the edifice, >INVENTORY

The Moonlit Tower by Yoon Ha Lee [Comp02]

IFDB page: The Moonlit Tower
Final placement: 4th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

For the first several years that I judged the comp games and wrote these reviews, a nifty thing kept happening on my last game — it was always one of the best of the comp. In fact, one year the last game I judged was The Edifice, which went on to win all the marbles. The trend had trailed off over the last couple of years, but I’m very happy to report that it has returned. The Moonlit Tower is a rich and gorgeous piece of work, and a very strong debut from an excellent new author. Easily the most striking thing about this game is its writing, burnished and evocative prose that sets a very elevated tone. Here, just a haphazardly chosen example:

>play ocarina The ocarina's notes are high and sweet.

In this place, they remind you of that first court dance, when you and you brother first saw the justiciar, a vision of red and black, a flash of gold. Someone played an ocarina that time, too. Flutes, zithers and lutes join in the cheerful clamor of instruments being tuned, though none of them are to be seen. Some of them play swift phrases while others sustain long, low tones.

Of course, the risk of elevated writing is that it can easily slide into self-parody; in IF this risk is even sharper, because at least some of the prose must perform fairly mundane interface and state management tasks. The Moonlit Tower occasionally veers close to this territory, especially with its “You can’t go that way” replacement messages, which, while charming at first, can quickly begin to seem overblown. In the end, though, it worked for me, and the words are crafted with enough skill that I never found myself snickering at the tone.

If anything, the game feels almost too rich, like trying to eat an entire cheesecake at one sitting. It belongs to the genre of games whose backstories unfold themselves as you explore their landscape, so to say too much about the plot would be spoilery. Even if I wanted to, though, I would be hard put to explain exactly what this game is about. Part of my problem may be that I’ve only played the game once — I get the distinct impression that this piece was designed to be experienced and re-experienced, with different paths revealing further facets of the character, and the history behind his situation. Lacking the benefit of these further layers, I sometimes found myself just guessing at what was going on, performing actions not because they made perfect sense to me, but because they were implemented and seemed like a good idea at the time.

The highly figurative language, while it continued to draw me in throughout the story, also frequently served to veil some of its more practical levels, prompting me to piece together disparate phrases and concepts in order to maintain my shaky grip on narrative. I’ve criticized other games in this very comp for that kind of behavior, but I found that in The Moonlit Tower, I didn’t feel unsatisfied when I reached the game’s end. Enough information came through, even in my one traversal, that I didn’t feel totally at sea. As a matter of fact, the game strummed a deep emotional chord for me when it drew together two of its metaphorical strands, confirming a guess I had made earlier about how those strands interrelated.

So much for the writing and the story. The coding was fairly impressive, especially for a first-time effort. A number of non-standard verbs were implemented, and the scenario is frequently described to an impressive level of depth. Some rookie mistakes are still evident — GET ALL lists all the objects in every room (there’s a chance this may have been intentional, but if so it was a tactical error, in my opinion), and a stray message still told me I had scored 0 out of 0 after I won the game.

For the most part, though, the programming functions smoothly in sync with the writing to deliver a memorable experience. Exploring the splendid mysteries of The Moonlit Tower was a wonderful way to end my journey through Comp02, and I look forward with considerable anticipation to the author’s future works of IF.

Rating: 9.3

The Gostak by Carl Muckenhoupt [Comp01]

IFDB page: The Gostak
Final placement: 21st place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

In the proud tradition of Bad Machine, this game broke my brain. If you’ve played it, you’ll know why. If not, maybe this will give you an idea:

Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds. Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes discren them. But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you.

That’s the game’s introductory text, and it pretty much goes on like that the whole time. At first I thought it would be kind of a fun, Lewis Carroll-ish diversion, full of nonsense words but still easily understandable. I was wrong — the game is much more insidious than that. The linguistic displacement is deep, and it infects the game on every level, up to and including its help text and hints. In fact, I paid closer attention to this game’s help text than I probably have to any other piece of IF’s instructions, ever, since it used so many unfamiliar words, and since these words were absolutely necessary as levers to begin cracking the game’s code.

Not that I ever completely succeeded in figuring out every aspect of the game’s environment. I ended up with three pages of words, each of which held a column of nouns and a column of verbs. I didn’t even attempt the adjectives. At the end of two hours, I was pretty impressed by the amount I’d been able to grok of the game’s language, and in fact I had wrenched my head far enough into this new linguistic space that I’m having to be careful to make sure I’m writing English as I type out this review, so as to avoid louking “rask” instead of “take”. Oh, sorry. [Don’t worry, this is no more a spoiler than the little starter hints telling you that Z=E in today’s Cryptoquip.]

