Tag: time travel

Finding Martin by G.K. Wennstrom [misc]

[This review appeared in issue #45 of SPAG. The issue was published on July 17, 2006.]

In an era of bite-sized IF, Finding Martin is a 12-course meal. Actually, it’s more like one of those progressive dinners, where you go from one house to the next, a different course at each house, for a total of 12 courses in the evening. Except it’s more like going to one of those every night for two weeks.

Seriously, this game is HUGE. This is the kind of game where you might find an item with ten different modes, many of which can be used to adjust the item to one of its 720 different settings (and some of which do other things entirely), settings which are split into twelve different themed sections, many of which give hints, some of which give red herrings, and some of which perform game functions. I am not exaggerating. And that’s just one item out of dozens and dozens you’ll find in this game way way way before you get anywhere near finding Martin himself.

If you love yourself a big, juicy puzzlefest, Finding Martin is cause for celebration. It’s several times larger and more complex than anything Infocom ever attempted, and it’s generally quite well-implemented. I encountered a number of glitches in my journey through the game, but they were all minor — typos, missing synonyms, and underimplemented parsing mostly. There are a few logic errors here and there, but nothing game-crashing, and in fact very little that even caused me any trouble with a puzzle. Moreover, these problem areas are a very small percentage of the game itself, and this is a game that implements some highly complex behavior. A few errors here and there are quite forgivable in a game this ambitious in scope.

As for the puzzles themselves, the news is again mostly good. Most of the challenges are logical, and some are quite clever indeed. In particular, there’s a puzzle (or maybe it would be more accurate to call it a suite of puzzles) toward the end of the game that is astoundingly intricate and deeply satisfying, the kind of a puzzle that would make up the entirety of another game.

It’s a time-travel scenario that takes the groundwork laid by Sorcerer and expands it by an order of magnitude, asking you to consider the relations between a number of different time-slices as well as to coordinate the actions of multiple past selves with the actions of your current self in order to bypass certain barriers. However, well before you reach that puzzle you’ll have made your way through a large number of obstacles that should scratch any inveterate puzzler’s itch.

Not only that, the puzzles frequently build on each other, and most of the goals require several components to achieve. Finding Martin‘s world can feel astonishingly layered and convoluted. I frequently found that the discovery of a new item or command would add new dimensions to the pieces of the game I’d already uncovered, and that their interactions would open up new avenues for exploration.

Of course, the flip side to this is that such a discovery would often compel me to explore the game’s giant world yet again, trying the new key to see if it would unlock any heretofore unseen doors. At time, the gameworld feels like an obsessive-compulsive’s paradise, but at least most of the interactions seem logical once they’ve been found.

Unfortunately, not all the puzzles manage to meet the same high standards. There are a number of read-the-author’s-mind stumpers spread throughout the game. Some of these just require induction stretched absurdly far, but for several others I still have no idea how I was supposed to come up with the solution.

There’s another category, too: puzzles whose solution required some kind of cultural referent which I lacked, a la Zork II‘s baseball puzzle. Finding Martin‘s pedigree consists mostly of geek lore like Monty Python and Douglas Adams, and that stuff I’ve got covered, but a couple of puzzles require knowledge of Asian customs that I only learned from the walkthrough.

On the flip side of read-the-author’s-mind are “puzzles” whose solution is entirely arbitrary but so heavily clued that the game pretty much just tells you what it is. Imagine a dark room with a description along these lines: “It’s impossible to see anything in this room — this must be what a cinnamon roll feels like when it’s in the oven!” And lo and behold, you just happen to find a cinnamon roll later in the game, so when you bring it into the dark room and eat it, the cinnamon-oriented olfactory sensors in the walls detect it and turn on the lights, just as they’ve been programmed to do by the house’s exceedingly eccentric and patient owner. That example isn’t from the game, but there are several puzzles in there that are cut from the same cloth.

The substandard puzzles are a minority, and they certainly aren’t enough to ruin the game, but my advice is: don’t be afraid to bust out the walkthrough. Yes, sometimes you may find that a perfectly logical solution was staring you in the face, but other times you’ll be relieved to just take the rather farfetched solution and move on with your life. Happily, the author is kind enough to provide a walkthrough on her web page that is broken up into 5-point clusters so as not to give away too much at once.

