Tag: surreal

an apple from nowhere by Brendan Barnwell as Steven Carbone [Comp01]

IFDB page: an apple from nowhere
Final placement: 37th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

Last year’s comp gave us Stupid Kittens, which I called dadaist IF. an apple from nowhere (caps intentionally omitted, as they are in the game) is perhaps a cousin to that game. It’s avant-garde, certainly, but where Stupid Kittens‘ stream of non sequiturs was snide and aggressive, this game’s barrage of scenes feels more distinctly dreamlike, less a pointed attack than just the random firing of synapses, aggregating elements from life to stretch them and collide them.

The game skirts some taboo areas, drug use and pedophilia among them, but it seems to do so more out of an attempt to directly channel the subconscious than out of an explicit desire to shock. Perhaps I’m giving it too much credit — there is an awful lot of in-your-face subject matter here — but the dreamlike atmosphere felt genuine, if overly charged. Perhaps it’s the dream world of a somewhat mentally ill person.

The question it brings up for me is this: what happens to IF when logic is removed? There are plenty of bad games that lack logic unintentionally, and some of these can be as surreal as anything in apple, but they are unsatisfactory, because we can sense that their incongruencies are a bug rather than a feature. When the illogic is intentional, the IF prompt carries a different sort of subtext. Normally, the presence of interactivity tells us that the game wants to shape itself around our commands, and challenges us to enter into a dance with the text whereby we both lead and are led. When a game makes it clear that its responses to our commands may only be tangentially related to what we type, and may not be related at all, it has taken the lead in that dance and turned it into more of an amusement park ride. Now, amusement park rides can be a wonderful thing, and I’d even suggest that there is some room for exploring the ways in which participation can enhance surreality — Shade is an excellent example of this sort of thing done right.

apple, however, has a different agenda than Shade. At the core of Shade, there was still a story being told; all its unreal occurrences were very clearly included with a purpose in mind. In this game, such a purpose is harder to discern. It’s awfully brief, for one thing, so we don’t get much of a chance to make the connections that might lead to a story. For another, it jumps, Fusillade-style, through a variety of characters, settings, and even writing formats (a few scenes are written as a sort of interactive screenplay.) It was well-written enough, and certainly well implemented. There was very little interactivity, but that’s hardly the point in a piece like this.

Ultimately, I think it was apple‘s lack of cohesion that failed me. When I reached the end of this game, I blinked, and then I shrugged. Some people can look at a Pollock and see emotion made visible. Other people just see chaos. This game may be similar, and while I enjoy surreality and even randomness, I don’t think there’s much here that will be sticking with me.

Rating: 7.1

SURREAL by Matthew Lowe [Comp01]

IFDB page: SURREAL
Final placement: 45th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

The author’s notes for SURREAL contain the following statements: “I am currently fourteen years old and I enjoy playing text adventures.”; “SURREAL is the first text adventure I have ever written so I hope that it’s alright.”; “I hope you like it.” So now I’m in a bit of a pickle. I didn’t like the game, because it had lots and lots of problems. But I hardly want to crush a first-time author, especially somebody so young who enjoys text adventures not as nostalgia, but on their own merits.

So this seems like a good time to reiterate my general reviewing philosophy: basically, I’m here to help. I never want my reviews to come across as nasty jabs, and if they do, it’s because of my own deficiencies as a writer and critic. Instead, I hope that these reviews offer worthwhile feedback to authors, and that they communicate some of my ideas and knowledge about IF. The point is not to smack somebody down for writing a bad game, but rather to report on my experience with that game so that the author’s next game can be better. Now, that being said: SURREAL was not a strong game.

Let’s talk first about the writing. It’s pretty apparent that the game’s landscapes are inspired by the Myst series, and that’s not always such a bad thing. There are moments throughout where a vivid picture arises from a paragraph, or even a sentence. However, grammar is a serious problem through the entire game. Poor grammar is a writer’s bane, because as a rule, it impedes the communicative arts; the prose in this game is no exception to that rule. Take these sentences, for instance:

You are standing in the fresh outdoor air again, a spray of salty water hits you in the face. The weather has taken a turn for the worse as dark clouds roll across the sky like and army of black horses marching to war.

