tolkien, >INVENTORY

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.

Eragon by Unknown [IF-Review]

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

IFDB Page: Eragon

Eragon Vs. Bygone Era

IF aficionados have often made the argument that the medium could have a commercial comeback if marketed in the right way. Forget gamers, the line of reasoning goes. Instead, interactive fiction should be sold in bookstores, right alongside the books, appealing to an educated, literary audience that sees “all words no pictures” as an advantage rather than a drawback. After all, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was one of Infocom’s biggest hits, and it seems reasonable to conclude that that game drew much of its audience from people who loved the books. (Leave aside for a moment the tremendous overlap between fans of those books and computer nerds.) Perhaps the beginning of this IF resurgence might be text games appearing on author websites, inviting fans of that author to experience their favorite fictional world interactively, possibly re-enacting some key scenes, or filling in some narrative gaps from the paper stories.

I’m not sure I believe that IF will ever experience a commercial comeback on any significant scale, but I love the idea of skilled authors with large fanbases creating text adventures. Consequently, I was excited to learn that Christopher Paolini, author of the “Inheritance Trilogy” of young adult fantasy novels, had placed a text adventure on his site, set in those books’ universe. I’ve never read Paolini’s work, but his books seem to be popular with the kids, what with the first one spending months on the New York Times’ bestseller list and having over a million copies in print. The fact that such a popular author was offering interactive fiction based on his books seemed quite promising to me, and I was eager to check it out. A web browser is a lousy place to play a text adventure of any size, given that Zplet doesn’t provide for SAVE and RESTORE, so once I found the game I dug the zcode file out of my browser cache and played it locally. It would be nice if the author’s web site had provided an easier option for downloading the game file, but that’s a forgivable lapse. I fired up the game, all energized about the bright possibilities.

Unfortunately, that energy evaporated almost immediately. The first thing I did was turn transcripting on, and saw this:

Start of a transcript of Eragon Eragon. Release 1 / Serial number 050712 / Inform v6.30 Library 6/11 SD Standard interpreter 1.1 (4F) / Library serial number 040227

Uh-oh. Debugging verbs left on: not a good sign. Also, what’s with the subtitle being just the title with a period added in? Finally, where’s the author credit? Did Paolini actually write this game, or did he leave his name off because some employee or fan of his is the real author?

Having played the game, I’d put my money on the latter. Both in terms of design and prose style, Eragon feels like the product of a member of its intended audience: readers in their early teens. At the very least, given the number of comma splices and grammatical missteps in the game, I think it’s safe to say that this prose has never seen the services of a professional editor. The milieu of the game itself feels like Tolkien with just a few of the serial numbers rubbed off — apparently you’re a dwarf in the tunnels under “Farthen Dûr”. Your quest is to warn the “Varden” (i.e. the good guys) that an “army of Urgals” (i.e. orcs) is approaching. In the process, you’ll come across some magic dust that makes people fall asleep, mysterious runes concealing hidden rooms, huge underground chambers, and so forth. It’s bog-standard stuff.

As for the game itself, well, I wish the news was better. It’s not that this game is out-and-out terrible. Worse games get submitted to every single IF competition. However, it suffers from some very serious flaws. The worst of these is the way it deploys a kind of “selective parsing” that makes it feel like a product of 1983, despite having been produced with Inform 6. Several times throughout Eragon, I found that the parser would claim not to understand a particular formulation, only to specifically require that formulation at a later point. This kind of thing is simply unacceptable in a text adventure — if you tell me a command is not understood, don’t expect me to try it again. A variation on this is the way that at certain junctures I found myself wrestling with the parser, trying to communicate a specific idea, only to learn that the game would only accept the most generic command possible, doing all the rest of the heavy lifting itself. Here’s an example, altered to remove spoilers:

>X TRAP DOOR The stone trap door is covered with finely carved runes and etchings of intertwined dragons. There is an empty space in the center, just about the size of the marble orb.

>PUT ORB ON DOOR Putting things on the Trap Door would achieve nothing.

>PUT ORB IN CENTER I do not understand your command. Doublecheck your spelling or refer to the commands list for help.

>OPEN TRAP DOOR The door is locked, and simply impassable.

>PUT ORB IN STONE You can't put something inside itself.

>X CENTER I do not understand your command. Doublecheck your spelling or refer to the commands list for help.

>USE ORB The orb slips perfectly back into place, becoming one with the door. The door, now unlocked, automatically begins to slide open, dragging heavily along the floor.