Putting my head into the game’s space was critical to getting anywhere at all in it — I found that to play The Gostak successfully, some significant immersion is required. The game upends IF convention so thoroughly that all the directions have different names (and abbreviations), as does almost every verb. Consequently, once I had figured out many of the fundamentals, I was able to navigate through the game with relative ease, but only during that game session. After I saved my game, ate dinner, and returned to it, my old IF habits were obstructing me again, resulting in the game rejecting or disastrously misunderstanding much of my input. Since I only had about 15 minutes left on my two hours at that point, I was unable to fully recapture all those tenuous understandings I was holding in my head during the first session, and consequently couldn’t quite finish.

I get the feeling that this game wanted to be a comp-length exercise in the kind of mental mechanisms that made The Edifice‘s celebrated language puzzle so much fun. To some degree, it succeeds. I was able to enter this game’s foreign world much more easily than that of, say, Schroedinger’s Cat, and I found the process much more enjoyable. I was shocked at how quickly and easily I found myself typing commands like “doatch at droke about calbice”.

However, the whole experience was completely cerebral, with little of the emotional catharsis I associate with successful storytelling. I felt this effect when I played Dan Schmidt’s For A Change, but it’s ten times stronger in this game, where words aren’t simply rearranged but actually replaced wholesale. Consequently, while playing The Gostak was a strange and memorable experience, one which will surely elevate the game to the rarefied level of For A Change, Bad Machine, and Lighan ses Lion, I found it a somewhat strained sort of fun. Great for a puzzle-solving mood, and certainly worth trying if you’re a cryptography buff, but not terribly involving as a story. If it sounds like your cup of tea, make sure you set aside a few hours — it’s not something you want to leave and come back to.

Rating: 8.1

A Moment of Hope by Simmon Keith [Comp99]

IFDB page: A Moment Of Hope
Final placement: 18th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Remember how one-room puzzlefests were the big trend of the 1998 competition? Well, I think I’m getting a handle on what it is for ’99: non-interactive fiction. It’s the legacy of Photopia, I suppose. But how little we knew, when we played that one short, brilliant Red Planet section of Photopia where every chosen direction advances the plot, that in a year we’d be playing entire games that operate like that. So far I’ve seen Halothane, which enforces its plot fairly rigidly; Remembrance, which limits the player’s options severely by restricting them to a very short menu; and Life on Beal Street, which is no more interactive than a book. Perhaps the worst offender yet, though, is A Moment of Hope. At least Beal and Remembrance didn’t pretend to be anything but linear roads with no detours available. At least Halothane allowed some freedom of action. Because A Moment of Hope is a TADS game with the appearance of an unrestricted parser, it gives a very believable facade of interactivity, when in fact it’s anything but. Here’s a sample from towards the end of the game:

>SLEEP You flip your pillow upside down, and hope you can go to sleep. >GET UP Turning to your other side, you give it another try. >GO GET A SANDWICH You kick at the tangled blanket, convinced it's what is preventing your slumber. >IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT I TYPE, DOES IT? In a valiant attempt to block out the sun, you vainly cover your head with your pillow and try to relax. ...It doesn't work. >BITE ME You finally decide to give in. It's time to get up.

This is the most drastically non-interactive section of the game, but every section of it crowds that side of the continuum. There is only one exit from each location — even if others are described, the game forbids travel in all but one direction. When the game wants you to, for example, read an email, any other command is met with something along the lines of “Not right now, you’re busy.” Adding to the aggravation, sometimes commands have to be repeated multiple times in order to get the parser to accept them. At one point you have to repeat a command eight times in order for it to actually work.

Let’s take a moment to think about this. It seems clear that what the game wants to do is to tell me a specific story. It seems equally clear that the game isn’t much interested in what I want to do. Why, then, was this written as interactive fiction and entered into the IF competition? To really delve into the reasons would be an essay in itself, but one that comes to mind is, as I said earlier, Photopia. After all, the big winner from last year was a game that heavily emphasized the “fiction” side of the IF equation, so that must be the way to win competitions, right? Well, not necessarily. Even setting aside the fact that the three previous competitions were won by games with prominent and interesting puzzles (Edifice, Meteor, Weather/Zebulon), there’s also the fact that Photopia restricted interactivity strategically rather than just doing it indiscriminately. To take one small example, think about the Red Planet section of Photopia compared to the section of A Moment of Hope I’ve quoted above. [PHOTOPIA SPOILERS AHEAD] The Red Planet section of Photopia is part of a story being told to a small child. Even though the player may not know it at the time, the responses of the parser are really Alley’s responses, and the player’s input really Wendy’s participation in the story. This fact constitutes a sensible, cogent reason why every direction taken advances that section’s plot: Alley is telling a story to a small child, and using a clever technique to move the story along so that Wendy won’t find herself pointlessly wandering around the landscape. No such fictional level is present in A Moment of Hope. The game’s responses and player’s input are no more or less than they seem, and as such, when the game uses Alley’s trick on the player it seems rather condescending. After all, we’re not small children with five-minute attention spans. A range of choices and a landscape to traverse won’t lose us.