The first sentence is a run-on, meaning that it’s really two sentences held loosely together by a comma. What this does to me as a reader is basically to pull the rug out from under me. I read the first part of the sentence, then hit the comma, which signals to me that I’m about to read something related to the first clause, probably either a dependent clause or an appositive. Instead, I get hit with another independent clause, and consequently I have to stop and try to figure out what the connection is. A moment later, I realize that there is no connection, because it’s just a run-on. But by then it’s too late — I’ve already been thrown out of the prose. All this happens very quickly, but the result is devastating to the story’s power, because it makes me remember that I’m reading words on a screen rather than inhabiting a surreal world.

The second sentence has a more obvious problem: instead of “like an army of black horses”, it says “like and army of black horses.” Typos like this are similar to heavy static on a TV screen. If we’re looking closely, we can see what’s supposed to be there, but after a while, it hardly seems worth the effort. Words are the game’s only conduit to our minds, and if the words don’t make sense, the game doesn’t either. There are also several NFIEs, but I have taken a deep, cleansing breath and promised not to rant about those.

Implementation is also a serious issue. The game is apparently programmed in GAGS, a precursor to AGT. Now, why in 2001 someone would want to use such a primitive development tool is a complete mystery to me. Even if one is too intimidated to broach something like Inform, TADS, or Hugo, there are plenty of newbie-friendly languages that are far more robust than GAGS. That choice of tool alone limits the game’s audience severely, since it’s only playable via MS-DOS, and even among DOS users, there are plenty of people who are unwilling to put up with a rudimentary parser and absent features from a modern text adventure.

On top of that, some of the most important items in the game are unimplemented, even with a “That’s just scenery” sort of description. No matter how much one loves text adventures, parser-wrestling is just not fun, and tools like GAGS make for lots of parser-wrestling. There is promise in a game like SURREAL, but it’s a promise largely unfulfilled. My advice to the author is to learn a high-level IF language (it’s not that hard, really!), review basic grammar, employ proofreaders and beta testers… and write again!

Rating: 2.5

The Ritual Of Purification by Jarek Sobolewski as Sable [Comp98]

IFDB page: Ritual Of Purification
Final placement: 12th place (of 27) in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition

The feeling I got while playing Ritual reminded me of nothing so much as those old Dr. Strange comics from the 60’s, back when the master of mysticism was drawn by Steve Ditko, himself a master of the bizarre. The game is full of strange, hallucinatory images: a road that melts into nothing, an arch with marble carvings on one side and black decay on the other side, exploding and melting universes. The whole thing made me feel like I was immersed in a Ditko landscape, and the fact that the main character is a spellcaster on an astral voyage didn’t hurt either. Of course, some of the scenes in Ritual could never have taken place in a 60’s comic — at least, not one that adhered to the Comics Code Authority. There’s nothing really outrageous, but there are scenes of sexuality, drug use, and gore that you’d never see Dr. Strange experiencing. I’m not suggesting that the game is some sort of Dr. Strange rip-off, or that Ditko was an inspiration for Ritual — that’s just what it reminded me of. However, one source of inspiration for the game was clearly some of the more obscure poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. At the completion of almost every puzzle, the game throws a box quote from Poe, usually one which has some relation to the obstacle just overcome. These quotes are well-chosen, digging deep into the Poe archives and highlighting how much he inherited from William Blake, as well as how much he prefigured H.P. Lovecraft. At its best, most deranged or sublime moments, the game evokes the weird, dark mysticism shared by all these creators. On the whole, the effect is very trippy, and a fair amount of fun.

