[COMP05] Mike Russo's Reviews

[mar...@columbia.edu]

Like it says on the tin, posted herein are my reviews of the games of
the 2005 IF Comp. I've been writing these since the 02 Comp, and my
tendencies towards wordiness, idiosyncrasy, and snarkiness seem to be
given freer and freer range over time, for which I apologize (I really
do try to - I only used "trope" nine times in the course of writing
over 20,000 words worth of reviews, which is probably a personal
record). If I say anything too unkind about a particular game, the
author will hopefully take comfort from the knowledge that I probably
wrote the review at 3 AM, desperate to get the bloody thing finished so
I could get to sleep.

This year, I've decided to dispense with noting my numerical scores for
each game. Associating some objective ranking with my subjective
reactions always occasions much wringing of hands from me, and while I
accept that they're a necessary evil - the Comp is a competition,
after all - I've decided there's no particular reason to give them
any more weight. There's an element of calculation in this, of course
- my reviews are somewhat wordy, and now if you want to know what I
thought of a particular game, you'll be forced to actually wade through
my prose, rather than just skipping to the number at the end. Also, I
insulate myself from accusations of hypocrisy and arbitrariness in my
final rankings. Consistency, hobgoblins, &c.

With that said, I tend to view reviews as being primarily critical in
nature, which is to say that most of the time I'm not so much
attempting a dispassionate evaluation of strengths vs. weaknesses as
hopefully groping towards interesting ideas prompted by the game at
issue. Since I did try to keep my numerical rankings somewhat
objective, they might not track the way I talk about a particular game
- I found quite a lot to comment negatively upon in some of the games
I ranked highly, while others which were basically inoffensive might
not have elicited much in the way of complaint but didn't grab me.

Also, I haven't gone out of my way to avoid spoilers, so reading the
reviews might ruin one's enjoyment of as-yet-unplayed games.

As always, major thanks to the organizers and all the authors, without
whom the world of IF would be a much-impoverished place.

-Mike Russo

//

Space Horror I:

While I'm generally quite partial to knock-down drag-out argumentation
on abstract matters, for some reason the question of what makes
something IF has never really struck me as worth getting worked up
about. Space Horror I is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style game, and
that may or may not disqualify it from being considered IF under some
(quite reasonable) definitions of the form, but its cardinal sin isn't
that its structure is unconventional - rather, it's that the author
hasn't made good use of that structure once chosen.

CYOA has a bad name because of how the eponymous series of books was
put together - lots of "pick door No. 1, die horribly, pick door No.
2, the story continues," in my recollection. But this isn't anything
inherent in the CYOA framework; it's just a matter of implementation.
And CYOA does have its virtues: the author has a great deal of power to
tell a compelling story; since only a limited set of player actions are
available, it's possible to take every choice into account and weave a
deft tale that's responsive to everything the player does. That is,
the raw possibility-space may be highly constrained, as compared to
typical IF - instead of deciding where to go, what to examine, and
what to take, you can only choose from a pre-ordained menu -- but the
flip side of that those fewer choices can be more meaningful, more
dramatic, have more of an impact on the story. Many IF authors choose
to go with menu-driven conversations rather than the more free-wheeling
keyword system for precisely these reasons, after all.

Space Horror, however, doesn't take advantage of the strengths of the
CYOA model; instead, it's modeled (explicitly, according to the
end-notes) on one of those books from the bad old days. The player is
left making choices in the dark, with no real information about the
likely consequences, and with death very often the wages of an
incorrect choice. Progress in the game often resembles navigating a
labyrinth more than creating a story; instead of picking what actions
would make for the most compelling narrative, the player winds up
backing up from dead-ends and going left instead of right, so to speak.
Picking a small, quick car over a big, slower one will result in
player death, but there's no a priori reason to know that. Going back
to the player character's dorm rather than exploring around is likewise
a one-way ticket to the restart menu. The game doesn't present
interesting choices - it just presents frustrations. The only real
exception is the series of choices at the beginning that determine
which branch of the plot gets played, but again, there's no context
informing the choice, so it has weight only in retrospect (and really,
the way the options are presented isn't exactly the stuff of high drama
- "oh, if only Oedipus hadn't gone into the bedroom before going to
the kitchen, it might have all turned out differently!" And so on).
Further reducing one's chances of doing well on these shot-in-the-dark
quizzes, the author repeatedly uses the player character's thoughts as
a head-fake; several times, the text indicated that the protagonist
wanted to pick a certain path, which when followed led to certain
death. I'm unsure whether this was intentional or not, but it felt
unnecessarily punitive and served to emphasize how the other characters
were much smarter than me. This is called "deprotagonizing," and it's
not particularly fun.

>From the title alone, it would be unfair to expect Space Horror's story
to be anything other than B movie fare, but given the choice of CYOA
format, the narrative has to do even more heavy lifting than it would
were the game a more conventional work of IF. Unfortunately, even
judged by the standards of the aliens-invade genre, the tropes deployed
still manage to be tooth-grating. Everyone from the player to the
supporting characters immediately twigs to the fact that it's aliens
behind everything, despite the ravaging monsters looking a lot like
werewolves, and the mass disappearance looking a lot like the Rapture.
This uncertainty could have been exploited to create some nice tension
- of course the girl who runs the UFO web site thinks it's aliens,
but then she's not all there, is she? - but sadly we're left with the
dull (and somewhat silly) consensus that it's carnivorous wolf-aliens
who've traveled untold light-years and deployed hugely advanced
technology in order to eat us. And the Tina character is too
transparently the Romantic Interest - immediately after seeing an
8-year-old girl horribly eviscerated by an alien monstrosity, her first
words are a thank-you to the player for being thoughtful enough to hold
her hair while she vomited from the horror. The other characters are
generally more bearable, though are just as cardboard - the
Defenseless Moppet, the Cop In Over His Head, the Kooky Survivalist.
The overall amateurish writing doesn't particularly help matters.

The puzzles are nothing to write home about either, being decidedly
abstract and poorly integrated into the story proper. The use of Morse
code as a puzzle element is especially ill-advised; there isn't an
in-game shortcut for deciphering the message, which means that the
puzzle reduces to simple drudgery once the player realizes that Morse
code is involved (I confess to immediately scurrying to the hints
because I was too lazy to perform the transcription, which presumably
isn't the desired behavior). There is an opportunity for a clever
puzzle - discovering why the player character and the other survivors
weren't taken - but the author immediately sabotages it by having the
answer written in block-caps across the top of the screen. Simply
presenting the facts and allowing the player to deduce the pattern
would have been much more satisfying.

Space Horror just doesn't have enough room for player agency, both
because of the CYOA format and the less-than-inspired puzzles. If all
this railroading was in the service of a novel story, it would be
forgivable, but the plot is an unpretentious genre exercise which
barely registers the moment after it's over; more, because of the way
the story branches, it's likely that what small narrative punch it
packs will be diffuse the first time through, since many of the
characters won't make it to the end or won't have had any screen time.

I can't close out the review without offering one unalloyed word of
praise, however: "Is it the end of the world? :(" is perhaps the most
hilarious parody of Internet-discourse I've ever read. The idea that
someone, someday will greet the apocalypse with an emoticon still
leaves me giggling.

Cheiron:

The dual nature of IF - works generally are both stories and games
- is one of those things which authors need to grapple with.
Regardless of where the balance point winds up being, the best IF
manages to weave the two strands together so that they're complementary
rather than antagonistic. The authors of Cheiron aren't particularly
interested in that task, however, and the result isn't so much
antagonism as it is an all-out rout. The game is a medical-care
simulator, with deep implementation of the process of diagnosis;
gameplay consists of poking and prodding at patients until you discover
what's wrong with them. Concerns of story are chucked out the window
to an almost unprecedented degree - as far as I can tell, there's no
way to even get the game to acknowledge that you've "solved" one of the
"puzzles" and identified a patient's malady, which means Chieiron
provides even less narrative closure than a hand of Freecell.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, don't get me wrong. To borrow a
paradigm from Will Wright, Cheiron is more of a software toy than
interactive fiction as such, but (see above) I'm hardly a purist in
such matters. However, the reason that I'm harping on the lack of
narrative context is that Cheiron's approach to its subject matter is
pointillistically detailed, and makes no concessions to the
nonspecialist. The overall effect is austere and forbidding, and a
more robust frame, more deeply-drawn characters, more *story*, might
have rounded off some of its sharper edges, making for a more
satisfying and more approachable experience for those who don't happen
to be in the rather narrow core audience. There's definitely something
to be said for sticking to one's guns and refusing to compromise a
vision in favor of accessibility - hell, if you can't get away with
it in IF, you can't get away with it anywhere - but here, while the
end result is certainly impressive, it doesn't have much to offer to
anyone who isn't a doctor or medical student.

The implementation, as mentioned, is very deep - you can PERCUSS all
sorts of nouns, and ask the various patients about a wide variety of
subjects. There are occasional bouts of awkwardness, however: I
encountered a number of annoying disambiguation issues (many revolving
around nipple-lumps and discharge, unpleasantly enough), which isn't
helped by the parser often presenting degenerate possibilities.
AUSCULTATE CHEST, for example, presents a host of available targets,
one of which is the torso. But AUSCULTATE TORSO requires you to
specify heart or lungs, and AUSCULTATE HEART is similarly not specific
enough, prompting another deluge of Latinate nouns. Listing only the
possibilities which would actually lead to a result would have been far
more convenient. Some dialogue responses are shared across patients
- diet in this part of the world seems remarkably uniform - but
given the wide variety of conversational topics, this is
understandable.

There are long help files provided, but they're fairly contextless -
that is, they just give you a long list of things to try, without any
guidance provided for individual patients. The help file points out
that you can call the lab for test results, but I found the feedback to
be meaningless. Again, there's no context or baseline given: if a
patient has a peak flow of 418, is that high or low? Who knows? It
seems like it would be possible to incorporate some cues of this kind
into the game itself, and even if that would interfere with the
pedagogic purpose, the authors could still have provided a reference
manual or something similar, to allow the non-expert some recourse.
Diagnosing an illness could be a rewarding puzzle, albeit one involving
many highly-complex steps, but where a normal work of IF would provide
clues at each step and attempt to guide the player through the process
of deduction, Cheiron just leaves the player to flail around
helplessly. There's no sense of progression, of working towards an
understanding of a complicated problem by examining each part of the
whole - rather, you're just left with a sea of atomized data. And
the patients don't have much in the way of personality, which keeps the
whole exercise feeling abstract.

So does Cheiron work on its own terms? Probably. I'm not aware of
what training tools medical students generally use these days, and I'm
certainly not qualified to judge whether the detail provided is
medically accurate and sufficient to help students learn how to
diagnose patients, but from my layperson's perspective, it seems like
it would get the job done. Still, I feel like the authors missed an
opportunity here. I enjoy playing around with complex systems, and
going in, I was excited to play around and maybe even learn something
about medicine, but there just weren't enough concessions on hand to
allow me to do that. I have to respect what the authors have
accomplished, here, but Cheiron unfortunately didn't have anything to
offer me.

The Plague:

I was going to write a disquisition on the pros and cons of adherence
to genre tropes in order to justify my principal criticism of the
Plague, but upon reflection, I think the point is obvious enough to not
require extensive apologia: if you're going to write a survival-horror
game about a zombie apocalypse, the zombies should be scary. While the
game is overall fairly solid, its refusal to maintain a tension-filled
atmosphere severely undercuts its effectiveness.

Things do get off to an appropriately threatening start; the Brit-slang
dialogue is authentic-sounding (at least to my ears, though I admit
that most of what I have to go on is a couple of songs by the Streets),
the inevitable disaster is a slow-motion horror which gives the player
plenty of time to feel trapped, and the initial few moments of
confusion are nicely drawn. I was well sucked-in by the time the game
proper began.

