Tag: xen the contest

Beyond by Roberto Grassi, Paolo Lucchesi, and Alessandro Peretti [Comp05]

IFDB page: Beyond
Final placement: Tied for 2nd place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

Here we are again: I couldn’t finish this game in two hours. I found it quite absorbing, and with 20 minutes left, I really debated whether to turn to the walkthrough or just play out my 20 minutes with a bit less dawdling around examining things, getting as far as I could. I picked the latter, but with 5 minutes left, I really wanted to know how the story turned out. So I peeked at the walkthrough, hoping to speed through to the end. NOPE! Turns out I was midway through chapter 4 of 7 (plus an epilogue) — just about halfway through, I reckon.

Back in the day I used to penalize games like this in my ratings, hoping to discourage people from this behavior. But it’s not like whatever I put here will deter people in, like, Comp06. Plus, as Michael Coyne taught me, authors have a strong motivation to enter their too-long games in the comp, and nothing I did as a reviewer could have changed that motivation anyway. And I’m obviously not trying to go through all these Comp05 games in six weeks — I started on these almost three years ago! So while I am still stopping after two hours to write a review, I’m not going to specifically take points off anymore, except to the extent that having to stop prematurely affected my enjoyment of the game. Heck, in some games stopping after two hours feels like a gift.

Stopping Beyond was disappointing, though, because I was deeply involved with its story, being pulled along at multiple levels. At the higher level, there’s a frame story, in which the PC is the spirit of an unborn child, exploring the reason why it wasn’t born. I was very wary when I encountered this premise, fearing that it would veer into an anti-choice polemic, but I needn’t have worried. Instead this concept brings us into a compelling murder mystery, in which we play a detective looking into the murder of a pregnant woman.

Really, I shouldn’t call the unborn spirit piece a frame story, because it returns after every chapter, in interludes where we see the murder scene as a ghost, or experience a bit of what life might have been like had the mother lived, or watch different scenarios of how that night might have gone, from a godlike remove. In the prologue, the game makes clear that the PC (and thereby the player) cannot affect her fate. She will never be born, and can only learn the circumstances surrounding that fact.

Thus the game takes place under a heavy layer of inevitability, similar to Photopia — a game to which Beyond pays a neat, subtle tribute by replicating one room and item description. And yet, also like Photopia, Beyond weaves a deeply compelling story around this unavoidable death. As the detective, we’re able to investigate the scene of the crime, talk to a wide variety of connected characters, and make clever observations that lead us closer and closer to solving the crime.

As any good mystery should, the plot takes several unexpected turns, and who knows how many more were in store, given that I was only halfway through the story when I reached my time limit? Not only is the plot well-crafted, but the presentation of the game is excellent as well. The whole thing renders in tan text on a black background, setting a nicely somber mood, and fantastic illustrations appear throughout the traversal, in that same color scheme. These illustrations might appear at the top of the text window, or on either side, and the game handles their appearance, persistence, and disappearance very smoothly, in a way that always enhances the story and never disrupts it.

The one Achilles heel in Beyond, I’m sorry to say, is that the game sometimes demonstrates a rather shaky command of English. Every so often there’s a mention of a baby “wrapped in white clothings”, or a character who says, “I have took the water”, or a phrase like, “I feel like I’m bringed away.” All things considered the errors aren’t overwhelming — certainly not the trainwreck that some broken English comp games turn out to be — but enough to throw me out of the story when they happen.

Nevertheless, this bothered me much less than it might have, and that’s down to the overall outstanding craft that was put into the game. It was one of those that I wish I could give more time, and maybe someday I will, but for now, I leave the story unfinished, but with admiration.

Rating: 9.3

Xen: The Contest by Ian Shlasko as Xentor [Comp05]

IFDB page: Xen: The Contest
Final placement: 16th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

Well, it took eight games, but I’ve finally hit the classic “game too big for the competition” issue. After two hours of Xen: The Contest, I had 29 points out of 63, so about halfway through the game I guess. It was enough for me to encounter the big (heavily telegraphed) plot twist, but not enough for me to understand how that twist changed the story. As usual, I’ll be reviewing the game based on what I saw of it in two hours.

What I saw, mostly, was your standard “implement a college campus” game, overflowing with stereotypes seemingly lifted from a paonply of 1980s movies, overlaid with a plot in which the PC gradually discovers he has superpowers and why. First, a word about the college stuff. I’ve had a 27-year (so far) career in higher education, moving from administrative assistant, to financial aid counselor, to Java developer, to manager and now associate director in the IT office. For a good chunk of that career, I’ve been in charge of the student portal, which has brought me in contact with nearly every part of the university, so it was with an insider’s perspective that I received the game’s treatment of the college experience.

Reader, it was not good. This game hates college. It hates the faculty. It hates the administration. It hates the students (well, the student athletes anyway.) It hates the grill chef. It hates the bookstore clerk. For crying out loud, it hates the receptionist at the student health center:

>x receptionist
Yet another minimum-wage employee who has been corrupted by the meager authority bestowed upon them, the receptionist has a permanent sneer on her face from looking down on all in her presence. In simple terms, she's a real [expletive].

(Note that the “[expletive]” is the game’s censorship, not mine.) Mind you, the PC is a freshman who has literally never walked into the University Hospital before. But for somebody who’s just showed up, boy does he have a lot of preconceived notions about everyone and everything. The snarling disdain for everything around him is evident in the majority of room and object descriptions. What’s more, there’s quite a bit of disdain set aside for the player and the basic mechanisms of IF as well. Many an object description ends with a “duh” statement, like so:

>x backpack
This is your backpack. You put things in it. Novel concept, huh?

One time, this kind of understatement can be a little bit funny. Over and over, for description after description, it communicates a resentment for even having to write descriptions at all, which causes me as a player to wonder why I’m playing this game that the author didn’t want to bother fully implementing. By the way, do you find anything in that description to suggest that the backpack would be better at extinguishing a fire than, say, a blanket? I sure hope so, because if you use the blanket to smother a fire you die, whereas the backpack is a big success!

That’s the other fundamental problem with snide non-descriptions. Not only is their tone grating, they also actively impede the play experience by failing to provide key facts that the player needs to succeed. Taken together, these qualities add up to a game that feels like a bully, calling you dumb for not knowing information that it intentionally withheld from you.

When it wasn’t making me learn stuff by dying, Xen was making me guess triggers. This is one of those games that waits for a particular command, then dumps out plot or exposition when the player enters it. These aren’t puzzles, really — most of the time the command is something like “sleep” or “sit”. When a trigger system like this is working smoothly, as it does for the majority of Xen, it can feel like traveling effortlessly through a story — just follow the very logical cues and you will make the plot happen. When it’s working badly, as it does sometimes, it can feel like wandering around in the wilderness, trying to guess the magic word that will unlock the only possible path forward. At no point does it feel like you have a choice of actions — scenes are strung together in a single linear path, and until you figure out the trigger that advances you along that path, you will make no progress in the game.

Between its truculence around describing things and its insistently single-track design, Xen: The Contest feels like a prose story whose author decided it would get more attention as an IF game. That may have been true, but it wasn’t a lot of fun for me as a reader or a player, especially given the fact that in two hours, even when resorting to the walkthrough several times to unearth a hidden trigger, I only saw about half. I suppose in a way this is the old “the food is terrible and the portions are so small” joke in action again, but I wasn’t really laughing.

Rating: 4.5