Another set of 2005 Spring Thing reviews
carolyn...@yahoo.com
written immediately after I finished playing the game.
My overall ranking:
Bolivia By Night - 10
Flat Feet - 9
Whom the Telling Changed - 7
Second Chance - 7
Threnody - 5
Authority - 3
As you can tell from the (significantly different) official competition
results, your mileage may vary.
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Authority - Life in a Central Government Authority
It is obvious from the very beginning that the author of this game
wrote it in order to make a point. Was the point made? With the
assistance of a walkthrough, probably. In that light, it can be argued
that this is a very good work of art. But it was an abysmal game.
This sounds like a cruel thing to say, considering that this was a
preliminary version rather than a final release. The designer never
intended for this version to be released, but it was released (due to a
bug in the final version that made the final version impossible to
complete.) But this was the version that was available for play, as
the designer did not withdraw entirely, and therefore it is the version
I have available to judge.
The premise was... boring. For those of you who may not have played:
"the game depicts life, objectives, events, and language in a
contemporary central government authority." (Quoted from the ABOUT
section in the game.) Now, not everything has to be sword and sorcery
or science fiction, but the premise does need to attract my attention
and make me want to play. The writing was as unappealing as the
premise. The room descriptions were uninspired at best:
Home
You live in a simple one-room flat in Suburbia.
Here's another example:
Corridor:
"The corridor continues to east and west. The door to the south leads
to a kitchen. A map beside the kitchen door shows the distribution of
virgin forests in the European Union. The door to the south leads to a
kitchen. The nameplate beside the north door reads "Johan Lindh."
Most of the rooms, like the one above, are simple lists of directions.
Thankfully, most of them do not contain mysterious duplicate sentences.
Generally, the spelling and grammar were excellent, but it didn't
redeem the result.
Most rooms possess a great many props (I think this game has more
wastebaskets than any other game in existence!) but they are badly
implemented. For example, if you switch off the computers, you will
find that examining them shows that they still have screensavers
running, and the owners of the computers do not object to such cavalier
treatment of their property. For another example, you can cook
anything you want in the microwave, and it will always smell like
overdone fast food, even if it's a newspaper.
The NPCs are the worst of the props. Several do not appear in their
room descriptions. Most of the important ones run on a "talk to" menu
system. You can immediately tell this because, when you arrive in
their rooms, you will receive the following message: "You should talk
to the (NPC)." (substitute the NPC's name in -- porter, for example.)
It may keep players from getting lost, but it struck me as high-handed.
In particular: I should talk to the cleaner? Why? I have no reason
to talk to the cleaner; I've specifically been told to talk to someone
else.
Moreover, Authority runs on a bad menu system. I have nothing against
menu systems, but this one offered me conversational options before I
had actually reached places where they would make sense. To make
things worse, there is one NPC who works on an "ask NPC about topic"
system instead, and, so far as I could tell, responds to perhaps five
topics (neglecting at least two that would make perfect sense). The
lack of consistency was painful.
I don't think that this game can be fixed and recovered into a state
where I would enjoy it. Overall, the game may have been intended to be
funny, but the joke fell flat for me. Others might find it otherwise.
I suspect a knowledge of August Strindberg's novel Roada Rummet
(translation: The Red Room) is required for proper appreciation of the
game. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it.
Unlike some throw-away games from various competitions, however, it is
obvious that Authority's author cares about the game, which I do
appreciate. I recommend extensive testing in the future and wish her
luck with future ventures.
SCORE: 3 of 10.
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Flat Feet
Humor is hard to do. I know I can't do it well myself. And bad humor
is (in my opinion) significantly worse than bad drama. Someone trying
to be funny who is completely un-funny is boring at best. That's why I
was so delighted at such a remarkably funny game as Flat Feet.
Flat Feet is a gumshoe mystery set in the San Francisco Bay area. In
truth, the mystery isn't all that compelling; what IS compelling is the
author's sense of humor, which picks you up and drags you from place to
place to place as you try bizarre things just to look at the results.
The first thing I tried to do was to pick up Ralph, the main
character's ferret sidekick, which worked. Then I put Ralph on the
tire balancing machine, and the response made me laugh out loud. Then
I was simply hooked.
The plot, to be frank, isn't much, but the genre doesn't demand much.
I didn't spot a single spelling or grammar error, and the writing is
top-notch. One thing I particularly appreciated was the vast, vast
number of random responses that went into various things -- instead of
getting one message for Ralph refusing to do something, for example,
there were perhaps twenty or thirty, all making it obvious that a
ferret's attention span is difficult to catch and hold no matter what
you want it to do.