The game doesn’t take that risk, though, perhaps because its main character is so unsympathetic that it can’t afford to allow any player input that might make him less pathetic. The basic plot here is that an incredibly insecure guy has gotten an email from a matchmaking website. The site has matched him up with somebody he really likes, but how serious is she about him? The game is unrelenting with the constant reminders of just how strung out this guy is. Especially in the first section, almost every single turn yields multiple messages about the PC’s deep, deep depression. No wonder, then, that the game wants to restrict player action. What if a player came along who wanted to make the choice to just forget about this girl and call a friend instead? What if a player wanted to just turn off the computer (the computer in the game, I mean) and read a good book? Hell, what if a player wanted to at least make the damn bed? Nope, wouldn’t fit the story. Wouldn’t fit the character. So it’s not allowed. But a player can’t help wondering: what am I doing in this short story? It’s written well, with no mechanical errors (or coding errors), but if A Moment of Hope were straight fiction, I wouldn’t much want to read it. But I did read this game. Come to think of it, because it was a competition entry, the whole group of judges was a bit of a captive audience, wasn’t it? Hmmm, maybe the choice to write the story as IF rather than straight fiction isn’t so mysterious after all…

Rating: 3.8

The Plant by Michael J. Roberts [Comp98]

IFDB page: The Plant
Final placement: 3rd place (of 27) in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition

You know, by the time I get finished writing these reviews, I’m pretty tired. It takes a lot of energy to put out twenty or thirty thousand words about competition entries, and even though my reviews are shorter than last year’s, and there are fewer games involved, they were also written in a much more compressed judging period, so my exhaustion level is about the same. However, every year I’ve been reviewing the competition games I’ve gotten a little reward in the final game of the batch. In 1996, I was playing the games in order of filename, so the last game I played was Tapestry, an excellent piece of work by Dan Ravipinto which ended up taking second in the competition as a whole. Last year I let Lucian Smith’s Comp97 order my choices randomly, and ironically the last game on the list ended up being Smith’s own The Edifice. And true to form, that was another excellent game to finish on, and it ended up winning all the marbles in the 1997 comp. So it was with both trepidation and eagerness that I broached the final game of this year’s batch, The Plant. When I saw it was by Michael J. Roberts, the legendary implementor of both TADS and HTML-TADS, my anticipation was increased even further. I’ve never played one of Roberts’ games, having been an Inform initiate when I started programming, and having entered the IF scene just shortly before Roberts’ departure. And after this buildup, I’m pleased to say that The Plant completely lives up to my mini-tradition of grand finales. It was a great game to end the competition with — the reward I was hoping for, so that this review wouldn’t be too hard to write.

Probably the thing I liked the most about The Plant was its puzzles. I know there were several other games this year that were focused on puzzles, and some of the puzzles in those games were excellent. However, I liked The Plant‘s puzzles better precisely because the game wasn’t focused on puzzles. Instead, its puzzles were very well integrated into its story, so solving the puzzles really propelled the narrative. It’s much more interesting to solve a puzzle when it opens the door to the next piece of the story, rather than being just one of a roomful of puzzles that you have to solve to escape that room. The Plant was probably the only game in this year’s competition to give me a feeling similar to what I have when I play Infocom games. I love that feeling of uncovering an exciting story by cleverly putting pieces together, using items in unexpected ways, or doing the right thing at just the right time. And the game’s story is definitely an exciting one. It begins as you are stranded on an abandoned side-road with your boss, marooned by his unreliable car. It’s up to you to find a phone or a service station and get moving again, but when you go looking you may find more than you bargained for. I won’t give too much away about the secrets that are eventually revealed, but the game definitely packs plenty of surprises. The pacing is excellent — I only felt completely stuck once. I turned to the walkthrough to solve the problem, just because I wanted to finish as much of the game as I could in the two-hour time limit, but if you’re playing The Plant for the first time, let me urge you not to check the walkthrough unless you’re completely stuck. All the puzzles are completely logical, none of them require reading the designer’s mind, and many of them are quite satisfying to solve, requiring several steps or clever combinations of objects, or both.