Unfortunately, there are some false notes as well. From time to time a character will say or do something fairly anachronistic, which tends to break the spell pretty thoroughly. In fact, at one point you can get a character to whip out a bong and start taking hits from it, which brings the whole elevated plane of symbolism and wonder dive-bombing back to earth. The effect is not so much of Alice in Wonderland‘s “hookah-smoking caterpillar”, but more of Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It just doesn’t fit. There are also a few times when the game seems to slip into clichés or “AD&Disms” — one beast is described as “biting easily through a set of plate mail”, and some of the spells feel suspiciously close to ones I remember from 7th grade basement role-playing sessions. In addition, the game has a number of grammar and spelling errors, usually minor problems like missing punctuation or vowel mistakes, but again they break the spell. Finally, and worst of all, there’s a bug in the game which causes it to not respond at all if a certain action is taken sooner than the game expects it. There’s nothing that ruins immersion quite so much as when a game just doesn’t respond to a command in any way. Well, maybe not nothing — crashing the interpreter would probably ruin immersion more, but because of the lack of response problem I ended up turning to the hints, only to find that I had in fact given the right command to solve the puzzle — I just gave it a little too soon.

The game suffers a bit from the “unconnected symbols” syndrome — sometimes it feels like all of these dreamlike images are just images, with no meaning or substance attached to them. However, the game manages to pull them together somewhat through its title, intro, and ending — the bizarre symbols with which the game is littered are all loosely connected through a theme of purification, of facing inner demons and the pain & joy of life in order to become a better person. It didn’t entirely work for me — some of the symbolism seemed arbitrary or clichéd to my mind — but I think it was a good beginning. I would really like to play a game with this kind of tone which had freed itself from shopworn images and RPG leftovers. Something with imagery like the more arresting parts of Ritual, but which really cohered to make a powerful statement on some aspect of the human condition, could really take advantage of IF’s immersive capability to create a remarkable work of art. Ritual isn’t it, but I hope it becomes the jumping-off point for someone (the author perhaps?) to create something like it but better: no writing errors, no clichés, no anachronisms, no bugs — just the Ditko universes exploding and melting all around us, with meaning.

Rating: 6.9

Little Blue Men by Michael S. Gentry [Comp98]

IFDB page: Little Blue Men
Final placement: 7th place (of 27) in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition

WARNING: Because Little Blue Men uses obscenities in its text, that language will also appear in this review.

Well, the first thing I have to say is that starting Little Blue Men right after finishing Human Resources Stories was quite mind-bending. The game starts with a character who is sitting at his desk thinking of his job as “another day in the trenches,” looking at his corner as his “own little slice of the shit pie those sons of bitches call an office.” I had this sudden vision of IF authors as angry loners, driven by their misanthropy and lack of social skills into highly solitary hobbies like writing and programming, friendless misfits who hate their jobs, hate their lives, and generally hate people, and who write supposedly entertaining games that are really about how much the world sucks. Luckily, the vision passed as the game underwent a curious transformation. First of all, the game’s disclaimer assured me that “at its most fundamental level, this game is about learning to love yourself.” OK, maybe we’re not loving anybody else yet, but loving yourself is at least a little positive. Next, I entered a few commands, the first ones that came to mind, really, and… won the game. Or did I? My final message said “*** You have learned to love yourself ***”, which is what I was told the game was about. So I won, right? In 10 moves? I wondered how in the heck a game whose .z5 file was 171K could end up being so short. I wondered, in the game’s words, “What the hell…?!”

It turns out that although LBM may be about learning to love yourself, if you do the things that help you reach that goal too quickly you end up missing the entire story. That story consists of scheming ways to kill or otherwise waylay your co-workers, destroy the things that aggravate you, discover the secrets hidden behind the bland office walls, and figure out just who or what your boss, “that bastard Biedermeyer”, really is. In short, it consists of getting an unpleasant character to do unsavory things, in service of a plot that grows more and more metaphorical and surreal as you progress through it. When I finally got to the end, I wasn’t sure that I was any more satisfied with the “real” ending than the one I got to in 10 moves. In his postscript, the author tells us that he wants the story’s structure to help us question to help us analyze some of our assumptions about IF. For one thing, we should think about what really is the most “optimal” ending of the game, and whether it’s worth it to actually play through a game if it’s possible to reach a positive ending at the beginning, and/or if the motivations of the character are twisted and repugnant? Now, these are not new ideas. Andrew Plotkin‘s A Change In The Weather offers a similar situation at its outset — if you rejoin the picnic, you end up having fun after all, but you also miss the story. To go back earlier, Michael Berlyn used a related technique in Infidel by making the main character a shallow, exploitive greedhead who probably deserves a desert demise, then asking you to solve puzzles and find treasure on his behalf. Little Blue Men, though, makes these propositions starker than ever before by making its main character thoroughly repulsive and an optimal ending immediately reachable.