The only problem is, our protagonist - a slim twenty-something who's
been out partying all night and then gets knocked unconscious - kicks
more ass than John Bolton at the UN. Once she gets her hands on a
makeshift weapon, she bashes her way through zombies a half-dozen at a
time. There are certain circumstances where the zombies are
overwhelming, but in these cases, they're used only to close off
exploration - they block a tunnel, so another way around needs to be
found, e.g. At no point are the player character's life, limbs, or
sweet, sweet brains in any jeopardy, and while the zombies do devour
the occasional NPC, the deaths are mostly shrug-worthy, since none of
the victims have been established as characters in their own right. By
the end the zombie horde elicits annoyance rather than fear. I'm
generally not in favor of games which are too death-happy, but once the
danger is removed from this particular scenario, not much is left.

On the other hand, the Plague does manage to appropriately model
another, er, salient convention of the B-movie aesthetic: there are
breasts everywhere, from the main-character's "small but perky chest"
to the 16-year-old NPC's "full cleavage." Post-zombie attack, the
player character's first interaction with another human involves an
attempted rape - admittedly, it does fit the genre, but I found it
rather unpleasant to play through. It doesn't help that the
protagonist once again proves herself to be frighteningly competent in
a fight, and her method of dispatching her attacker is somewhat
ridiculous - I know they're called stilettos, but still, offing
someone with a pair of heels?

Other than these admittedly rarefied genre concerns, the game is
playable and solid. My fears were pricked - in a bad way - by the
ABOUT text's warning that there would be a lot of locked doors, but
fortunately my dark visions of Resident Evil-style lock-related
silliness failed to materialize. Most of the puzzles proceed logically
- collecting gloves to grab a sharp object, giving water to a wounded
survivor, bribing another with a packet of cigarettes - modulo a few
minor hiccups (X NOTICE BOARD initially returns a "this isn't
important" response, but a subsequent re-examination is necessary to
progress, without any clue to the player that anything's changed). The
writing is generally strong as well, though it is marred by a few
typos: "looked me up" for "locked me up," "smear-like" for
"spear-like." Still, while the prose does begin to establish the
tension appropriate to a zombie apocalypse, the gameplay lops it off at
the knees.

Gilded: The Lily and the Cage

Gilded is one of the more ambitious games in this year's field;
unfortunately, it's also one of the least polished. It's got an
interesting premise, and the prose is fluid and distinctive, but the
player isn't given enough direction, and sloppy implementation further
confuses things. There's plenty of creativity on offer, but lack of
guidance and bugs suck away most of the enjoyment, and I found myself
floundering and using the provided hints and walkthrough as a lifeline.

The set-up for Gilded - a fairy-tale in reverse - is initially
compelling, and after reading over the introduction and ABOUT text, I
was looking forward to leading the adventurers on a merry chase. The
descriptions and especially the dialogue were amusing, but almost
immediately the fun of using my powers to play pranks on the poor
mortals gave way to a life-and-death struggle. Instead of proactively
coming up with clever mischief, the player is himself forced to react
to a series of threatening situations, which increases the feeling of
being off-balance, as the player doesn't have the leisure to experiment
and explore. While there's nothing wrong with such an evolution
towards reactive gameplay, it happens far too suddenly, and feels too
much like the rug being pulled out from under the player. The opening
sets up a lighthearted scenario where the player will be in control -
and then midway through the second location, this control is history.
A more gradual transition would allow the player more time to master
the fey's powers, and flesh out the characters more fully. Indeed, the
rivalry/flirtation with Val is one of the most enjoyable elements of
the game, but again, it isn't given much space to develop - you chat
for a while outside the tavern, and then are off solving puzzles and
trying to escape him. Most of the world is open from the very
beginning, and while there's quite a lot which isn't directly related
to your struggle with Val, its relevance is rarely clear.

Puzzles based on magic and allusion are always difficult to pull off;
when they work, they work beautifully (see the Moonlit Tower, for
example), but it's often hard to communicate the operant logic to the
player. This difficulty is compounded in Gilded; not only do the
player's abilities work on metaphor, so too do those of the primary
antagonist - when Val begins plastering papers etched with sutras all
over the forest, it's difficult to know what the appropriate course of
action is. The endgame, by way of contrast, seems to vary wildly in
tone, and brute force comes to the fore; while I'm sure there are
cleverer ways out than simply fighting, I wasn't able to come up with
any, and as a result, the ending was very anticlimactic. Still, the
writing as a whole is a pleasure to read, and there's plenty of visual
creativity on display - the sutra-plastered forest might be somewhat
obscure as a puzzle element, but it's a beautiful image.

Contributing to the sense of disorientation is the feeling that the
game isn't quite finished. There are only hints for two areas of the
game, and I got stuck in the help menus at some point, unable to return
to the root menu. I encountered a number of disambiguation problems,
and in one play-through, the conversation in the tavern would display
no matter how far away I traveled.

Overall, I found Gilded to be a frustrating experience; the writing is
good, and the scenario should present fertile opportunities for
enjoyment, but the lack of guidance and lack of polish makes it more
frustrating than it should be. A post-comp release with some better
clueing and some of the quirks ironed out could really improve the
game; it's deep and interesting, but doesn't quite cohere as-is.

Jesus of Nazareth:

This is the one game in the comp I didn't assign a numerical rating to.
I played for a few minutes, and then found that I had to stop. It's
not that I found it offensive; for some reason, I just couldn't force
myself to try to solve the puzzles presented. Some elements really
work - the dialogue especially effective, as various NPCs will voice
their concerns, and the player character responds with direct quotes
from the Gospels, in Jesus's voice, which are relevant but pleasingly
obscure. But many of the other elements are, in a word, game-y, and in
the context of a story about Jesus, they come off as absurd. What to
make of Mary Magdalene asking Jesus to find her lost necklace? Or a
prospective apostle saying "perhaps if you brought me my papers, then I
will follow you unto death"? The combat engine - Jesus vs. the
Romans! - is perhaps the crowning example.

For whatever reason, I couldn't quite handle the cognitive dissonance,
so I stopped playing fairly quickly. I don't think it's a terrible
game - the homemade parser didn't seem too annoying, and while the
puzzles seemed fairly bland, they didn't suck away any enjoyment. And
the author seemed to treat the subject matter respectively, at least
within the conventions of IF. It's just not something I could meet
halfway and complete.

Dreary Lands:

If I were a better man, I would resist the temptation to note that the
adjective in this game's title is unfortunately a quite accurate
description of the experience of playing it. Sadly, I'm not, and it
is.

The ABOUT text admits that the game was rather a rush job, and sadly it
shows. The story, such as it is, is so bare it vanishes when you
squint. The setting is haphazardly thrown together with no particular
logic, serving only to provide space for the grab-bag puzzles, most of
which I felt like I'd solved several dozen times before in other games.
The one exception - acquiring a fire arrow to defeat a tree-creature
- is plagued by implementation issues; there's a strange sort of
recursive notification of nested burnings, and LIGHT ARROW fails,
instead of a more natural "what do you want to light the arrow with?"
prompt. There are wall-to-wall misspellings, and "your" and "you're"
are continually interchanged. And of course X ME is left at its
default.

As first games go, Dreary Lands certainly isn't terrible; lackluster,
yes, but not terrible (for which, see Phantom, below) - but while I
sympathize with the author's desire to release something in time for
the competition, I ultimately think the must-submit-a-game-any-game
mindset is self-defeating. If he'd instead waited until the Spring
Thing, or next year, and entered with his more ambitious project,
chalking this one up as a learning experience, I think he'd have gotten
a much better reception, instead of having his first released work of
IF be something he's not satisfied with.

Phantom:

The first sentence of this game is "Legends speak, of a great egyption
warrior." To say my expectations going in were low as a result would
be something of an understatement. Sadly, the game lives up to the
promise of that opening line: rampant misspellings, mountains of
unimplemented scenery, and not one but three mazes, at least one of
which is noneuclidian (SE, NW doesn't take you back to where you
started from). And the main character's nickname is apparently derived
from a DnD spell. I could continue heaping up complaints, but really,
the bottom line is that this game has nothing to recommend it, unless
mazes and misspellings are your idea of a good time.

Psyche:

So a couple of months back, I was in a clothing store with my family,
shopping for a coat for my two-year-old cousin. I had to go to the
bathroom, which was a one-person-at-a-time unisex deal, with a
concomitant line. After a few minutes standing there, I noticed that
there was a guy a few places ahead of me who had what appeared to be a
wakizashi - basically a smaller version of a katana - belted to his
waist. In other circumstances, I would have probably thought this was
somewhat neat. But I was shopping with my two-year-old cousin, so it
was just uncomfortable instead.

My primary impression of Psyche is a similar feeling of awkwardness.
Psyche is billed as an "Interactive Geek Myth," and it lives up to the
appellation, mixing characters and situations from Hellenic mythology
with puzzle-solving gadgets. I like a mash-up as much as the next guy,
but in this case, I really don't think it works; the two elements are
pulling in such opposite directions that the mythology aspects wind up
looking like window dressing. I admit this reaction is almost beside
the point - the characters and situations are jokey enough that it's
clear the author wasn't aiming for much in the way of genre emulation,
and the scenery and characters are likewise underdeveloped, with the
puzzles obviously mean to be foregrounded. Still, these decisions
wound up making the puzzles feel arbitrary and disconnected from the
story, which isn't pleasant no matter what kind of game you're playing.

The puzzles are conceptually fine, but for some reason they never felt
intuitive to me. Possibly this is because my brain had to deal with
cognitive dissonance brought on by the thematic mismatch, but I suspect
they're just not particularly well-clued (alternative explanations,
viz., I'm just not that good at these sorts of puzzles, I of course
dismissed out of hand). Having a description disclose that the
magnitude of a task is enough to make you want to cry doesn't strike me
as an adequate prompt for communicating to the player that CRY is the
only action which will progress the game. The gadgets seemed
overly-fiddly, too, and the descriptions could stand to be more robust
- I had to resort to the walkthrough because I hadn't realized that
the counter could fit in the mouse's expansion slot. Forcing the
player to type G 60 times in a row is also not the best design I've
ever seen; I initially stopped after 5, afraid that since the game
hadn't acknowledged that I'd succeeded, I must have been doing
something wrong.

Ultimately, Psyche is a reasonable enough game; its puzzles are
competent albeit uninspiring, and the implementation is solid. But the
aesthetic choices, keying off an unfortunate pun, make it less than the
sum of its parts.

Hello Sword:

A second game spawned from an ungainly pun (though perhaps it's
cleverer in Italian), Hello Sword is yet another of the solid comp
games which doesn't stray too far from the path other boots have trod.
It falls into the familiar
"modern-lad-is-sucked-into-the-fantasy-realm-where-he's-the-last-hope-against-the-evil-overlord"
genre, and while it has a rocky start, it eventually levels off.
Still, there's little here that's distinctive, and some clueing issues
- possibly an artifact of translation from an Italian original -
make it less compelling than it could be.

The weakest part of Hello Sword is undoubtedly the beginning; the
player is plopped down with only the vaguest idea of what to do, and
the language is initially very awkward. I floundered right out of the
gate; READ PAD and X PAD didn't seem to do anything, and the responses
seemed to indicate just that the note had gotten lost somewhere -
only a second READ PAD allows the player to progress. In my view,
puzzles which require doing the same thing twice in a row, without some
indication that repetition will be necessary, should be avoided, as the
player will generally only discover the solution, if ever, after
running out of new things to try and growing frustrated. This problem
of necessary repetition occurs at least thrice more in the game -
once with SING, again with WAKE, then later with X COUNTER - and in
each case, I found it stopped me in my tracks for a time.

After the initial pad-reading issue is overcome, I found a further
inelegance: I've played enough games to know that you can read what was
written on a piece of paper by rubbing the sheet below with a pencil,
but the syntax was rather unforgiving. RUB PAD WITH PENCIL and WRITE
ON PAD WITH PENCIL both failed, returning unhelpful responses, but
WRITE PAD WITH PENCIL is necessary to proceed. It isn't quite a
guess-the-verb situation, but close enough. Fortunately, I ran across
only one other instance of this problem, though it was a doozy: the
unlikelihood of ever coming up with MENACE ENEMY WITH SWORD on my own
conjures up images of monkeys at typewriters, banging off to infinity
(in case you were wondering, yes, now that I've read it over again I
recognize that that last clause conjures up other, less PG-rated mental
images, but I'm too fond of the locution to change it).