Now, the story itself does have some flaws. There are some parts that felt quite implausible to me, and from time to time the fact that your boss follows you around in your travels doing the same two or three things all the time starts to feel a little artificial. In addition, there are one or two minor spelling errors in the game. Outside of this, the plotting and writing are quite good. The Plant‘s prose often conveyed a very vivid sense of the visual. I drive by a plant like this about twice a month, and the game’s descriptions of it, how its completely industrial and utilitarian networks of pipes and lights can seem almost like an abstract fairyland when glimpsed from afar, are right on the mark. I could really visualize most of the places in the game, and the mental pictures the game’s text creates are quite dramatic and compelling. In addition, the game uses a few small touches here and there which utilize the power of HTML TADS. No pictures or sound, but a few well-placed hyperlinks in the help text and one or two spots with specially formatted text really make the game look sharp, and add to the very visual quality of the prose. If you sometimes start to feel a little impatient with all the growing that the medium of interactive fiction is doing, and long for a good old-fashioned Infocom-style thrill ride, check out The Plant. I think it may be just what you’re looking for.

Rating: 9.0

The Edifice by Lucian Smith [Comp97]

IFDB page: The Edifice
Final placement: 1st place (of 34) in the 1997 Interactive Fiction Competition

You’re an ape, spending your days hunting for Food and fleeing from Enemies. You have these little thumbs, too, that set you apart from the Others. Suddenly one day, a huge black Edifice appears before you, arousing your wonder and suspicion. I can almost hear “Also Sprach Zarathustra” in the background: Daaaaaaaa, Daaaaaaaaa, Daaaaaaaaaa….. Da-Dummmmmmm! However, from this highly derivative beginning, The Edifice ventures quickly into much more original territory. It seems that once you enter the monolith, you find yourself able to enter various stages of human development, from the discovery of fire to protecting your village against plundering marauders. The idea works very nicely, putting the player into puzzle-solving situations which blend very naturally into the game’s environment and using the edifice itself as a sort of frame around the smaller narratives as well as a hinting device.

One section of the game in particular I found really remarkable. On the second level of the edifice, you find yourself as a very early human, living in a family unit in the woods. Your son has a fever, and to cure him you must find the Feverleaf, which can be made into a healing tea. However, no Feverleaf seems to be available anywhere, until you stumble across a Stranger. Unsurprisingly, however, the Stranger does not speak your language, and so you are faced with a problem of communication. The game does an incredible job with simulating this situation. I was astonished at the level of realism which this character was able to achieve, and at the care that must clearly have gone into fashioning this interaction. I’ve rarely seen such a thorough and effective establishment of the illusion of interactivity. The Stranger did not of course respond to English words in understandable ways. However, you could point to objects, or speak words in the Stranger’s language, and gradually the two of you could arrive at an understanding. It was an amazing feeling to be experiencing this kind of exchange in IF… I really felt like I was learning the Stranger’s language. It will always remain one of the most memorable moments of this 1997 competition for me.

I spent a lot of time on this one encounter, but I spent more time on the first level of the edifice, where you learn how to fashion a spear, how to hunt, and how to cook your meat over a fire. All of the puzzles in this section were logical, and the implementation was characteristically thorough and rich. However, this level is also where I ran into the game’s one major flaw: its scoring system. Upon typing “score”, you are told something along the lines of “You have visited two levels of the Edifice and solved none of them. You are amazingly discontent.” However, sometimes “amazingly discontent” changes to “very content.” for reasons that aren’t at all clear. Moreover, I did everything that the etchings indicate on that level, but the game still insisted I had not solved it. I worked on this until I got so frustrated with it that I just went up to the next level. I’m not sure whether these irregularities in the scoring system were intentional or not, but I found that they were the only significant detractions from an otherwise excellent game.

Prose: The author did a superb job with the prose. Objects and rooms were described carefully and concisely, and in fact their descriptions often changed to reflect the character’s expanding knowledge. In the beginning, words are simple and their meanings often archetypal: Rock, Enemies, Others, etc. As the game progresses and the character continues to evolve, the diction becomes more complex and the meanings more specific. This is the type of effect that a graphical game could never achieve, since it arises from the nature of the prose itself. That the game can achieve this effect shows that it is very well written indeed.

Plot: I didn’t finish the game, so I’m not sure whether the mystery behind the edifice is ever revealed. From what I saw, the game’s plot was a clever device to put the player into various moments in the history of human development. Its central device is rather clearly lifted from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but other than that it’s an excellent frame story around fascinating vignettes.

Puzzles: I think the language puzzle was the best one I’ve seen in interactive fiction this year. Certainly it was the best in the competition — it advanced the narrative, developed the character, achieved a new kind of IF character interaction, and packed a powerful Sense of Wonder. The other puzzles I encountered were also very good, arising quite intuitively out of the game’s situation and objects. My only frustration was with the elements of the game which suggested I had more to solve but never seemed to indicate what those things were.

Technical (writing): The Edifice‘s prose was quite error-free.

Technical (coding): Aside from the problems with the scoring system, the coding was outstanding. Synonyms abounded, and almost all logical or intuitively available actions were accounted for.

OVERALL: A 9.2