However, if I may offer one more piece of advice: download the full walkthrough from that page and tuck it away somewhere on your hard drive. Otherwise, you may find yourself, as I did, stuck two-thirds of the way through the game and panicking because the author’s site has gone down. Luckily for me, the page came back up the next day and I found some cached bits on Yahoo in the meantime, but I could have saved a good deal of time and stress if I’d just had the full walkthrough to fall back on.

Finally, take heed of the author’s advice in the intro text: save your game a LOT. There were quite a number of times I found myself returning to an earlier savegame because I was trapped without a necessary item, or I wanted to undo something I’d done a bit improperly a few hundred moves earlier. Actually, that brings me to one of my chief gripes about Finding Martin: it sets a few arbitrary limits, ostensibly in the name of realism but functionally just to irritate the player. Chief among these is an inventory limit. Let’s face it: this is not a game that holds realism particularly dear. Many of its puzzles consist of caprice and whimsy, and its entire plot is metaphysical to say the least. However, for some reason it decided that the player should only be able to carry a limited number of objects, and it failed to provide any kind of bottomless sack-type object to circumvent this limit.

Not only that, there’s a puzzle component that steals items when they’re dropped on the ground. Even more confoundingly, commands like PUT ALL ON TABLE are met with the response, “One thing at a time, please.” And of course, there are many many journeys to pocket worlds whose obstacles require that the player has brought a particular item. Frequent were the times I cursed at this game for the way it forced me into numbingly dull inventory management tasks when I wanted to be having fun instead. Also, there are several instances of the game being pointlessly obtuse, along these lines:

>READ BIG BOOK
First you'd need to open it.

Come on. This is 2006 — we know by now that READ implies OPEN. Such obstructionist world-modeling benefits nobody.

I’m not sure if responses like this one and the response to PUT ALL are TADS default behavior. I do know that I sometimes wished this game had been written in Inform, so that I could get certain pieces of the Inform default functionality. Besides the lack of a sack_object, I was jonesing hard for an OBJECTS verb that would let me see all the items in the game I’d found up to that point. Similarly, a FULLSCORE command that told me all the puzzles I’d solved so far would have been most welcome, especially given how many times I had to restore back to an earlier saved game. Finally, having just played Bronze, I really missed conveniences like GO TO that allow me to traverse the game world without rattling off memorized directions to the parser.

Okay, I’ve been complaining for a while, which makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy the game. That’s not true — overall I had plenty of fun. It’s just a similar feeling to what I had when playing Once And Future, another enormous old-school puzzlefest. Like OAF, Finding Martin provides lots of opportunities to feel that satisfying click as logical components snap together, but forces a little too much tedium on the player after that click has happened.

It’s the figuring-out that’s the fun part of a puzzle, not the follow-through of putting twenty pieces in just the right place once you know where they’re supposed to go. Several of this game’s puzzles would have been much more fun if they’d provided some way of automating that follow-through once the player has demonstrated understanding of the basic concept.

Enough about the puzzles anyway. What about the story? Well, actually, the story is pretty much MIA for the first third or so of the game. We begin with a reasonably compelling premise: your brilliant but peculiar friend Martin has disappeared, and his family has asked you to explore his house in hopes of finding him. Why you and not, say, the police? Well, it seems that you may just be close enough to Martin’s highly bizarre mindset to understand how to find him when the police wouldn’t even be able to get in the door. Strong echoes of Hollywood Hijinx abound as you poke through rooms laden with fascinating devices and hidden exits, but there’s not much more story to be had for a while.

Finally, the game begins doling out plot in awkward lumps, but about two-thirds of the way through, these lumps smooth out and the story begins to tie together as more and more interconnections between Martin’s family and friends, as well as his past, present, and future, reveal themselves. By the time I was rolling toward the endgame, I had felt genuinely moved several times. In fact, a couple of times Finding Martin hits a real IF sweet spot, where the solution to a puzzle not only advances the story but carries strong emotional content about the PC’s role in the other characters’ lives. I recall one moment in particular that gave me goosebumps, as I figured out how something I had done in a past time-travel scenario had affected the future, and how someone in that past had sent a message forward in time to me.