Once the real world is left behind and we're in the realm of
spellcasting and evil trees (second arboreal terror of the Comp so
far!), things do settle down - the writing seems to get a bit
clearer, the puzzles feel less arbitrary, and a clear motivation is
finally supplied. The ending encounter is intriguing and
well-executed; it's a shame that the beginning was so off-putting,
decreasing the chances that a player will make it there. Hopefully a
continuation or other game from the author would benefit from the
experience apparently gained from the writing process; while Hello
Sword bears all the marks of a first game, down to the title, and isn't
greatly enjoyable of itself, it does bode well for what the author does
next.

Futuregame:

Futuregame is a didactic riposte to a straw-man argument that nobody's
ever actually made. This means it kind of sucks, both as game and as
rhetoric.

[To briefly engage the argument: yes, a reductio ad absurdum focus on
some shibboleth called "player choice" to the complete exclusion of
plot, characterization, puzzles, and gameplay doesn't make for a good
experience. But you could overexaggerate any of the other elements
above - or hell, punctuation - while leaving the rest to atrophy,
and you'd wind up with something just as execrable. This in no way
implies that player agency isn't arguably the most distinctive and
therefore exciting part of the IF medium]

Neon Nirvana:

Neon Nirvana is a solid and unpretentious take on scenario common in
fiction but less so in IF; as a cop looking to bust a big-time crook,
the player runs through a number of well-integrated puzzles and a few
narrative twists and turnabouts. This procedural isn't without its
faults, but is inarguably a pleasant romp. It's the IF equivalent of
finger-food; nothing spectacular, but well-suited for entry in the
Comp.

The puzzles, as mentioned, all arise logically through the context of
the story. The one involving a building permit is perhaps a bit of a
stretch, but the rest - hiding from thugs, sneaking backstage,
outwitting the bouncer - feel very natural. Since the
cops-and-robbers set-up isn't one that classically lends itself easily
to puzzle design, this is an impressive accomplishment. The solutions
do start to feel a bit same-y - a whole lot of LOOKING UNDER things
is required - but absent magic or exotic equipment or complex
machinery, this is forgivable. The story, while nothing thematically
deep or character-heavy, at least moves along at a fairly good clip,
which is enough to sustain interest.

There are a few unfortunate bumps which make the whole thing go down
less smoothly than it could; in one scenario involving a propane tank,
described as a cylinder in the room description, I failed to progress
because X CYLINDER failed to work. Similarly, towards the end, I knew
I wanted to break a door by hitting it with a chair, but the intuitive
BREAK DOOR WITH CHAIR wasn't supported. A piece of graffiti suggests
that the player type HELP for more information, but in fact there is no
HELP text, and Neon Nirvana sadly fails the X ME test ("as good looking
as ever"). Still, I only noticed one typo on offer ("wimch hook",
which is better than a "wench hook", I suppose).

The biggest complaint I had about the game is that Neon Nirvana suffers
from a tone mismatch. The overall vibe and language are very jokey,
but there are occasional moments where the author seems to be wanting
to tell a more serious story - the death midway through, for example,
and the ending, which felt more like something out of Chinatown than
arising naturally out of what had come before. In the grand scheme of
things, however, this is a minor issue; if the main object of criticism
is consistency of mood, rather than bugs or misspellings or bad puzzles
or an inane story, you know you're in pretty good shape.

Waldo's Pie:

This is another game which features something of a tone mismatch, yet
strangely it didn't bother me so much. The setting is a garish
carnival-island fallen to degeneracy and decrepitude, and juxtaposes a
whimsical central puzzle - bake a magic pie to rescue your children
- with some fairly Grand Guignol bits. Despite harboring rather
complex emotions vis a vis clowns, the "evil circus" aesthetic is
generally something I find irritating - it often comes off like
someone trying to convince you they're terribly outre because they
listen to lots of Nine Inch Nails. But in this case, the execution is
understated enough that my anticipated eye-rolling failed to occur.
Sure, there's an evil ringmaster and all that, but Waldo's Pie plays
sleekly and contains enough enjoyable touches that they don't much
matter. It's not one for the ages, and there are a few niggles to be
picked at, but overall it's a refreshingly pleasant enjoyment.

Puzzles are generally pedestrian - trade with a shopkeeper, collect
ingredients, and so on - but very well clued. I'm not the best
puzzle solver in the world, but I found the solutions to even the more
complex scenarios, like the tiger-hamburger-grate-rope puzzle, to be
intuitive, because there were enough textual cues pointing towards the
salient features of the available objects. The only real complaint I
can levy is that PULL DOWN FENCE is a very specific locution to
require.

It is possible to put the game in an unwinnable state - in fact,
there are many ways of doing so - but in a welcome convenience, the
author appears to have altered the way UNDO works, so that instead of
backing up one action, it reverses back to just before you committed
yourself to the action which will lead to inevitable death. And some
of the ways to lose are almost as much fun as winning - neglecting to
remove the life preserver before jumping through the hole in the
henhouse roof, for example, leads to poor Waldo getting stuck and
starving to death.

Again, the plot is nothing to write home about, and the puzzles aren't
the fiendishly clever stuff of which XYZZY's are made. But not
everything needs to be Spider and Web or Photopia, after all, and
Waldo's Pie very much succeeds on its own terms.

Beyond:

I recently made my way through a video game called Indigo Prophecy.
Initially, it looked like a dark and brooding game of psychological
horror, but about two hours from the end the wheels fell off and it
devolved into, to put it charitably, batshit lunacy. What started out
as a compelling examination of the intrusion of random, terrifying
violence into an ordinary life, dealing as much with the emotional
fallout as with the inevitable whodunit, metastasized into tripe about
Mayan prophecies, Matrix-style kung-fu, Illuminati-style conspiracies,
and sentient AIs. The transformation cripples the game, making it
impossible to take seriously - one gets the feeling the designers
wanted to pull out all the stops and reveal twist after twist, but
didn't realize that the more stripped-down, impressionistic stuff at
the beginning was the best part.

Don't get me wrong, Beyond certainly isn't crippled by its twists to
nearly the extent of Indigo Prophecy, but I did find that my enjoyment
of the game steadily eroded as time went by, not so much because the
writing or puzzles got less compelling as due to the fact that the slow
hints led up to revelations which seemed disappointingly over-the-top.
The early stages of Beyond successfully invoke world-weariness,
wistfulness for what might have been, and a compelling investigative
urgency, but the endgame turns into something different, more garish
and obvious and inferior to the understated early sequences.

The opening is very strong, introducing the central mystery and the
framing device which turns it into something other than just a
commonplace cop-show procedural. The authors manage to evoke real pity
for the fate of the central protagonist, and the complicated way she
interacts with the character who the player guides through most of the
game winds up being enjoyable - trying to solve the mystery of one's
own death is a compelling premise. In the first viewing of the corpse,
for example, the player in his detective-guise is presented with a
young victim of violence, leading to a hint of paternal feeling, while
simultaneously in the child-protagonist's eyes, the body is that of a
lost parent. The overlapping impressions create dynamic frisson which
very much deepens the experience. The small Italian village in which
the main action is set is well-drawn, and the characters quickly manage
to make an impression. Indeed, the detail of the real-world vignettes
make for an effective contrast with the overtly fantasy-based
interludes.

One could perhaps complain that these interludes occasionally suffer
from being overly-precious - the Mad Joker's transformations do
sometimes feel too zany for the surrounding narrative - but when they
work, they're absolutely devastating. The authors managed to make a
sequence of chores into the most compelling thing in the story; this
luminous portrayal of a casual domesticity rendered impossible by
violence is far more effective and heart-wrenching than the late-game
reveals on what was going on in the shack's cellar. There is a
noticeable missed opportunity in this sequence, however - when
fetching well water, DRINK WATER returns a default "you're not thirsty"
response. The protagonist, a child who's never been born, has never
tasted water before; this would have been a perfect chance to zoom in
and bring home the poignancy of lost possibilities, of the mundane
experiences the protagonist will be denied.

The puzzles are well-clued and unobtrusive, which is almost a shame, as
the integrated hint system is elegant and enjoyable in its own right.
Finding the secret door in the shack is nicely handled, and the initial
investigation is more entertaining than just Xing everything in sight,
as the player demonstrates that he's figured out what the murderer did
by walking through the same steps. A word should be said about the
accompanying artwork, which is evocative and very successful at setting
a mood of obscure dark fantasy - again, especially in the opening,
where everything is threatening and unfamiliar.

So I did very much enjoy most of Beyond, but as alluded to at the top
of the review, I found the game got decreasingly effective as it wore
on. From the set-up - a young girl, murdered as her pregnancy
becomes obvious - I'd assumed that the crime was essentially domestic
and squalid, arising out of a relationship which never should have
happened, the fruit of desperation and anger and stupidity. The
murderer, I imagined, was somebody who acted out of recognizably human
motives - evil, sure, but still essentially a person. The authors,
however, went in a rather different direction: the killer is a
Satan-worshipping priest who'd been ritually and sexually abusing two
different girls of the town. This felt disappointingly over-the-top,
turning the villain into a cartoon and rendering everything far too
simple and pat. Besides this aesthetic objection, conjuring up the
specter of ritual satanic child abuse brought to my mind the famous
hoaxes, like the McMartin Preschool case, which further undermined its
effectiveness. Sure, there's something horrific about discovering that
your father is a demon-worshipping sexual predator, but since the
character is so unrecognizable, it's essentially safe. Presenting the
villain as an actual person who did something terrible for all the
wrong reasons would have been far creepier, and more memorable. I'll
willingly concede that choosing this particular trope isn't by any
means invalid or wrong, and it certainly pops up in fictional
portrayals with some regularity, but again, I think a more humanistic
approach to the evil would have made for a more satisfying experience.
The final real-world sequence compounds the mistake in my view - the
hostage drama, replete with guns and shouting, lacks the grace and
subtlety which are the game's greatest strengths. In the final
sequences, understatement is deprecated in favor of spectacle and
narrative pyrotechnics, but I think the detail-work of the opening is
superior to the broad strokes of the endgame.

Additionally, while the game is quite solid, a few mistakes did seep
through - I noticed misspellings of "chamomile" and "consecrating,"
but these are forgivable. Likewise, in one place I saw "e" used in
place of "and," presumably due to the authors' native language being
Italian. There also appeared to be some inconsistencies involving the
appearance of the protagonist; during the first interlude, she is
supposed to look like a woman in her twenties, but looking in a mirror
returns a description about her being a child in a pink dress, and X ME
gives the newborn response. And in a few places, I ran into
disambiguation issues.

I feel churlish even mentioning these, though - as is often the case
with games I enjoyed, I think I've spent most of this review harping on
things I disliked, which might give the wrong impression. To state it
baldly, Beyond is a good game, and has all sorts of highlights - from
the moody art to the artful juxtaposition of fantasy and reality, with
plenty of imaginative flourishes (the discourse on bright and dark
inspirations sticks in my head as particularly clever). I think the
choice of making the bad guy a *really* bad guy broke the emotional
realism of the scenario, but up until that point, I got as much
enjoyment from the game as from anything else in the Comp, and even
looked at in aggregate, I still think it's one of the very strongest
games on offer.

Sabotage on the Century Cauldron:

The first thing I do when entering a game, even before typing ABOUT or
HELP, is X ME. Usually I'm just hoping for something other than "as
good looking as ever," but Sabotage's response is one of the few to
ever really take me aback: being told that I'm healthy, naked, and
covered in oil is not exactly what I was expecting. Fortunately or un,
it's not THAT sort of adventure; Sabotage is yet another variation on
the trapped-on-a-starship-with-monsters plot, albeit one which boasts
enough wrinkles to keep it interesting.