Now, my answer to this question in its abstract form is that responses will vary depending on the player. Some people probably have no interest in playing a repulsive character, and so will just delete the game. Others might be driven by curiosity to complete the game even though they find the experience unpleasant. Still others will view it as a chance to get a glimpse into abnormal psychology, or to have some fun playing a villainous character. In this way, playing such a game is akin to watching a movie like Natural Born Killers, or reading a book like In Cold Blood — it may be very well-done, but it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, and that’s fine. Consequently, I guess I don’t view the question as all that interesting, maybe because any assumption I might have had about IF characters having to be good was eliminated as soon as I finished Infidel (in 1986). But even though I feel this way, LBM still didn’t work for me, not because of its main character but because of its choices of setting, imagery, and metaphor. The game invokes the movie Jacob’s Ladder a couple of times, which is a movie I loved. That film was by turns profound, chilling, and inspiring. LBM only achieves glimpses of these things, and I think the reason is because I found its imagery muddled and incoherent. The game is obviously taking place on some metaphorical level, but it was never at all clear to me what the metaphors were supposed to be representing, and as they stack up it only becomes more confusing. In addition, there was basically no connection with reality, which left the game’s symbols floating unanchored. Some flashback scenes, some glimpses of reality, some type of explanation for the heaven/hell dichotomy the game presents would have gone a long way toward connecting its symbolism with something more meaningful than just other symbols. There’s a lot to like about this game. It is written well, and although it doesn’t achieve an overall arc, it does contain moments which can be quite moving or frightening. Technically I could find very little for which to fault it, both in its writing and its coding. Its puzzles may have had some unpleasant content, but they were clever and engaging, and generally quite well integrated with the storyline. But for me, it did not succeed as a work of art. Nonetheless, I respect it for being an ambitious but flawed experiment — I’ll take that over competent repetition any day.

Rating: 6.3

CC by Mikko Vuorinen [Comp98]

IFDB page: CC
Final placement: 18th place (of 27) in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition

CC is a dreamlike piece of work that starts out in a void and moves into a desert. Its landscape remains spare, and the meaning is never clarified at any point in the game. Things never make all that much sense, and even after the ending “revelation” I never felt like I had any more understanding of the game than I started out with. The author is aware of this, and says in the text included with the game “You probably won’t understand what the game is about, but that’s all right… I just wanted to write something that doesn’t make much sense.” Mission accomplished. Actually, that probably sounds like I hated the game, which I didn’t at all. CC is rather evocative, and although I couldn’t begin to offer an interpretation of what it means, it wasn’t an unpleasant experience to wander through the game’s strange desert artifacts. It also included an equally mysterious NPC who, when asked about almost anything in the game, would make some vague, mysterious answer along the lines of “You must discover the answer to that mystery on your own.” Not very helpful, but that fits in with the tone of the game.