Remember how I mentioned the game’s geeky pedigree? There are a number of references woven throughout the story that are pulled straight from the geek handbook: Star Trek meets Hitchhiker’s meets Tolkien. Some of these made me smile, and some made me squirm. At times I felt like saying, “Yes, yes, I get it. You like Monty Python.” Also, the writing around these references can sometimes feel a bit flat and ingratiating, as when the PC encounters a used paperback:

>x novel
It's a book by Douglas Adams, entitled "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish". Apparently this is the fourth book in the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" trilogy. It occurs to you that publishing the fourth book of a trilogy must be the toungue-in-cheek behavior of someone with a fantastic imagination and an audacious taste for the bizarre.

Ho ho ho. Nothing like belaboring that “fourth book in the trilogy” joke. I get it — you like Douglas Adams. Also, “tongue”.

Aside from that, though, the writing worked well. Most of the time it was transparent, but there were some clever twists and turns throughout, as well as a few good jokes. Having finished this game at last, and finally found Martin, I have to express my admiration. It must have been an unbelievable amount of work to put together a game of this size and scope, and for the most part it’s done really well. If you’re hungry for puzzles, Finding Martin should keep you fed for several weeks. Even if you’re not a puzzler, grab a walkthrough and explore this game — there are pleasures here for many tastes.

All Things Devours by Toby Ord as “half sick of shadows” [Comp04]

IFDB page: All Things Devours
Final placement: 3rd place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

I must admit, I got a little nervous when I saw this game’s title, which appears at first blush to be grammatically incorrect. As it turns out, the title isn’t in error — it’s excerpted from one of the riddle-poems in The Hobbit, the one that begins “This thing all things devours.” I still think that it’s a weak title — the entire line would be much better — but I was relieved to know I was in the hands of a competent writer. In fact, my fears about the entire game were groundless; it’s very good. It has a plot, but by the author’s own admission, ATD is much more game than story, an intricate puzzle-box, with a couple of puzzles I found very satisfying indeed.

The setup is complex, requiring the same sort of lateral thinking as that featured in Sorcerer‘s famous time-travel puzzle. Due to its convoluted nature, the game had to be quite a chore to implement, and while its coding isn’t perfect, I was impressed with how thoroughly and skillfully it covered a very wide range of permutations. Moreover, ATD does a wonderful job of automating mundane actions, the very thing I was moaning about in my review of The Great Xavio. I can’t tell you how pleased I was to see something like this:

>n
(first opening the door to the Deutsch lab)
(first unlocking the door to the Deutsch lab)

The Deutsch Laboratory

Every first-level object interaction I tried was handled gracefully, and the automation even did one or two cool tricks to keep track of player knowledge. Anyway, I’m about to raise a couple of points criticizing ATD, so I want to make it clear that I really did like the game. I liked it a lot.

That being said, there are a couple of flaws I’d like to discuss. The first is that I don’t think this game plays fair with the concept of the accretive PC. If you don’t recognize the term, that’s because I recently made it up, while reviewing Adam Cadre’s Lock & Key for IF-Review. In that review, I made the case that games like Lock & Key and Varicella have a unique sort of PC, one whose knowledge and/or cunning must by acquired by the player herself in order to successfully complete the game. Primo Varicella, for instance, has a devious plan to take over the regency. At the beginning of any session with Varicella, the PC knows what this plan is, but the player may or may not. It’s only through experiencing multiple iterations of the game, and thereby learning all the things that Primo already knows, that the player can hope to embody Primo successfully enough to win the game.

I call this sort of PC “accretive” because the player’s accreting knowledge allows the PC to become more and more himself on each playthrough, and once the player’s ingenuity matches that of the PC, she can successfully complete a game. When that happens, it’s as if the real story is finally revealed, and all those other failed attempts exist only in shadowy parallel universes. In my opinion, this sort of game is a brilliant refutation of the idea that IF games should be winnable without experience of “past lives.” After all, if the PC’s knowledge must match the player’s at the outset of the game, the PC must know very little, which is why we see so many amnesiac PCs in IF. An accretive PC allows the player to catch up with the PC through the device of past lives, and as long as the PC is established as already having all the knowledge that the player is able to gain, it all works swimmingly.

At first, ATD appears to be exactly this sort of game. It certainly requires quite a few iterations to win (or even to understand, really), and the PC is shown to have much more specific knowledge of the surrounding area and of her specific task than a player will on the first time through. However, partway through, something happens that the game clearly specifies as a surprise to the PC, something not included in her original plan. Consequently, she has to think on her feet in order to recover and still succeed at her goal. The only problem is, she can’t reasonably do that without knowledge of past lives.