The puzzles themselves are pitched at a good level for kids, but any kid would be driven crazy by how frequently this game fails to parse.

Alongside the technical failures is some highly irritating design, the centerpiece of which is a large maze. This maze isn’t terribly challenging — the game is kind enough to give each location a distinctive name, like “Maze M18”, “Hallway H6”, and so forth — but it is so, so dull. Wandering through one empty location after another, following the left hand wall, is not my idea of a good time. Hilariously, the game helps orient you by telling you that you hear singing, loudly or faintly, from a particular direction, but when you get to the source of the sound it seems to forget that it ever mentioned singing. There’s a person there, but I never saw her sing. In addition, there are several spots where I flummoxed the game by doing things in a different order than it expected. For instance, there’s a library section where I thumbed through the books and was told, “Upon realizing that this is not the book you are looking for, you return the book to its place on the shelf.” Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet met the character who told me what book to look for, which made that message rather nonsensical. I’d venture to guess that the game was written to a walkthrough and not playtested thoroughly enough to uncover its hidden assumptions. Tons of formatting errors, capricious capitalization, and logical lapses add to the unpolished feeling.

I realize that all this criticism is negative, and I don’t mean to be too discouraging, especially if Eragon was written by some young Paolini fan as a labor of love. I think the lesson that emerges from this game is that although it would be great for popular writers to offer interactive fiction based on their works, they should probably do so in collaboration with experienced IF authors if they’re unfamiliar with modern IF themselves. After all, even Douglas Adams didn’t try to write the Hitchhiker’s game himself — the participation of Steve Meretzky helped ensure that the game would not be a hash of bugs and mainframe-era game design cliches. Similarly, modern authors would do well to avail themselves of the knowledge contained within the modern text adventure community. Combining a popular writer’s skill and imagination with the technical expertise and experience of an established IF creator would be most likely to result in a game that puts both the author’s works and interactive fiction itself in the best light. Without that creator’s insight, you run the risk of games like Eragon, which makes IF fans want to avoid more Paolini and Paolini fans want to avoid more IF.

Identity Thief by Rob Shaw-Fuller [Comp02]

IFDB page: Identity Thief
Final placement: 13th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

A couple of years ago, there was a comp game called VOID:CORPORATION, which proclaimed itself to be cyberpunk. Unfortunately, as I said in my review, what it did instead was “just slap a cyberpunk sheen on standard fantasy tropes”, and was consequently pretty weak. Only a few days ago, I heard from the author of that game, who had just found my review and thanked me for writing it, so V:C was on my mind when I saw Identity Thief describe itself in Comp02 as “a cyberpunk interaction.”

Happily, this game exceeds its predecessor by a long stretch. Rather than being thinly disguised versions of Tolkien or Zork, Identity Thief‘s characters, settings, objects, and plot arise organically from a much more science-fictional premise, a premise nicely limned in the game’s optional introductory material. The prose maintains a very fine level throughout, sometimes even hitting rather sublime and poetic metaphors. The gadgets, such as implanted hands with “memory plastic” that can store palmprints of anyone whose hand you clasp, are delightful and have a great “wow factor.” What’s more, the story starts out with an arresting setup, moves quickly into a high pitch of urgency, and then keeps going into stranger and stranger territory.

I was particularly taken with what I suppose you might call the game’s second half. [I’ll try to be pretty vague here, but some of what follows could be construed as mild spoilage.] The first half involves completing a particular task, and indeed the first pleasant surprise is that there’s still more game to go when that task is completed — I fully expected the story to end, but instead I was asked to do the next logical thing, given what had happened up to that point. As that second scenario progressed, I felt more and more uneasy, suspecting that some big whammy was coming my way, but I didn’t try to get away. I didn’t even want to try to get away, because I knew that wasn’t what the character would do, even though the character himself was probably sharing my apprehensions.

Through its excellent writing and careful plotting, the game had cemented such a solid emotional connection between the PC and myself that I never flipped into the more “gamelike” state of mind that would attempt to obtain the most favorable outcome no matter how its methods might jar against the character or the story. This sort of split consciousness is essential to dramatic irony, and is exceedingly difficult to achieve in IF. Identity Thief achieved it, at least for me, and deserves a great deal of praise for that.

Where the game falls apart, though, is in its depth of implementation. The first part of the game has the PC hunting for a particular object, but a great many reasonable commands related to such a hunt were met with the response “You have better things to do.” This is unsatisfying not just because it thwarts my attempts to solve the puzzle, but because it’s patently false — the PC’s highest priority ought to be to carry out just such actions.