The travel system works very well. You are automatically stuffed into
your vehicle whenever you go somewhere that requires a vehicle, and you
automatically leave it whenever you go somewhere that doesn't require a
vehicle. Very cool.
I only found one way to die, and it warned me extensively before it
occurred. I persisted anyway because it was funny. I'm not sure
whether it was possible to get the game into an unwinnable state.
One concern: some of the puzzles are a bit... weird. I slipped up on
the first puzzle because I had a second solution to the problem that
failed to work. There was another puzzle that I am not 100% certain
was working correctly. It dealt with a shifting-state object, and,
although I was staring at the walkthrough by this point, I had to try
it several times before getting it right (though I had disturbed the
area prior to checking the walkthrough, which may have interfered.)
However, the well-implemented nature of the game encourages
experimentation, and I am confident that a determined player could get
all of the puzzles with enough experimentation.
Flat Feet was great fun, and I recommend it highly to anyone who wants
a good laugh.
SCORE: 9 of 10.
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Whom the Telling Changed
It is difficult to discuss the premise of "Whom the Telling Changed"
without giving too much away. It bears a certain resemblance to Andrew
Plotkin's "The Space Under The Window", yet it has an existence
separate from prior experiments. In a way, it reminded me of Emily
Short's "Galatea" as much as "The Space Under The Window".
The atmosphere is serious and haunting; the writing is excellent. I
encountered only a few typos and bugs; one was serious enough to evoke
a Z-code programming error, but did not crash the game or prevent it
from continuing. I also encountered one keyword that didn't exist.
There are virtually no puzzles, though you do have the ability to
affect the story's journey I'm not quite sure whether you can really
change the ending; I ran it four times, trying to get a different
ending, and came up the same every time. Still, there may be a way I
was unable to find. It would disappoint me to discover that it is
impossible. I'm going to keep an eye on other people's reviews to find
out.
I'd suggest playing it at least once. It won't take long, and it's an
interesting journey. Past that, take it or leave it, but it's worth
looking over at least that once.
SCORE: 7 of 10.
POSTSCRIPT:
>From reading other people's reviews, I now know that "Whom the Telling
Changed" is more versatile than my gameplay uncovered. I'm leaving my
review in its original version for the purpose of this post, but I'll
have to go back and fiddle a bit more with this game.
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Threnody
Threnody is an extremely ambitious adventure with old-school flair. In
one of three capacities (that of a warrior, wizard, or rogue), you
enter Eselatem's Keep to collect treasure and free his captives.
(Eselatem himself, fortunately, is long gone, but that doesn't stop his
spells from keeping his servants around.) While you encounter the same
puzzles no matter which path you choose, the solutions to many of the
puzzles will vary depending on which role you have chosen to play.
This is neat.
One of the game's greatest features is a magical map that lights up to
show your position. I was never lost. I really like never been lost.
It does have a few peculiarities (for example, it showed one room as
being east that was actually down) but I forgave it. Another is the
neat introductory graphic and the other graphics scattered through the
game. Some of the treasure graphics don't match the actual result from
"x object", which is a touch annoying, but will not interfere with
gameplay.
The writing is acceptable; it won't win any poetic prizes, as it is
generally fairly short and to the point, but it works well for
Threnody's old-school atmosphere and mood. The captives are
interesting, though not always overflowing with bubbly conversation.
The treasures are a bit annoying; every one seems to be a bad pun, and
my patience with puns for their own sake is minimal. I would have been
just as happy recovering a brilliantly bejeweled cape as I would have
been when recovering the Cape of Good Hope.
The heart of Threnody is puzzles. Most of the puzzles are very
obvious, falling just shy of bopping you over the head and announcing,
"Hello! I am a puzzle." I'm not the world's most skilled puzzler,
though, so I didn't mind that the puzzles were often obvious and often
rather simple. A great many of them are solved by applying item A to
puzzle B. Don't worry about an inability to find item A; Threnody is
item-rich, by which I mean that you are constantly tripping over items
every time you turn around. Not being the type to drop a Potentially
Useful Item, I was carrying well over fifty items by the time I hit the
endgame. (Let's hear it for magically capacious backpacks!) I can do
simple and obvious; it makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something.
While it might be frustrating to more sophisticated gamers, it's fine
by me.
But Threnody expects a certain level of psychic power from its player.
Upon multiple occasions, I went to the walkthrough and discovered that
the author's idea of the correct syntax to do X varied wildly from my
idea of the correct syntax to do X, and the in-game help did not offer
sufficient guidance. In addition to syntax trouble, I have no idea how
the solutions to some puzzles were cued, and I suspect that they may
have been functioning entirely on guess-and-check. My patience with
guess-and-check is frankly not very high.