A successful traversal of ATD requires not only knowledge of the circumstances and the setting, but advance knowledge of something that the game itself definitively states that the PC does not know in advance. Here, I cry foul. I’m not complaining that the game is unfair — it does an admirable job of warning players upfront that it’s going to be unfair, and I’m fine with that. However, it’s constructed in such a way that its story cannot make sense. The puzzles still work, but the unbelievability of the PC’s actions causes the story essentially to self-destruct.

There’s another problem too, one that causes the logic of the central puzzle to fall apart. Unfortunately, it’s terribly difficult to discuss without revealing spoilers. About the best I can muster at the moment is that if I follow the solution as laid out in the walkthrough, it seems to me that one of the central problems presented by the game remains unsolved, though the game does not acknowledge that this is the case. Because I was crafting my puzzle solutions to avoid this unsolved state (and having a hell of a time solving the puzzle as a result), I was rather flummoxed when I finally broke down and looked at the walkthrough. It was unsatisfying to end the game feeling as if it hadn’t played by its own rules.

Now, as I said initially, the environment in this game is really quite complex, and it’s possible (likely, even) that my objections stem from a careless or incomplete understanding of how the game is actually working. If that’s the case, I look forward to withdrawing my complaints once somebody explains how I’m being dense. Even if not, the game is eminently worth playing just for its clever premise and a couple of excellent puzzles. It may play a bit fast and loose with its concept, and its ending may be a bit anticlimactic, but I highly recommend it nonetheless.

Rating: 9.0

Moments Out Of Time by L. Ross Raszewski [Comp01]

IFDB page: Moments Out Of Time
Final placement: 2nd place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

I found myself both rationally and irrationally annoyed with this game. Let me start with the irrational, since it’s least defensible. Near as I can tell, there is no interpreter that can utilize all the effects of which the game is capable. As an author and a member of the IF community, I understand the reason for this perfectly. The way that things seem to go is that specifications get created for interpreters, zcode formats, multimedia package formats, and suchlike, but they don’t ever tend to get implemented. Why? Because there are no games that use these extended capabilities, so what’s the rush? But of course there are no games, because why produce games with unusable features?

These gears turn each other forever, getting nowhere, and Moments Out Of Time is intended as a crowbar stuck between the gears; from that perspective I applaud it. Hopefully this game will act as a prod (well, maybe a shove) to interpreter authors, and someday there will be an interpreter that can play it. In the meantime, though, from a player’s perspective, it’s a little irritating. It’s rather like being handed a book and told “Oh, some of the pages have illustrations, but you won’t be able to see them without some special perspect-o-vision glasses. But, uh, those glasses don’t currently exist. They might someday, though!” Sure, I’ll still read the book, but it’s a drag to feel like I’m missing the full experience. I understand the reasoning, but still feel irrationally annoyed at being presented with a thing that doesn’t completely work, and that irritation probably colored my experience with the rest of the game.

Of course, there were a number of completely legitimate reasons to be annoyed with this game. For one thing, it is that judges’ bane, the Way-Too-Big Comp Game. Two hours is a completely inappropriate amount of time for evaluating this game. It took me 45 minutes just to read the various manuals and introductory materials, for heaven’s sake. Before I’d even started the game proper, I’d already used up about a third of my judging time. Then there’s the fact that the game offers a zillion different tools, but only allows a few per game session — sure, it’s great for replay value, but how much replaying am I going to do in two hours? Oh, and how about this: even after reading the massive manuals, there were still parts of the interface that were totally unexplained. Here’s a hint for anyone struggling with the conversation portion: don’t use ASK, TELL, or NPC, . Instead, just type the answer at the command line. If you don’t know the answer, type DONE. I figured this out by pure guessing, thereby using more precious time.

Also aggravating was that the game implements the square bracket (“[“) for making notes at the prompt. Okay, that’s not aggravating, that’s cool. What’s aggravating is that 1) You have to type a space after the bracket in order for the game to handle it properly, and 2) Making bracketed notes takes game time, one turn per note! This wouldn’t be so bad, except that there are a number of time limits worked into the game, so making the comment command non-meta effectively penalizes the player for using the game’s built-in notation system. Finally, despite the fact that Moments boasts an amazing amount of technical polish, it suffers in several places from what I can only call lazy implementation. You may find a book which can’t be referred to as “book”. You may be told something by the narrative voice that you couldn’t possibly know, given that it’s happening hundreds of miles away. You may find (details changed to prevent spoilage) a hidden cache in the floorboards, but when you “examine cache”, you will be told “You can’t, because the floorboards is closed.” Oh they is, is they?