Another area where the implementation seems particularly threadbare is in its major NPC. This NPC, when questioned with the right word, rarely fails to offer large quantities of information, much of it critical to the plot. However, those words can be difficult to determine, and to pretty much every other topic, the NPC responds, “I do not understand your question.” And while that statement may be perfectly true, it is not sufficient.

As a result of these problems of shallowness, Identity Thief feels like it’s one or two drafts away from being finished — bugs and prose errors are rather rare (though not entirely absent), but the game could still benefit greatly from a beta-testing session that addressed not only things the tester finds that don’t work properly, but also things the tester tries that don’t prompt a unique response. Identity Thief is already a good game, but as yet it lacks the polish to be anything more.

Rating: 8.8

Fort Aegea by Francesco Bova [Comp02]

IFDB page: Fort Aegea
Final placement: 8th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

I have more thoughts about Fort Aegea than I’ll be able to fit into these few paragraphs, and I’m a little concerned about it. See, I think this game’s shortcomings may be more interesting than its successes, but if I spend more time talking about flaws than strengths, I may give the mistaken impression that I didn’t enjoy it. So let me clear that up right now: I liked Fort Aegea quite a bit. Most of the game is really fun — it has several good puzzles and action sequences, a nice propulsive plot, and some surprising and well-drawn details.

In addition, the game employs spellcasting, which is a kick — there are lots of moments that measure up to anything in Enchanter, and the spells have the added virtue of being particularly well-suited to the character and thus helping to further define her. The game felt quite well-tested and proofread to me — I found a few syntactical errors here and there, and maybe one or two bugs, but on the other side there are a number of rather complicated effects that the game produces with admirable smoothness.

Oh, and lest I forget, Fort Aegea has some of the most gorgeous feelies I’ve ever seen with an amateur game, hand-drawn maps that positively exude Tolkien. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this game to anyone who enjoys Dungeons-and-Dragons-influenced fantasy IF, especially games in the Enchanter vein.

Very well then, now that that’s out of the way, I want to look more closely at a few things that tarnish this game’s shine. First, let’s talk about that D&D influence. I’ve been on a yearlong Bioware jag, so the D&D rules are fresh in my mind, and this game hews so closely to them that it may as well have a Wizards Of The Coast logo in its banner. The main character is a druid, with spells like “Entangle” and “Warp Wood”, who cannot use edged weapons but carries a mace and plate armor into battle. The game explains the philosophy of her order as one that strove to be “one with the world and viewed good and evil, and law and chaos as balancing forces of nature which were necessary for the continuation of all things.”

For anyone familiar with AD&D rules, this material will ring a churchful of bells. This, in itself, is not a terrible thing, though it feels a bit boilerplate, as if the story’s characters don’t really live and breathe in their own fictional universe but are cookie-cut from prefab templates. Where things really break down is when the characters start speaking as if they themselves are D&D players:

“He’s the fabled Green Dragon, and he’s not been seen or heard from
in over a century! What we know of him we’ve gathered from the Great
Book of the Dragons and here are the specifics: He’s vicious and he
has a ferocious breath weapon; one that unfortunately we don’t have a
defence for.”

It strains the limits of my belief to think that a person who actually coexists with dragons would talk about their “breath weapons” — it’s just a little too close to saying something like “take a look at this fine sword — it’s +2!”. In addition, there are linguistic anachronisms sprinkled throughout the text, such as the adventuring expedition that a history book characterizes as a “public relations nightmare.”

The net effect of these choices is to drain the scenario of fictional credibility. Every D&D reference, every anachronism makes the game feel less like a story and more like an exercise — instead of drawing us into its world, Fort Aegea keeps reminding us of ours. Instead of breaking, mimesis simply stretches thinner and thinner until it’s nearly transparent.

Here’s another way that happens: for much of the game’s plot, the PC’s objective is to stay alive until nightfall, while being hunted. In the course of trying to do this, she finds several spots that would make outstanding hiding places, where one could easily wait out a day, emerging victorious after the sun sets. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t allow any actual time to pass while the PC sits in these places, no matter how many times the player may type “z.” I know, because I tried.

It was one of the slowest mimesis breaks ever — the more I saw the “Time passes” message, the more convinced I became that no time was passing. Once I knew that I needed to conform to the game’s puzzly expectations in order to complete the scenario, my emotional involvement evaporated — probably a good thing given that several horrible, unstoppable events occur in the course of play. Fort Aegea has a great deal of fun to offer as a game, but as a story, I found it a pretty inhospitable place.

Rating: 8.5