"Interesting," of course, is one of those loaded words which can mean
either "good" or "distinctively bad." Indeed, one of the reasons
Sabotage sticks in my memory is that I can't think of another work of
IF in which the player character is defecated upon, which is perhaps
not the greatest claim to fame in the world. The author's working in
dangerous territory here - portraying mentally ill people usually
ends badly (Episode in the Life of an Artist, from the 03 Comp, is a
notable exception), as it's very easy to veer into slapstick. This
happens all too often in Sabotage, and the wackiness makes the game
hard to take seriously (the fact that the evil master plan looks like
it was written by a seventh-grader doesn't particularly help matters.
I suppose I can't really complain - in second grade, I wanted to
destroy the sun - but it does make the game harder to interface with
without smirking). The early going suffers especially from this
problem - strange things seem to be happening all around, the initial
objective seems bizarre, and the player isn't given any real sense of
how to go about accomplishing it. The dream-interlude doesn't help
matters - dream sequences are most effective when they're tied to the
larger narrative, and here, they seem just like a disconnected series
of "crazy" vignettes.

Fortunately, once the scenario gets a bit better established and an NPC
starts providing some much-needed guidance, the player can finally
start to get his bearings and concentrate on the puzzles, which are a
heterogeneous mix of the reasonable and the bizarre. In the latter
category fall such tasks as jumping on a monster's belly to get it to
disgorge swallowed objects. Even in the ones which rely on
recognizable logic, it's not always clear what's going on: I solved one
puzzle more or less by accident, by noticing that a passcard had fallen
down when some chaotic NPCs ran through a particular room. There are
also some implementation hiccups: at one point, the player needs to
vocalize a password, and SAY PELICAN causes the interpreter to return
"I don't know the word pelican," which isn't true, as SAY "PELICAN" is
necessary to progress. I managed to grit my teeth and get past these
issues, but the inventory limit is harder to ignore, especially since
there are quite a lot of red herring objects.

The upside is that Sabotage doesn't wind up feeling too by the book.
While many of its elements aren't really successful, the author at
least managed to present a pre-and-post-disaster spaceship-romp in a
way that felt rather original, even if it wasn't always fun. So points
for that.

A New Life:

Bear with me through one more comparison: I recently read Perdido
Street Station by China Mieville. I'd had it recommended on the basis
of its setting, which did not fail to impress - the novel's set in a
city in which a variety of fantastic creatures rub elbows in a
Dickensian social milieu. It's incredibly rich, which is why it was
utterly perplexing to me that the plot is a DnD-style monster bash. It
felt like a waste of a fascinating setting, to fall back on such a
bog-standard narrative.

In much the same way, A New Life immediately drew me in by presenting a
novel and evocative religious system, a society in which gender is
continually and individually constructed, and an interesting central
character who boasts a backstory nicely revealed through layered
remembrances. Unfortunately, none of this has very much to do with the
actual plot, which is kicked off by a peddler who wants you to rid a
cave of goblins. While the story eventually becomes more interesting
that the premise suggests, it never managed to sink its hooks into me
- the history of some kingdoms I didn't care about and political
machinations undermining a marriage whose ramifications I didn't quite
grasp didn't seem all that compelling, when what I really wanted to
know was about what happened to the player character's brother, and the
girl s/he had fallen in love with when s/he was young, and how s/he
felt about the religious figures depicted in the shrine, and whether
s/he was ever going to acquire a gender again. This is clearly a
testament to the author's skill at getting me to care about the world
and the protagonist, but again, it felt perverse to have all the really
interesting elements shoved aside in favor of something pedestrian by
comparison.

With that said, the game is by no means bad. The writing remains
strong throughout, the cave lair boasts some distinctive features - a
planetarium and underground tower - the dialogue is sharp, and the
puzzles are original and entertaining, especially the final sequence in
which the player must recover another's lost memories by interacting
with mnemonic seeds and a dragon reminiscent of the one from Grendel.
The map in the upper-right corner is a welcome convenience - though
the gameworld isn't particularly huge, it's still a nice barrier to
getting lost. Many obstacles boast multiple paths around them, and
there are a few actions which aren't strictly necessary, but which
better flesh out the world and make for a more satisfying narrative.

If all of this had been in the service of a different story - or if
the author had employed a different player character, one with a
personal stake in the proceedings - A New Life could have been my
favorite game of the comp. As it was, though, each twist of the story
earned little more than a shrug, which is really a shame, given the
overall high quality of the game. My favorite parts wound up being
sideshows that didn't really have much to do with anything - I was
eager to try to tease out as much of the player character's past as
possible, to explore the pilgrimage site's carvings, to manipulate the
planetarium so it showed an alien sky. Helping the genocidal
peddler-woman paled by comparison, but all that other compelling stuff
ultimately turned out to be inconsequential. I'd very much welcome
seeing the author further explore this world, but A New Life winds up
being a very good introduction to the setting but only a fair game as a
result.

Vespers:

Vespers feels a lot like Name of the Rose. I know, I promised I'd stop
with the using other works of fiction to make comments, but I'm not so
much drawing functional comparisons as I am pointing out topical and
thematic similarities here, so according to my head it's all right.
The primary reason why I bring this up isn't to do something so dreary
as to accuse the author (responsible for last year's Sting of the WASP,
an excellent but very different game) of lack of originality or
anything like that - in IF as in every other medium, it's all about
execution, and the best creators are plunder-happy magpies, ripping off
ideas from wherever they can find them. I mention the Eco connection
mostly to disclose that I liked Name of the Rose a lot, am a sucker for
Medieval Catholic eschatology, and therefore might be biased towards
Vespers due to an affinity for the subject matter and residual
good-will for works which hoed much the same row.

(For those of you keeping score at home, yes, I do feel obligated to
provide a disclaimer before saying something nice about a game for a
change. This is because I am a terrible person. Read the On Optimism
review if you don't believe me).

So with that out of the way, I can now start praising Vespers. It has
numerous strengths, but I think the most important is how well paced it
is. The introduction slopes in gradually, and while I generally like
to have some idea of what I should be accomplishing from the very
beginning, here the more leisurely approach worked well - knowing
that plague was loose and the monastery was locked in made things more
interesting than the standard wander-corridors-until-something-happens
opening, and front-loading much of the exploration allowed later
sequences to play out tauter, since the player knows exactly where
everything is. The number of NPCs is initially a little overwhelming,
but the author does a very good job of giving each of them a
distinctive feature, so that the player soon remembers which is the
crazy one, which is the terse, practical one, and so on. Besides,
things pick up fairly quickly once the player's visited all the
important areas - Cecilia's arrival kicks off a string of clear,
well-motivated puzzles, and from there interaction with her serves to
give the player character his next objective.

The narrative doesn't just progress, though - it deepens. As time
passes and the malady which has laid claim to the player character does
its work, descriptions change quite strikingly, which is a very nice
touch - not only does it effectively convey the character's
deteriorating mental state and effectively underline the thematically
central mood of decay, it also makes re-visiting already-explored areas
a pleasure rather than an invitation to tedium. The player is also
allowed to complete major goals along the way, which lead fluidly on to
the next. The arcs of individual monks are continually resolved
(usually, sad to say, this involves their death), which each add
something to the larger puzzle. The game also does a good job of
unlocking new areas to explore in a controlled fashion; the player is
introduced to a few new locations at a time, generally already knowing
what he wants to do, which helps create a fleshed-out world without
unnecessary disorientation.

Speaking of avoiding unnecessary disorientation, the puzzles are
another strong suit of Vespers. The player knows about most of the
major puzzles (finding the hidden diary, gaining access to the cellar)
from the early stages of the game, which serves to alert him to any
tools or clues which might help with those tasks. Smaller-scale, more
immediate puzzles (the avalanche, the wolf attack), often confined to
one particular area, are introduced cleanly, usually requiring some
quick thinking but no items from previous scenes. The prayer system is
particularly elegant, almost serving as get-out-jail-free cards - I
think in every case, the player can find a solution which doesn't
involve prayer, but if you're having trouble coming up with the answer,
a saint's intercession will do the job, without forcing recourse to the
hints file. This middle ground of providing the player with a limited
number of expendable puzzle-solving tokens is very good game design,
and evocative too - before bedding down on the first night, I thought
the good abbot should say his nightly orisons, and was pleasantly
surprised by the fact that this preemptively solved a puzzle which
otherwise might have required a die-and-undo!

So Vespers is already a very good game, before you get to the endgame
and the rug gets pulled out. Not only is the narrative twist nicely
done - it both comes out of nowhere and had me slapping my forehead
for not noticing it sooner - there's also a mechanical twist, as this
whole time the game has been keeping track of the sins you've
committed. It would be very easy to have put the mechanic front and
center and transparently informed the player when he's moved down on
the degeneration track, but keeping it hidden was definitely the right
call, as this way the player isn't even aware he's being judged until
it's too late, and it's never obvious which particular decisions were
decisive. My only objection is that I think the scale might be too
unforgiving - my first time through, I got the "evil" ending, even
though of course I think my transgressions were relatively minor (I'd
once prayed to Cecilia, and attacked the unknown figure I'd tripped
down the stairs since I wasn't sure if he was incapacitated from the
fall). Still, given the setting, an unforgiving morality is definitely
appropriate.

Flaws? A few. The mystery of what Constantin's been up to is a major
driver of the narrative, so the rather hasty reveal felt abrupt and
therefore had less impact than it might have. The last scene, while a
nicely calculated sucker-punch, also has about it a faint redolence of
a heavy-metal album-cover. And sometimes the header quotes (which are
nicely done, by the way, like the scenery descriptions starting out
familiar, almost banal, but slowly growing strange and threatening as
the plague progresses) wouldn't properly erase, so that bits of earlier
quotes would stick around and overlap on the new ones. But that's
literally all I can come up with, which is pretty impressive, given how
much of a stickler I can be. My notes don't record any disambiguation
issues or typos; they're basically just reminders not to forget how
neat particular elements were.

Overall, Vespers was my favorite game of the comp.

Vendetta:

It's not often that I say that a particular work of IF really should
have been done as conventional fiction instead, but Vendetta is among
the unhappy few. The overwhelming impression I retain is of gigantic
text-dumps containing lots of dialogue and action, brought on by typing
a single command - which is often G. The story isn't terrible: the
main character - Colonel Jem Bitter, which is possibly the best name
for a sci-fi badass ever - boasts an overly complicated backstory,
but the author does try to foreground character interactions. Still,
the off-putting presentation prevents the player from really investing
in things, and the protagonist's flattened affect doesn't help matters.
His jaundiced, seen-it-all attitude bleeds over into the player, and
as a result the game's attempts to explore themes of love and vengeance
fall flat.

The player doesn't have much agency over the story, but there are a
number of puzzles to be solved. Far too many of them, unfortunately,
have to do with finding and operating elevators. While the specifics
do vary from floor to floor - sometimes you need to find keys, other
times it's a matter of disabling guards - the building-ascent
sequence goes on for much longer than it should. Too, there are a few
guess-the-verb issues - the laser-beam puzzle is a particularly
egregious offender - and descriptions don't always point the way
through the puzzles in an intuitive fashion (saying that a desk doesn't
have anything interesting on it when there's actually game-critical
information there isn't playing particularly fair).

The author is clearly trying to tell a story which is a bit more
sophisticated than usual in this genre - more Blade Runner than
Aliens - but the disaffected narrative voice and uninspired puzzles
combine with the noninteractive storytelling techniques to undercut the
story's effectiveness. There's just not much for the player to do
here, and the story isn't strong enough to let the rest of the game
coast.

History Repeating:

History Repeating either makes a subtle statement about how the
smallest changes can lead to enormous effects, or it boasts the most
virtuous protagonist in the history of fiction. The conceit is that
the player character gets the opportunity to travel back in time to the
critical juncture of his life and fix the mistake over which he's
brooded ever since: that one year in high school when he slacked off
and did a crap job on a history paper, which forced him to retake the
class in summer school. Really. The game is going for a comedy vibe
and doesn't take itself too seriously, but come on, there could at
least be a girl involved. Or serious intravenous drug use. Whichever.