Okay, enough spleen-venting. It’s just too bad, because there are the bones of an amazing game here. The plot revolves around a future time-travel agency, and the world-building evident in the details of this is just wonderful. Also, some of the things that make it inappropriate for the competition don’t necessarily make it a bad game. Quite the contrary, in fact — the number of options available makes for an incredibly rich gameworld. I kept wondering what would have happened had I chosen a different array of technology at the beginning, while still quite awed by the capabilities of what I had chosen. I feel I barely scratched the surface of the story, and the scenario was interesting enough that I’m quite curious to see all the things I missed.

The writing did a nice job at establishing a consistent tone, and provided plenty of amusing juxtapositions as the future character examines technology that is primitive to him/her. I saw the beginnings of a number of intriguing puzzles, though there’s an overwhelming array of keys and locked doors, and the game’s auto-unlock feature appeared to me to be broken.

All in all, a very worthy effort, but I wish it wasn’t a competition game. Releasing this game outside the competition would have accrued several benefits. It would have allowed more time to fix those nasty details of implementation and documentation. Players could have approached it as something they could spend a significant amount of time on, rather than having to rush through it to see as much as possible while not giving short shrift to the other 51 games awaiting their attention. And it wouldn’t have been presented for formal judging in a not-completely-functional state. Would have, would have, would have. If only real time travel were possible.

Rating: 5.6

Vicious Cycles by Simon Mark [Comp01]

IFDB page: Vicious Cycles
Final placement: 6th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

[Note: Because Vicious Cycles gives so little away upfront about its content, this review could be considered a wee bit spoilery. If you’re terribly averse to that sort of thing, go play it first. It’s worth playing.]

Timing can really be a bitch sometimes. Vicious Cycles takes terrorism as one of its subjects, and isn’t entirely unsympathetic to the terrorist in question. This choice was almost certainly made before 9/11, and before that date I think I might have been much better able to make the emotional leap that the game encourages. Today, though… having been inundated with news of the real people whose real lives have been affected by terrorism, and felt the consequent wrenching emotions, I found it difficult not to project those emotions onto the game’s fictional scenario, and that made me a lot less receptive to the story than I probably should have been. That story was a good one (though perhaps just a trifle hackneyed in its presentation of a dystopic future where corporations rule the world and advertising is all-pervasive), but I just wasn’t the best audience for it today. Still, even taking those reactions into account, there is a lot to appreciate about Vicious Cycles.

The game’s best feature is its central concept, which is a great riff on the nature of IF. You play a character hooked into a “time-shunt” and trying to prevent a disaster from occurring. The way the device works is that it sends your consciousness back in time, to inhabit the body of a bystander, whose actions you may then control in your attempt to prevent the disaster. If you don’t manage to stop the catastrophe, you’re shunted back to the beginning of the scenario, to try again with a different sequence of actions. In Groundhog Day, a similar concept was played for laughs, but here the iterations are deadly serious, a race against time with horrible consequences.

I thought this sequence was very well-designed indeed, going against the typical IF grain to fine effect. Here, not only do you learn from each death, but you actually must learn from your deaths in order to make progress on the problem. Having just finished (and loved) Planescape: Torment, where the main character is immortal and death is sometimes a necessary puzzle-solving component, I appreciated this twist very much. The overall puzzle is intricate and satisfying to solve, and the game does an excellent job of slowly doling out information as the PC gets closer and closer to completing the scenario.

Unfortunately, bad timing isn’t the only thing that drags the game down. The author credits testers, and I’ve no doubt that the game has received at least some testing — the main sequence hangs together well enough. However, either the author ran out of time to fix all the problems, or further testing is necessary, because little glitches abound. These bugs range from things like typos and misspellings to responses printed on the wrong turn, and in one case even a death that didn’t restart the time-shunt cycle. Troubles like this happened frequently enough that I was often jolted out of an otherwise absorbing story by their presence. I sincerely hope the author puts out a post-competition version of the game, with the final polish complete; when and if that happens, Vicious Cycles will be a sparkling IF experience, at least for an audience not overly sensitized to the terrors of terrorism.

Rating: 8.6