I wasn’t as wild about the puzzles. The text file and the walkthrough both make the point that the game is so easy nobody should need a hint, but I didn’t find that to be the case. True, in some of the puzzles the most obvious action was the one that was required. However, that wasn’t true every time. There was a real guess-the-verb puzzle towards the middle of the game, where several obvious answers didn’t work, and the correct answer worked in such a way as to make it very unclear why the others didn’t. I don’t think I would have gotten anywhere on this puzzle without the walkthrough. There was another puzzle on which I used the walkthrough, but in retrospect, it’s probably one I could have figured out for myself. Unfortunately, I went to the walkthrough much more quickly than I would have had I not had the earlier guess-the-verb experience. I think there’s a lesson for game designers in this: if some of your puzzles are poor, their effect is not limited to themselves. Instead, they make the player less willing to expend effort to unravel later puzzles, even if those puzzles are good ones. With every poor puzzle, you reduce the player’s faith that later puzzles won’t be equally poor. In a short game, this can mean that even one guess-the-verb puzzle is enough to send players to the walkthrough for the rest of the game, if they even bother to finish it at all.

The prose wasn’t bad, although for me it did have a few moments of dissonance that I chalk up to cultural differences. For example, there are some footprints in the desert, but the game calls them “footsteps.” I’ve always thought of footsteps as something you hear, so even though it wasn’t difficult to figure out from the context what the game meant, it jarred a little. However, I found no outright errors in the writing, and the coding was equally error-free. As in so many of the games in this year’s competition, this game was quite short, so the error-free conditions are only sustained for a very short time, but that’s alright. I’d much rather play an error-free short game than a problem-ridden long one. CC is slight, and rather confusing, but it has its good points too. If these trends continue, Mikko Vuorinen’s next competition game might be one to remember.

Rating: 7.1

Phlegm by Jason Dyer as Adjacent Drooler [Comp96]

IFDB page: Phlegm
Final placement: 17th place (of 26) in the 1996 Interactive Fiction Competition

A thoroughly whacked-out romp through realms of surrealism only barely touched on by Nord and Bert, Phlegm is pretty low on logic, but quite high on goofy gags. Perhaps its funniest moment comes in its opening screen, where it bills itself as “An Interactive Interactive”; it’s the kind of joke that’s only funny the first time, but since it is the first time, it worked for me. Also, in spite of the author’s assurance that it is impossible to make a mistake that renders the game unwinnable, I managed to do it, and I wasn’t even trying! (For the record, it’s because I put the toy elephant in the cart and then torched it with the flame-thrower.) Phlegm wasn’t really hilarious, but it provided a number of smiles, and even its puzzles were logical in an illogical kind of way. In many ways, the game is like its opening joke — lots of fun at the moment, but not anything you’d ever want to repeat.

Prose: Lots of cleverly funny little touches, from Leo the lemming whispering “Rosebud…” to the “Lil’ Terrorist brand Flame-thrower.” The prose was generally lots of fun to read, even if at times the silliness became a wee bit more irritating than amusing.

Difficulty: Well, I found myself looking at the hints quite a lot, but I’m not sure whether that’s because the puzzles were simply difficult, or difficult to take seriously. For some reason, I found myself unwilling to agonize about how to handle the guitar-playing lunatic, and wanted to look at the hints in order to see more of the jokes, since a game like Phlegm suffers quite drastically from a reduction in pace. So I suppose you could say it was a difficult game, but then again I’m glad I approached it the way I did — a plotless work like this one begs to be finished rather than battered.

Technical (coding): The coding was on the whole quite strong. I only found one weak spot, which was the fact that I discovered that I could carry the powder as long as I was holding the grail — it didn’t need to actually be inside the grail. Somehow I don’t think this is what the author intended.

Technical (writing): The writing was pleasantly error-free, which made the humor much more accessible and easy to digest.

Plot: Well, I couldn’t really say there was much of a plot, but on the plus side I don’t think much of an attempt was made at one either. So the game was plotless (aside from the very most basic “get-the-treasure” motivation), but it didn’t suffer all that much from being so.

Puzzles: Some of the puzzles were quite funny, and extremely reminiscent of Nord and Bert, especially those involving the needle. Then again, some others (the flame-thrower, for example), failed to be a lot of fun in their irrationality. In general, though, I’d call the puzzles successful in what I deduce to be their aim — parodying typical IF problem (the references to Balances were especially funny) and providing nutty goals in an off-kilter universe.

OVERALL — 8.5