Anyway, for all that the player character's dreamed of going back and
re-living his high school days, he's loath to interact with any of his
peers - he chats with several teachers, an administrator, and staff
members, but there's no opportunity to, say, humiliate the class bully
or impress the girl he always had a crush on. Indeed, besides
completing the much-regretted assignment, little of the plot and none
of puzzles really take advantage of the set-up - your high school
self presumably didn't care about finding a bit of wire and draining a
pond. Further undercutting the premise, doing a good job on the paper
is easy and is probably one of the first things the player will do (ah,
to have a WRITE PAPER function in real life). Irritatingly, doing so
locks the player into a suboptimal ending - for reasons which only
become clear at the finish, handing in the paper is the last thing that
should be done, as otherwise a restart is required to reach a better
resolution. The puzzles are generally fine, as far as they go -
they're not exactly well-motivated, but to be fair that doesn't seem to
be one of the authors' primary concerns.

Indeed, it's hard to figure out what exactly the authors are going for
in History Repeating; there are puzzles and a plot and characters, but
it's all perfunctorily albeit competently sketched, and the set-up is
really just a minor flavoring and framing device which doesn't do much
to drive what comes after. It's inoffensive enough, but not as fun as
the premise might suggest.

Pink:

There are certain set-ups, I must admit, that just overwhelm me with
enervation from the very first sentence. At this stage in my life,
playing a member of a starship's crew sent to investigate the
mysterious destruction of a colony on a thought-to-be-harmless planet
definitely qualifies. It's my own damn fault for watching too much
Star Trek in my youth, I suspect, but it's still a bias I carry with
me. Pink's introduction doesn't really redeem things by implying that
it's going to be a cynical, red-shirt's-eye take on these dust-dry
tropes.

However, my habit of typing X ME before doing anything else, for a
change, immediately rubbed some of the rough edges of the intro off.
The joke riffs on Inform's default response, and even suggests a good
reason for it - and by this stage of the Comp, I'd seen enough "as
good looking as ever"s to really find the line amusing. Pink mostly
stays true to this dynamic; much of it is cliched and runs the risk of
boring the player, but it's got enough unexpected verve to overcome
these weaknesses.

The Star Trek style plot, thankfully, does fall off the rails rather
quickly, though it must be admitted that what replaces it isn't
particularly novel either - in place of old sci-fi tropes, it's the
conventions of fantasy which are on display. The game does boast a
number of different endings, which are basically determined by choices
made at the very end, but the narrative isn't really the focus. As is
often the case, the puzzles are front and center, and for the most
part, they carry the day. They're familiar - unlocking chests,
swapping items with a shopkeeper - but are generally well clued.
Objects work how you'd expect them to, and the author does a very good
job of framing most puzzles, so that there are usually only a limited
number of possibilities in play at any particular time. More
importantly, in almost all cases, I was immediately aware of my goal
with respect to a particular character or location.

Pink's puzzles are also susceptible to multiple solutions - of course
there's the "good" path of helping others and puzzle-solving, but the
player can also opt to solve his problems through violence and
treachery. In an entertaining flourish, the world changes depending on
which approach the player favors, the trappings and NPCs oscillating
between candyfloss fantasy and Hammer horror. The substance of the
puzzles doesn't appear to change - both the "good" and "evil"
solutions are always open - but the alteration in flavor does help
keep the game fresh. The Goth take on the fantasy world is
over-the-top enough to induce a few chuckles, and the depredations of
an evil player-character are likewise presented in a comedic enough
fashion - while you might have compunctions about hurting the
friendly dolphin or pacific bunny, their evil-world counterparts more
than justify the violence unleashed against them.

As an aside, I have to confess that on my first time through, I hadn't
even realized that the puzzles had alternate, more direct solutions,
and that the world could turn spooky at the drop of a hat. I often
tend to have similar experiences with other games - in the Erudition
Chamber from two years back, I also wound up finding all the classic-IF
solutions, without more unconventional approaches occurring to me. In
Pink's case, if the end notes and hints hadn't referenced the alternate
path, I wouldn't have even known it existed. I'm curious how common my
experience is, and wonder whether making the possibility clearer from
the start might have ensured that the player got to see more of the
author's hard work. On the other hand, it would undercut the moment of
surprise when everything shifts, so it's hard to say one tack is better
than the other.

At any rate, Pink is unpretentious and doesn't even bother with logical
or tonal consistency, but it feels unfair to hold that against the
game. It's an enjoyable theme-park romp with some entertaining but
decidedly non-fiendish puzzles - nothing too special, but nothing to
be embarrassed of.

Mortality:

Mortality is the second CYOA-style game of the Comp (while the player
does move about, there's very little interaction which occurs outside
of conversation trees), and I think it winds up making better use of
the format than does Space Horror I; there's a greater sense that your
choices have an impact on the plot. Unfortunately, repeat playthroughs
reveal that the story is more railroaded than it first appears, and the
thoughtful and comprehensive manual arguably undercuts the game by
revealing a bit too much.

The plot of Mortality is pleasantly dark, and the nonlinear way in
which it's told makes for an interesting experience - rather than the
conventional CYOA structure, where stories branch continually from a
common origin, the game's narrative resembles a wave, diverging then
returning to common points. The jump-cuts also help prod the player
into working with the story: knowing that the protagonist will knock
off his employer, I thought about how to make the choices which would
make the scenario more interesting, rather than fighting to try to
avoid committing murder.

Unfortunately, most of those choices are hollow. I'll grant that
because the game moves around in time, it'd be hard to alter the story
in too fundamental a fashion. Still, there do seem to be several
missed opportunities. At one point in the story, the narrative flashes
back to when the protagonist killed a man in a bar-fight, which has
been presented as something of a turning point in his life. The player
has the option of having the character behave aggressively, starting
the fight of his own, or meekly, such that the killing is an accident.
The choice does seem to reveal something about the character, and one
would think that later conversation options might alter to reflect a
more confrontational or more retiring attitude, but no such changes
seem to be on offer. Similarly, while there are a number of possible
approaches to offing the employer, the interrogation sequence is
substantively unchanged no matter which is picked. Overall, repeat
playthroughs feel far less engaging than they should, and retroactively
make the first time seem less reactive.

There's only one main puzzle in the game, and the manual comes right
out and flatly tells the reader what it is: there's an internal
variable tracking how positively disposed the female lead is towards
the protagonist, and depending on its state at the finish, you're
either headed for the good ending or the bad ending. Not only is this
disclosure rather nakedly game-mechanical, it also sucks some of the
enjoyment out of the story; knowing that my ultimate fate hinged on
whether Stephanie liked me or not, I was loath to disagree with her.
The centrality of her opinion is morally neutral, of course - given
where the story ends up, it is reasonable that her subjective feelings
would be the single determining factor - but it does also have a
normative effect. Actions which please her are "good", those which
don't are "bad." As Stephanie isn't a particularly pleasant character,
having her desires be the world's guiding principles is likewise not
particularly pleasant.

Finally, though, it's the lack of player agency which is Mortality's
fatal flaw. The story is a robust enough take on horror tropes, and
the author is to be commended for making the protagonist be not at all
a hero, but there just isn't enough interactivity or reactivity to
create much in the way of investment.

Mix Tape:

There is one overwhelming mistake in Mix Tape, which poisons any
enjoyment a player could hope to derive: the central male character
asserts that the Rufus Wainwright plays the best cover of Leonard
Cohen's Hallelujah, when no reasonable person can dispute that the
honors in fact go to Jeff Buckley. It's the orthodoxy, sure, but it's
the orthodoxy for a reason. Either the author or the character is a
Judas and a liar.

This is an overstatement, of course, but it is very much emblematic of
my reaction to the game. Mix Tape, as the title suggests, uses music
to embroider upon the basic story, using the eponymous mix as a
structure upon which the narrative is framed. Music dominates the
scenery, the conversation, and even serves as a plot element (the two
leads meet cute over They Might Be Giants). There's nothing wrong with
this approach - in theory, I think it's a great idea, in fact - but
taste in music is a highly subjective thing, especially for those of us
cursed with pronounced music-snob tendencies, and mine wound up being
somewhat different from that of the author or the main characters.

This is in no way the game's fault (in fact, I played it while going
through one of my periodic
why-would-I-ever-want-to-listen-to-anybody-who-isn't-the-Mountain-Goats
phases, which was a further handicap), and I've tried to evaluate Mix
Tape dispassionately, but the fact that I want to derail this review
and go through all the reasons why the Jeff Buckley version is better
- or rant about how Iris and Don't Speak are way too melodramatic and
overplayed, or talk about the time I went to dinner with a friend and
the restaurant played Jewel's debut album on repeat, until my friend
and I were both twitching at the lyrical vapidity - makes this a
somewhat quixotic undertaking.

In fact, stripped of its musical associations, there isn't much to Mix
Tape - it's completely linear, and there aren't really any puzzles to
speak of. Cooking the lasagna perhaps comes closest, as the player can
actually fail at the task, but the couple has a blow-up whether it's
perfectly cooked or a malignant lump of carbon, and subsequent dialogue
doesn't reflect the difference (even if dinner comes out fine and has
nothing to do with the fight, Peter later says "It wasn't really about
the lasagna, was it?", which makes very little sense in context).
There are a few opportunities to take optional actions, or explore the
scenery, but overall interactivity isn't a strong point of Mix Tape.

What's left is the story of the relationship and its ups and downs, and
again, my personal reactions made it hard for me to enjoy the game.
Peter struck me as emotionally manipulative and borderline abusive,
even - perhaps especially - in the framing story where he's meant
to be reformed and contrite. Perhaps part of this is due to the
inherent difficulties of IF and the author's desire to use Peter to
guide the player along, but it does come off as domineering. Val, the
player character, by way of contrast comes off as emotionally
dependent, immature and annoyingly twee. Far be it from me to suggest
that good stories require likeable characters, but I do think there
needs to be some means to allow audience investment, and I was less
than excited about patching up this train-wreck of a relationship.

As a result of all of the above, Mix Tape never quite gelled for me.
This reaction was highly subjective - well, all reactions are, of
course, but there's something qualitatively different between an
aesthetic mismatch and bugs rendering a game unplayable - but I think
it's valid; how one feels about the game will hinge almost entirely on
how one feels about the characters and the music, since they're very
much the focus of things. The other elements mostly get out of the way
and let the story do its thing - I managed to crash the game once by
trying to leave Peter's bedroom in the fifth scene, but otherwise
noticed no bugs or typos. I can't fault it for not sharing my tastes,
and others might well enjoy the game quite a lot because they're more
in harmony with it, but Mix Tape just didn't do much for me.

Vigilance:

When writing this review, I've continually been aware that perhaps I'm
taking the game more seriously than it wants to be. I work at a human
rights organization directly involved with issues - U.S. detention
and interrogation policy, the proper role of civil liberties in wartime
- which are very close to those implicated by Eternal Vigilance. As
a result, I found the premise of being put in an interrogator's shoes
and turned loose fascinating, if disturbing, and was eager to explore
the dynamics of security.

That the game turned out to be more spy-thriller than
political-thriller was thus disappointing; both main factions appear
rather cartoonish, and again, the struggle is rarefied and divorced
from social reality. The fate of the poor writer is somewhat
problematic, but not especially so - given my job, I feel like I'm
rather more sympathetic to the civil liberties side of things than are
most people, so if I thought his detention and interrogation was bad
policy but ultimately justifiable, I suspect most players would be even
less bothered. Internal Vigilance employs the rhetoric of the
ideological struggle between liberty and security, but it fails to
really address the issues, and they act more to flavor the plot than
drive it. This is a valid approach, certainly, and can make for an
enjoyable game - but it wasn't what I was looking for.

Of more moment is that the game ultimately feels superficial. All
through high school, my English teachers would repeat that most
annoying of mantras: show, don't tell. Internal Vigilance presents a
1984-style dystopia, but doesn't provide any details or specificity on
what, exactly, the society does that's so terrible. We're told that
the Union tramples on individual freedoms, but the primary example is
rather problematic - the writer who's been arrested on suspicion of
being involved with terrorism in fact does have a link to a terrorist
faction dedicated to the overthrow of the Union, after all.