My worst moment in Threnody came when I entered a command that I had
entered before, and, instead of working, it produced:
[TADS-1026: wrong number of arguments to user function "."]
I hit the walkthrough and discovered that the syntax for the command
had changed. It wasn't the only TADS error I generated; when carrying
a feather and a white, billowy plume, I could not reference the
"feather" to the game's satisfaction. There were a few other minor
problems, but none quite so frustrating as the one above.
I liked Threnody. I liked the concept, I liked the genre, I liked the
title NPC, and I liked the size and and scope. I sincerely wished I
could have given it a higher score... but Threnody needs a set of ten
or twenty betatesters to comb through and complain about every little
thing that doesn't work or doesn't make sense. I can't recommend this
game until it gets them. I promise to recommend it afterward.
SCORE: 5 out of 10.
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Bolivia By Night
With a title like Bolivia By Night, I wasn't expecting great things of
this game. I play too much White Wolf, which means that "Bolivia By
Night" sounds to me like One World By Night goes South American.
Why am I harping on the title, you may ask? Folks, I barely got
anything else to harp on. Let me get my digs in where I can, as the
title was the worst thing about it. Bolivia By Night was magnificent.
The premise is fairly straightforward: you are a reporter working in
Bolivia. You go on a couple conventional interviews, and then...
erm... things get unconventional. I want to say a lot more, but I
would start spoiling things, and this game deserves to be experienced
in an un-spoiled state.
I was afraid that Bolivia By Night would be nothing but a glorified
travelogue. Instead, I was blown away. Bolivia By Night is cunning,
graceful, intriguing, and sincerely funny. It isn't a "deep" game, but
it isn't meant to be. It maintains a solid focus throughout with a
quick, steady storyline and a good dose of humor. The interface was so
nicely streamlined and betatested that I never experienced any trouble
determining what the syntax should be for a command or found myself
struggling through four commands where one would do. To ice the cake,
there are some very cool graphics, the "characters" command is
wonderful for trying to sort out the plot without taking notes, and the
game blends a tell/ask conversation system almost seamlessly with a
menu system.
I'm proud to say that I solved most of the puzzles on my own.
Experienced IF players will probably consider it easy for that reason.
(What can I say? I'm not a puzzle pro.) The puzzles begin at such a
gentle level that they don't really count as puzzles, but they increase
in difficulty as the game continues. There are a few doozies that made
me blink and cross my eyes, but there are no "psychic" puzzles -- every
puzzle makes perfect sense when its answer is revealed.
The hint system was a tiny bit klutzy; it seemed to be triggering from
time to time off where I'd been rather than what I'd done, so it
occasionally provided me hints in a non-useful order. The room
descriptions abandoned prettiness in favor of utility, as did the
object descriptions. Some of the NPCs are monotonous in their
greetings. Yes, I'm nitpicking here. I try to come up with some kind
of useful criticism, and I'm having trouble.
Due to some light sexual humor, this game might not be suitable for
young players. Aside from that issue, I recommend Bolivia By Night
enthusiastically for beginning and experienced players alike.
SCORE: 10 of 10.
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Second Chance
Second Chance begins right before the main character's death. In the
moment of death, the character is provided with opportunities to change
the past course of events and perhaps save his life. There are
multiple endings and many ways that the game's course can evolve.
The writing is good, with a strong sense of setting and character
attached to each perspective, though I did find the "examine me"
responses to be fairly uninspired. Aside from the "hint" command
giving me a false rhetorical question, I didn't encounter any bugs in
my three or four runs through the game.
Beware of the clues system (clues as opposed to hints -- they are two
different commands), which will potentially give you more information
than you want to know by their mere headers.
For some reason, I don't seem to be able to think of this game except
in terms of other games. The premise reminded me of Tapestry, the tone
reminded me of Photopia, and the actual game-play reminded me of
Varicella (which is to say... play, play, play, splat; play, play,
play, splat; play, play, play, splat... but I digress.) Arguably,
someone coming freshly to the scene might enjoy it more than the
above-mentioned games, but it was difficult for me not to perceive it
as derivative.
This game stands as a fairly good argument against those who suggest
that no serious work has been written in ADRIFT. In the end, though,
despite the quality of writing and the polished state of the game's
code, I just didn't enjoy playing it. This game didn't grip me or make
me want to see what happened next. I can only conclude that I was not
the intended audience for this game, and hope that others enjoy it more
than I did.
SCORE: 7 of 10.