room, a godsend for the many, many occasions when one has to trudge from one end of the castle to the other. Similarly, FIND <object> takes the PC directly to the target object’s location via the same pathfinding method. Bronze also implements LOOK <direction> to let the PC investigate adjacent rooms without traveling to them. Other great features include an adaptive hint system accessed via the THINK ABOUT verb, and a status bar that shows not only what exits are available but also color-codes those directions according to whether they have been explored or not. Finally, I must mention the very newbie-friendly, context-sensitive “novice mode” that gently injects instructions for how to deal with the IF interface throughout the game. In fact, Bronze is a game I’d recommend for newcomers to the form, since its story is a familiar one, its help system is extensive, and its writing is rich and enjoyable.

A few more words about that writing. Short’s style is a familiar one by now: elliptical but densely packed, full of arresting images and subtle wit. At times, devoting so few words of description to so large a map can make the game feel a bit sparse, but more often it achieves a lovely mystique, showing us just enough to intrigue and enchant. Many sentences are striking in both their economy and power, such as this description of a door:

The work of the hinges and handle, the color of the wood, the point of the arch: all malevolent.

In addition, the imagery of the castle’s fixtures is pure Short, such as the giant hourglass whose sands never stop pouring, or the cherry-wood floor in which is carved an expansive map of the Beast’s kingdom. Another authorial trademark that will be familiar to fans of Savoir-Faire is the game’s detailed working-out of a magic system and its implications not only for puzzles but for character and story as well. Bronze is no masterpiece, but it is a well-crafted, fun, and satisfying game. I recommend it not only to people wishing to learn Inform 7 but to all fans of quality puzzle-laden text adventures.