Once the plot picks up speed and the player begins investigating said
faction, instances of government oppression are few and far between.
The interrogation methods employed by the player are generally
unsavory, but not so terrible in the grand scheme of things - indeed,
the game perhaps includes an implicit anti-torture message, as direct
beating gets you nowhere. As a result, the proceedings feel bloodless;
the central dilemma which is meant to give force to the plot lacks
tension, and the ideological struggle is an abstraction without weight.

All of the above is rather personal and ideological (as opposed to the
rest of my reviews, the arch reader points out), which is perhaps
testament to the fact that the game doesn't really have any major
problems. A few sloppy mistakes appear to have slipped through - I
noticed some capitalization errors in the Investigation section, and
the apartment number given for the author's mother is inconsistent -
but overall the plot proceeds logically, the player has a reasonable
amount of choice of where to push the story, and the puzzles are clever
and well-clued. Indeed, the opening interrogation is a highlight -
it's a conversation puzzle which involves asking probing questions and
researching background intelligence on the subject, exactly what's
required in actual interrogations. I would have liked to see more
options for ideological debate - throwing the fact that the
anti-statist author was able to write his book because he was on
welfare, for example - but the options that are there are fairly
robust. And while the password puzzle is reasonable enough, it's
almost unnecessary, as I came very close to guessing the phrase without
any clues. The game also shows flashes of humor - the record will
show that I am a sucker for X ME descriptions which work in "as good
looking as ever."

In the end, my objections to Internal Vigilance probably boil down to
wanting something out of it that it wasn't meant to give. As a spy
story with an oblique nod in the direction of current political debate,
it works quite well. But the focus on bombing plots and digging up
conspiracies causes the social milieu to recede, and the governmental
oppression which theoretically drives the story isn't sharp or specific
enough to be anything but background. One advantage of this is that
the player is relatively free to decide whether the Union or the
terrorists have the right of it, and act accordingly. But this moral
weightlessness prevents the game from really engaging with the issues
it raises.

On Optimism:

(Re-reading this review while going through and editing - "editing"
being kinder albeit less exact than "desperately paging through hoping
I catch all the typos so I don't seem like too much of a bastard for
lambasting authors for mixing up it's and its" - it strikes me as
rather harsh. I considered softening it, but ultimately decided to
keep it unchanged; I think the points it makes are valid, and trying to
address more important issues does open one up for more stringent
criticism).

As always, I played the games from this year's comp in a random order;
as such, it's surely just a coincidence that three games in a row had
some degree of personal relevance for me. My first girlfriend used to
cut herself; so too did one of my closest friends. The female
character who provides the conflict and environment (the game is an
allegorical trek through her mind) for On Optimism has a number of
issues - heroin addiction probably being the biggest - but she cuts
herself too, and since thankfully none of my friends or family are IV
substance-dependent, cutting is the one I focused on. I will come
right out and say that I really disliked how the game treats the
activity, probably at least partly due to those idiosyncratic factors
which biased so much of the previous two reviews. However, I feel on
much firmer ground criticising it than I do Mix Tape or Internal
Vigilance - On Optimism just doesn't work, as a game or as an
aesthetic statement.

The game aspect is easier to critique, so I'll start there. On
Optimism is riddled with misspellings, usually due to homophones
(bear/bare, its/it's), which I find particularly irritating. There are
way too many pieces of paper floating around, and the game does a poor
job of distinguishing between them, which leads to lots of
disambiguation problems. The puzzles are either trivial (replace one
piece of paper in a cabinet with another) or completely inscrutable
(BROCK, GET NEEDLE is the worst offender here. Puzzles which require
ordering NPCs around are often difficult to implement in an intuitive
fashion, and here there's not even an indication that the statue is
animate). The game often requires solutions to be in very specific
forms: PUT BLOOD IN BOTTLE causes the character to put a bottle into a
hole into which blood is dripping, but the more intuitive PUT BOTTLE IN
HOLE doesn't work.

Worse, the game's writing is terrible. The prose is overwrought,
dripping with emotion which is completely unearned by the narrative -
at one point, the protagonist says that weeping is not his custom, when
it seems like every single room he enters prompts a different crying
fit. There are a number of poems, which serve as thematic signposts
and also play a role in several puzzles - they're similarly
overwritten and have a tendency towards doggerel and incoherence ("My
hand reached down to your waist/oh you should have seen your face/It
squeezed yours and we lost all our disgrace"). And for God's sake, if
you're going to quote Ecclesiastes 1:18, don't use the bloody,
bloodless NIV: "the more knowledge, the more grief" has nothing on "for
in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge
increaseth sorrow." Sometimes you just need to go with the King James.
At one point, to illustrate the depths of self-loathing which cause
and inform the self-mutilation and drug abuse, the author invokes, of
all things, Gollum/Smeagol's internal struggle in the Lord of the
Rings. And misspells the names.

On a more thematic level, the player character is a Romanticism-addled
victim of a messiah complex gone horribly awry. There's a slim chance
that the author is in on this, and the game is meant as a devastating
critique of a particular type of person who thinks that loving somebody
in a smothering, histrionic fashion is going to magically fix them,
showing the love-object that they don't actually have problems, they're
perfect and flawless just the way they are. The whole thing is framed
as a hallucination attendant on a suicide attempt, so there's some
hope. But the game oozes sincerity, and no matter how much I'd like
to, I just can't take it ironically. This is where my personal
experiences come in again - yes, I was just such a callow idiot when
I was younger, and it took a while to disabuse me of the delusion. To
be put back in a similar place was distasteful, as a result. But
worse, the process the game posits as a solution just isn't
psychologically plausible. It reduces the "loved" object to exactly
that - she's important only to the extent that the protagonist can
validate his own feelings of self-worth by abnegating himself and
thereby proving to the object that he's all she needs. It's not about
helping her work through her problems - no, it's all about him and
his martyr complex. It's perhaps the most extreme form of narcissism,
and it's impossible to wish the protagonist "success" in his endeavor
as a result.

I could also complain about the composition of the allegory - there
are some evocative images, like the take on the nihilism of fear, but
much of the rest, like the "window on the soul," lead to much gnashing
of teeth. Still, these details didn't really make much difference to
my reaction, one way or the other. On Optimism's writing is painful,
and the way it treats its female lead is worse. I wish it was
tongue-in-cheek, a parody of people who are way too into the Cure or
the Sorrows of Young Werther, because it certainly succeeds in this
task - an ironic train-wreck is somehow less of a train-wreck. But
unfortunately On Optimism plays it straight. While there are games
that are "worse" in the comp - because incomplete, buggy, cliched to
the point of inanity - I found On Optimism to be the least pleasant
to play. I didn't rank it that badly because whatever its faults, it's
at least attempting to deal with conflicts more dramatic than
recovering the Magic Amulet of Whatever or fixing the spaceship before
it crash lands or what have you, but by no means can I recommend it.

Off the Trolley:

After a string of games to which I had rather heavy reactions, I was
glad to have Trolley come up next - it's decidedly low-key and
quirky, a puzzle-y romp which isn't trying to have much plot but winds
up being fun nonetheless. The set-up - on the day of his retirement,
an aged trolley operator wants to crash his vehicle into a building he
thinks is evil - is bizarre enough that I immediately suspected that
the player character was meant to be mentally ill, but somehow by the
end of the game, I really wanted to smash those mirrored walls in too.

Trolley just has the one meta-puzzle, but there are a number of steps
required (as the operator, you need to get the trolley to switch
tracks, charge up its battery, and thoughtfully get all the passengers
to disembark before going off on a frolic of your own). This is a nice
set-up: it's always clear what the point of each individual task is,
and the player can work on puzzles in parallel without feeling like
he's getting stymied. Plus, the corresponding payoff is that much
greater.

The component puzzles are entertaining - none of them are
particularly difficult, and most are reasonably well-clued. Getting
the ordinary passengers off and charging up the battery just require
paying attention to the environment, and while evicting the bum is a
bit more complex, the author does a good job of providing feedback for
partially right solutions which don't quite get all the pieces
together. I had a hard time visualizing how to switch from one track
to the other, and my attempts were somewhat frustrating as a result,
but looking over the accepted syntaxes, I think the problem was just on
my end.

Overall, Trolley is a clean, focused game. Indeed, the weakest part is
probably the postlude; it's not immediately clear what you're supposed
to do, and suddenly jumping to an entirely new character in an entirely
new environment is disorienting, especially given the draconian time
constraints. It's probably a misstep, but as long as Trolley sticks to
its narrow premise, it does everything it sets out to do.

Tough Beans:

The genre of caffeine-referencing IF games about workplace purgatory is
more crowded than one might prima facie guess; it's also, in my eyes,
not been particularly enjoyable. The setup has been done to death, in
comic strips, sitcoms, and movies, and the particular games -
Caffeination and Coffee Quest II from the 03 and 02 comps, respectively
- have not been particularly good. So I was surprised to find myself
enjoying Tough Beans; fleshing out the scenario by including a plot
about actual characters, rather than relying on stale observational
humor, gives a tired premise a real shot in the arm. As a result,
Tough Beans is a workplace/relationship comedy which is fun to play.

The opening is effective, quickly establishing the character's
personality (and eliciting sympathy!) in just a few sentences, and then
continues strong by introducing a narrative complication. Suspected
(or actual) infidelity is one of the all-time great motivators, of
course, and it works like a charm here. Much of what happens next
isn't that different from what you'd see in other workplace-humor games
- mornings from hell, annoying bosses, endless queues - but knowing
that the player character is continually stewing over her boyfriend's
betrayal, and that every annoyance has the chance of being the straw
which will eventually lead to total meltdown, creates a necessary sense
of narrative momentum, and making the protagonist that much more
interesting. It's an elementary thing, but so many games neglect to
have the protagonist react to what's happening in any but the most
perfunctory manner that it's refreshing to see one that bucks the
trend.

The hoops the player must jump through are a mixed bag; some arise
logically enough, and have reasonable solutions (improvising a pen,
setting off the explosion), but others strain credulity (the dog-food
rattling puzzle at the beginning is a particular offender). Still,
none are too difficult, and the player can move through them at a brisk
pace. The breezy writing also helps matters go down agreeably

The scoring system seems to be a bit buggy (I won one game with 11 out
of 10 points), and doesn't really add much to the game, but I suppose
it does give a bit of an incentive to play again. I only noticed one
mistake: "subsequently, they aren't worth losing a finger over" doesn't
make sense, and I think the author meant "consequently." Besides
these, my only real complaint is that when speaking to the paramour of
the protagonist's now ex-boyfriend at the end of the game, TELL
PARAMOUR BOYFRIEND HAS GENITAL HERPES isn't recognized by the parser.
Sigh. And I felt so clever.

Tough Beans won't set the world on fire, but as first games go, it's
remarkably solid and enjoyable. I hope the author explores some less
played-out premises in the future - she's certainly got the chops for
it, and her easy way with characterization bodes well no matter what
she winds up working on.

Ninja 2:

I remember playing Ninja 1 in last year's comp. It wasn't very good
- like many custom parser games, interaction felt awkward, and there
wasn't much content. When I saw that there was a sequel on this year's
roster, I hoped that since the author already had the parser up and
running, he would have had a full year to focus on the story and
puzzles, and smoothing off the rough edges.

No such luck; immediately upon entering the game, a dragon accosts the
player and appears to want to play Spacewar (the setting is notionally
feudal Japan, I believe). I flailed around for a while, unable to
figure out what I was supposed to be doing. The parser kept kicking
out ">20" without rhyme or reason, same as it did last year. And then
a ninja cut me in half, which in most other circumstances would make me
unhappy, but here I must confess I was glad to be off the hook.

The Sword of Malice:

Sword of Malice doesn't make the best first impression in the world.
The protagonist, a good-looking-as-ever barbarian warrior, awakens in a
cell which reeks of death which nonetheless doesn't SMELL of anything
in particular. There's a body which is apparently hiding a book
someplace I'd rather not think about - when the body falls to the
floor, the book tumbles out, but before then, it's nowhere in evidence.
And the situation and protagonist seem so eye-rollingly cliched it's
hard to take seriously - yes, we're mighty-thewed and trying to get
the sacred McGuffin out of the enemy castle. Yawn.

Surprisingly, though, I found the game got more fun as time went on.
The milieu and protagonist possess a certain stripped-down, amoral
charm which pleasantly recall the classic swords-and-sorcery stories
(Howard, Lieber, etc.), and while there's nothing at all original on
offer here, the author depicts the proceedings with conviction which
almost starts to look like panache. Yes, it is a McGuffin-hunt -
worse, a hunt for four different McGuffins which combine into one big
one - and there's a combat system and silly names and items ripped
off from Diablo II (unless there's some folkloric origin for the potion
of fulmination, in which case, mea culpa), but somehow there's enough
enthusiasm animating the thing - and enough fidelity to the roots of
the fantasy tradition - to make the game feel fresh and fun. It
shouldn't work, but it does.

Primary credit for this has to go to the writing. It manages to be
both terse and over the top, and never cracks even a hint of a smile at
its own expense. Setting elements are described in the barest of
bones, but this is an integral part of the aesthetic. The puzzles are
likewise very lo-fi; you almost never need to bring any items from any
other location, as they're very self-contained, and hew tightly to
particular themes. Some puzzles do have alternate solutions,
accessible if the player manages to obtain mysterious super-powers (I
had to look at the walkthrough to realize that touching the body would
do anything useful, but this is more of an easter egg than anything
else). I ran into some guess-the-verb difficulties with the very first
puzzle - I knew I wanted to PULL BARS WITH CHAIN, but I got hung up
on attempting intermediate steps (ATTACH CHAINS TO BARS, TIE CHAINS TO
BARS, WRAP CHAINS AROUND BARS, etc.) which the game wouldn't permit -
but other than this one hiccup, matters were generally clear.

Again, there's nothing here which hasn't been done to death - and
badly - by countless other games. But Sword of Malice somehow
manages to be endearingly old-school, revealing that it still can be
fun to cater to your inner child and play Conan.

Amissville II:

I've not played the original Amissville game; however, I have gone
through a number of the subsequent Santoonie games. They've not been
particularly up my alley. Delvyn, from the 03 Comp, for example,
featured a gigantic, aimless world, plenty of in-jokes, even more
typos, and a hunger timer. I disliked it, and thought the hunger timer
was mostly to blame. After playing Amissville II, which features a
gigantic, aimless world, plenty of in-jokes and even more typos, and
I've decided I was wrong. Make no mistake, I still hate hunger timers,
but it's really the gigantism and aimlessness which I can't stand.

The player's introduction into the world is rather disorienting.
You're dumped into the woods, alongside a group of colorfully named
NPCs - none of whom are properly introduced, as if the game assumes
you know who they are. The NPCs bounce around doing their own thing;
one continually pesters you over a walkie-talkie, without saying
anything of apparent interest. There's some indication that you're
meant to find and explore a mansion, but there's no indication of where
it is. So off the player goes, and then the real problems rear their
heads.

The world is just far too big. There's no attempt made to channel the
player's explorations, or even give an overview of the environment.
There's lots of asymmetric connectivity; go east then west, and end up
someplace completely different. In fact, one time through I managed to
get myself so lost, I got stuck and couldn't find my way back to the
beginning. I lost count of the number of pseudo-mazes. There are
objects lying around, but it's never clear whether they're just red
herrings or if they're actually useful. Likewise, I never found
anything which was clearly a puzzle - should I try to cross the chasm
somehow, or is that someplace I can get to by wandering through yet
more woods? Who knows? I might once have eventually found the mansion
the opening told me I was meant to loot, but I quickly lost it and
couldn't make my way back. I think it was locked anyway.

I can see this design aesthetic appealing to a certain kind of player,
but it certainly doesn't work for me. I admit to only spending an
hour, rather than the maximum two, playing the game, but if the player
can't find plot or puzzles or point after an hour, there's something
dreadfully wrong with your game. Focus, direction, motivation, pacing
- in this day and age, they aren't optional. Even with the hunger
timer lopped off, Amissville II feels extremely archaic.

And the misspellings and typos. A partial list: in the opening text,
there's a missing apostrophe. You're and your are confused, as are
horde and hoard. Special thanks are given to Stephen Grenade (duck!).
Comma splices are legion. It's/its. Placque. Mirky. Steal/steel.
Abondoned. Lightening for lightning. Emmense. Bizaar. A few
mistakes or homophone confusions I can understand, but in Amissville
II, the spelling errors are practically a plot element unto themselves.

On the technical side of things, the first time I ran Amissville II, it
crashed my interpreter (HTML TADS 3.0C). I had to roll back to 2.5.9
in order to get the game to work. The game has enough other problems
that I doubt it really made much difference to my overall opinion, but
this issue didn't exactly get things off on the right foot.

I don't mean to be ungrateful. I really am glad there's no hunger
timer burdening the exploration this time around. But getting rid of
the glaringly annoying elements only serves to draw attention to the
fact that there's not much here to lure the player in. Maybe once you
get to the mansion, an IF experience of surpassing richness unfolds for
those luckily enough to stumble into it - in which case, start the
game there, instead of forcing the player to fumble through the
preliminaries for an hour. Playing Amissville, in this sense, is sort
of like being a high school student ineptly stranded in a purgatory of
foreplay, forever struggling with the hooks on the bra. It's just as
frustrating, with no promise of resolution.

Escape to New York:

Reading the title, I was expecting a John Carpenter homage, so I was
pleasantly surprised to see that the game's setup is significantly more
original than murky post-apocalyptica - you don't see many non-genre
historical games, and the idea of playing a thief attempting to gain
access to his ill-gotten goods while on a cruise ship sounded like a
lot of fun. Escape to New York mostly lives up to its premise; the
puzzles are tough but fair, the environment is evocatively drawn, and
there are some nice mechanical touches which reinforce the player's
role as a thief.

The ABOUT text indicates that the ship on which the action unfolds was
a real vessel, and given the author's attention to detail, it isn't
hard to believe. Descriptions note the texture of surfaces and the
richness of furnishings; leaving a porthole open will realistically
chill a room. I've probably played dozens of games set on board
spaceships, and am sick to death of running through their corridors and
cabins and galleys and decks, but the similar environments in Escape to
New York feel fresh. Focusing on details makes the ship seem like a
real environment, rather than a schematic backdrop for the action.

The dynamics of that action are fairly straightforward - the story
proceeds in chapters, each of which has a clear objective - but there
are enough twists to keep things interesting. The player is from the
first locked in a game of cat and mouse with one, then two,
representatives of the law, and while it's not terribly hard to avoid
them, it does make moving from one end of the ship to the other more
involving that it might otherwise be. There's also a sort of
pickpocketing side-game - the player can solve a number of small
puzzles to lift quite a lot of valuable merchandise, and while this
doesn't seem to affect the progression of the plot and only adds to the
player's score, it also nicely deepens the experience.

I found the main puzzles to be more of a mixed bag - I spent quite a
lot of time floundering, trying to get my package from the mail-room,
since dialogue seemed to indicate that the clerk wanted me to get it
myself, and the logic of locking the parcel in the cupboard somewhat
escaped me. Still, there are hints to nudge the player on track, and a
full walkthrough for when that fails. Also, the later puzzles seemed
to flow much more naturally.

There were only two writing errors which I noticed - well, one error
and an oversight. The word "complextion" is used, which is just a
typo, and trying to hit people or objects causes the game to ask "Who
do you think you are, Mike Tyson?", which I presume is an unchanged
default response, but is singularly and anachronistically
mimesis-breaking nonetheless. Still, these are niggles.

I enjoyed Escape to New York mostly on the basis of its setting - the
puzzles and the plot are solid, albeit not particularly engaging of
themselves. But choosing to place the game in a real, historical
place, and play straight without any genre improvisations, makes it a
real breath of fresh air in a field which is often choked with vanilla
fantasy and science-fiction scenarios.

Snatches:

Snatches is as at first a disorienting and frustrating experience, but
it's hard to fault it for that, as that's part of the design. As the
title indicates, the story is conveyed in short vignettes, out of
chronological sequence, each of which ends with a sharp jump-cut to the
next. The jagged storytelling enlivens what's at best a B-movie horror
plot, more or less on the old-Indian-burial-ground model, but as a
result of the snapshot approach, the narrative loses some of its
weight. Inevitably, some vignettes are quite strong, but the shifting
POV means that the player never really invests in the characters.
Because so little time is spent with each individual, they don't have
enough room to breathe and establish themselves, and their eventual
deaths fail to register as a result.

The early stages of the game do a good job of sucking the player in -
after the first vignette, one doesn't really know what's happening, and
the process of piecing together what's going on, and inhabiting
characters who are introduced earlier in passing, helps connect the
proceedings. Still, there are probably too many characters in the mix,
and the fact that each vignette ends with a death means that
individually few of them have much impact. The story of the boozehound
businessman which opens the game, for example, never actually goes
anywhere - he just dies, and that's it. The author does a reasonable
job of working in backstory for the cast, but since ultimately none of
these mini-storylines has any resolution, it winds up feeling very
cursory. Indeed, by halfway through the repeated death and subsequent
transfer to another character's viewpoint was starting to feel overly
familiar, which isn't something a horror game should be aiming for. I
also was frustrated at one point by having more knowledge than the
character I was controlling did; I'd already learned that spider webs
had some protective power against the monster, but since the character
didn't, my attempts to manipulate a cobweb were futile.

With that said, Snatches does get in a few good moments; playing as a
mostly-immobile old man and desperately casting about for some method
of escape as the monster slowly draws closer is nicely dread-ful, and
the episode where the player guides a family dog is especially
effective. The writing shifts to communicating information which would
be comprehensible to an animal - focusing on smells and so on - and
seeing the corpses of beloved owners without understanding what's
happened is spooky and sad.

The puzzles are generally not particularly involved - indeed, for
several characters, it seems as though the player is just meant to
explore while waiting to get eaten. When they do come in, they arise
naturally, and the solutions are usually reasonable. Sealing the
monster away in the flashback episode is well-clued, and every
adventure game player worth their salt always knows there's something
hidden in the grandfather clock.

Overall, Snatches is well-put together, but I think it suffers from
having too many characters crammed into too short of a space. Pruning
things down so there are fewer balls in the air and the player could
really start to care about the characters would have allowed the game
to pack more of a punch and tell a better story, I think. The best
horror IF I've played is probably Anchorhead, and much of that is
because so much attention is paid to developing the relationship
between the main characters. Without player investment in the
protagonists, monsters aren't frightening and death is greeted with a
shrug. Snatches is an above-average example of the genre, but because
of this narrative weakness, it doesn't ascend among the greats.

Chancellor:

I have a hard time reviewing Chancellor, because I didn't wind up
finishing it in the two-hour time limit. The author included hints for
the first series of puzzles in the game, but none for anything that
came later, and there was no walkthrough on offer. So when I foundered
on a puzzle part of the way through, I had no recourse, and time
eventually ran out. There are other games in the comp I didn't finish
- Jesus, Ninja 2, Amissville II, which likewise didn't have
walkthroughs, come to think of it - but this was the only one which I
felt I didn't know how to evaluate because of my failure to complete
it. Chancellor has some weak parts, but it also has some strengths,
and it's hard to know how that balance will turn out without getting to
the end. So the below is all rather provisional, and the only
definitive statement I want to make is a plea to authors to please
include complete hints or walkthroughs, because we players are a dense
lot who often won't get through your game without them.

The primary conceit of Chancellor knits together two plot-threads, one
following a college student left alone in an empty dormitory, the other
depicting possibly the same young woman as she sets off on a sort of
coming-of-age journey in a fantasy world. The fantasy-thread comes
first, and I found it a bit off-putting; not only was I told that my
cloak was +1 vs. quake spells - this is rather a more game-mechanical
description than I like to see in IF - but the solution to the first
puzzle seemed unpleasantly out of character. Drugging a beloved pet in
order to feed and sate a hungry monster (well, landscape-feature, to be
fair) seemed unnecessarily cruel, and not the sort of thing the player
character would have necessarily thought of (I found it reasonably
intuitive myself, which perhaps says something unkind about me). The
writing in this sequence is also inconsistent; sometimes it's clean and
evocative, but at others there are clunkers like "sunlight from the
front door and the window stabs through the room like it's a dank
crevice under a rock."

When the setting shifts to the present day, I was pleasantly surprised,
though. College dorm rooms feel like the new cryopods (that is to say,
they're overused as starting locations, not that they're easy to fall
asleep in and by the time you finally leave, several years have
passed), but Chancellor's depiction is well done - it probably helps
that I actually have been stuck in an empty dorm over Thanksgiving, so
I had an easy time identifying with the player character. The player's
given a number of reasonable goals, and while I'm generally down on
hunger puzzles, here the hunger acts to get the player moving and
provide a goal besides sit-in-the-room-and-work-on-a-paper, so it's
forgivable. The puzzles here again were well-clued, which precipitated
yet another shift, back to the fantasy world. It's here that I started
to hit some snags - monsters devoured my companion, I think because I
was too dense to figure out what to do properly, and then, back in the
real world, I finally was unable to get access to my clothes, stuck in
a washing machine. I was pretty sure I needed to find the coin I'd dug
up in the fantasy world (some objects appear to go back and forth), but
didn't know where to look, and again, without any nudges in the right
direction, my playthrough sputtered out.

Bearing in mind that I'm evaluating a highly incomplete experience,
overall I think Chancellor is well put together. The fantasy setting
starts off feeling overly familiar, but there are enough original
elements (the carnivorous mountain, for example) to keep monotony from
setting in. Likewise, the empty dorm is well-drawn, and I was feeling
positively disposed towards the puzzles before I got irredeemably
stuck. My biggest complaint is that there was a real tonal mismatch
between the halves; in the fantasy world, the protagonist is kicked out
into the world by a stern, uncompromising parent, which is a
dramatically compelling impetus for the action which follows. Being a
relatively comfortable upperclasswoman with a supportive family doesn't
line up well with the experience in the fantasy world, as a result;
sure, being stuck doing work on Thanksgiving sucks, but it didn't feel
like there was much at stake for the player character in these
sequences. Again, this thematic disjunction might get resolved further
in, so this can only be a tentative criticism. I think Chancellor
might be quite a good game, so it's frustrating that I don't know for
sure.

[After writing this review, I checked the author's site again and saw
that he had posted a complete set of hints for the game.
Unfortunately, since I'd already spent my two hours, my review and
ranking will have to stand]

Unforgotten:

Clearly, I haven't sufficiently internalized the tropes of adventure
gaming: I was stymied for quite a while in the opening of Unforgotten,
because after being told that my friend really didn't want anyone to
break into his belongings and read his diary, my reaction was to
respect his privacy. More the fool I. For much of the game,
Unforgotten seems primarily about sticking one's nose into other
people's business - the primary action is in unraveling the secrets
of the family of the player's friend. Unfortunately, the contours of
the central mystery - not its solution, simply the setup - are very
unclear until relatively late in the game, and the author's penchant
for twists make the story more confusing than it needs to be.
Underneath the continual Big Reveals, there's an interesting story, but
I felt like the thriller tropes wound up getting in the way of the
interesting relationships.

Unforgotten's beginning is probably its weakest section; after the
rather forced searching of the friend's possessions, the player is
thrust into a conversation which reveals some backstory, but leaves
important concepts and facts unexplained. Then without warning, the
setting abruptly shifts, without the player being aware of what exactly
has happened. This middle section, which contains the meat of the
game, is clearer, and the player has specific goals to work towards,
but just when I felt like I had my bearings, an NPC - the
aforementioned friend's sister - began launching into exposition
whose relevance wasn't immediately clear. Soon after, the player is
thrust into two vignettes, widely separated in time and space, which
are likewise fairly disorienting, and cast everything that's come
before into doubt. And then there's a final big twist at the end
(albeit this last one is rather heavily choreographed). I do enjoy
games which are one big meta-puzzle - Jon Ingold's corpus comes to
mind - but here, the twists just sort of pile up on each other,
yanking the player one way then the other. Eventually whiplash - and
fatigue - set in.

This is too bad, because the relationships between the three main
characters - the player character, his friend, and the friend's
sister - are interesting, and really drive most of the action.
Foregrounding them a little more, keeping the friend around for a while
longer so the player can form an attachment to him, and keeping the
story more focused by more aggressively framing the problem which the
player is attempting to solve, would have made for a stronger, sharper,
more affecting game. The wall-to-wall twists make the proceedings feel
contrived, and the game doesn't allow sufficient space for the
repercussions of each individual revelation to play out, which really
reduces their impact.

Unforgotten does do a good job of integrating puzzles into what's a
fairly plot-heavy game. The initial journal-stealing sequence, for all
my grumbling, is actually well-put together; depending on how exactly
the player goes about it, there are a number of possible outcomes.
There's a lot of fairly intuitive sneaking around, and except for that
first sequence, the player usually knows precisely what he's working
towards. I found one puzzle in particular to be shaky - lowering a
doped pie to attack dogs on the end of a fishing rod feels far too
slapsticky for the rest of the game, and LOWER PIE seemed a much more
natural way of doing this than LOWER ROD - but otherwise the puzzles
are well clued, even when the player doesn't necessarily know what he's
meant to be doing.

One sequence does remind me of the comment I made about Tough Beans,
above, to the effect that too few games depict the player character
reacting to events. There's a scene in Unforgotten where the player is
controlling a little girl who, while hiding, overhears two soldiers
talk about raping her mother - this strikes me as a rather traumatic
event, but for all the game discloses, the girl reacts with stone-faced
impassivity. I'm not lobbying for histrionics here, but any human
being would be really upset in this situation, and the tension of
perhaps calling attention to yourself could make for a more
dramatically interesting scene.

Still, Unforgotten does pay more attention to questions of character
than do most games, and its narrative shortcomings are real but not
fatal. Definitely worth a play.

PTBAD 6.5:

There was a PTBAD game among last year's entries, and I remember seeing
a post-Comp comment to the effect that it was written specifically in
order to get a certain result in the voting. I forget if it was an
attempt at the Golden Banana or a run for last place or to get at
exactly the one-third mark, but it was something like that. That
didn't exactly put me in the most open-minded of moods when it came
time to play this new entry, and indeed, it doesn't appear that much
has changed. There are a bunch of random objects, some of which aren't
actually mentioned in the room descriptions, plenty of misspellings,
and nothing much to do. My only real comment is that the line from
Song of Myself is "I am large, I contain multitudes." Comma, not
period. This matters to me, somehow.

Son of a...:

Son of a... (hereinafter SOA) is a minor game, a collection of low-key
puzzles without much in the way of plot to enliven things. The player
character's car has broken down, and now he needs to charge up his cell
phone and call for a tow. The premise is pleasantly quotidian, and the
setting - an abandoned motel - is at least not one that's been done
to death. The puzzles are where all the action is, and while they're a
bit overly key-reliant, they're generally intuitive.

All of this makes the game competent and inoffensive, which it mainly
is, except that it feels unpolished. There are a number of writing
errors: "its" is continually confused with "it's" (in the opening
crawl, no less), and there's a location called the "utily shack," for
example. X ME gives the predictable result. EXAMINING a sign in the
motel office caused the interpreter's font to suddenly change. At one
point, the player needs to break a window with a garden gnome, but
BREAK WINDOW WITH GNOME doesn't work. None of these are dealbreakers,
but they do make the game feel significantly less clean.

Really, there's not much to be said about SOA; it is what it is, and
what it is isn't particularly ambitious or memorable. If it's a first
game, it's pretty good - I didn't notice any technical problems, and
the puzzles are reasonably well structured - but there's not much
here to excite the jaded palate.

Distress:

I enjoyed the author's entry in last year's Comp, Trading Punches, and
though Distress is a fairly different game, I likewise had a good time
with it. This surprised me, as Distress is very deadly, is easy to put
in an unwinnable state, and has no plot or characterization to speak of
- generally not the elements I look for in IF! But it plays fair and
though the player will do a lot of dying, generally each death imparts
a bit more information about how to not die next time. The writing is
taut, the puzzles are reasonable, and solving the game definitely feels
satisfying. Distress nails what it's going for, in short, and while
this isn't my favorite flavor of IF, I can definitely take pleasure
from something so finely-crafted.

The ABOUT notes imply that the author put Distress through some beta
testing, not just for stability, but also to tweak the puzzle design,
and the effort paid off. A whole lot of death is necessary to make it
through the game, but the failure-text clues you in on what went wrong.
If you wait too long in the opening screen, a piece of paper gets torn
loose from some nearby debris and flies off, letting the player know
there's something hidden in there. Likewise, attempts to fight the
monsters generally end in a devoured player-character, but next time
round you'll know to use the distraction to flee. There are some
puzzles which are somewhat unintuitive - I kept trying to save my
mortally-wounded shipmate, despite this apparently being an
impossibility - but overall Distress is liberal with feedback, and is
short enough that restarting, when it becomes necessary, is not too
much of a headache.

There is something of a mystery hovering around in the background, and
there's something of a twist at the end (albeit not a particularly
original one), but the plot doesn't really add much to the game.
Likewise, there are puzzles which don't have anything to do with
getting away from the monsters, but as these lack urgency, they wind up
feeling somewhat pedestrian - the ending is a bit anticlimactic as a
result, since the after killing the best which has been plaguing him,
the player still needs to jump through a few more hoops. Still,
Distress is a very tight game, focused and, in its way, elegant.

Xen: the Contest:

I'm usually in favor of games taking some time to establish their
premise, the central characters, and the protagonist's routine, rather
than just jumping into a plot before the player is given a reason to
care about the proceedings. Situating a story in a particular place,
and allowing the people to exist independent of whatever dramatic twist
winds up pulling the rug out from under them is, generally makes the
narrative feel more distinctive, more real, and facilitates player
investment. Xen is a rare exception to the rule - not so much
because it's a bad rule as because the game's grasp of pacing is
seriously off. The opening sequences drag, such that half of Xen's
playing time elapses before the main plot really starts to kick in.
There's a positive fusillade of characters, who wind up crowding each
other out for screen time. And while it's nice that the main character
has a routine, it very quickly starts to feel that the only role the
player has in the narrative is to guide the protagonist to bed,
classes, and meals.

Most of the gameplay of Xen can be abstracted as follows: a) wake up b)
go to class c) meet one or more new NPCs d) eat lunch e) meet other
NPCs f) something plot-related happens f) go to bed. This isn't an
unreasonable way to structure things, but there are a few details which
make the repetition far more annoying than it had to be. First of all,
the "something plot-related" is doled out rather parsimoniously,
swamped by the day-to-day details for most of the game. More
importantly, there are a number of tasks - busywork, really - the
player needs to perform every time the cycle comes round. Before going
to class, you need to get your books together, which is a multi-step
process (PUT BOOK IN BACKPACK. CLOSE BACKPACK. TAKE BACKPACK. N).
Skipping one (trying to TAKE BACKPACK before closing it) makes you
start all over. Similarly, ordering lunch or dinner takes a while, and
getting into your dorm requires a card-swipe every time. The first
occasion that the player encounters these situations, it's fun to go
through the motions, but by the fifth or sixth, I was wishing that
there was a shortcut, or that the game would just automatically assume
that I knew to gather my things before running to class.

The puzzle design in Xen oscillates wildly: much of the time, it's
quite forgiving, almost puzzle-free, but then all of a sudden one wrong
move will result in instant death - I'm thinking specifically of the
spontaneous alarm-fire, which seems designed to require multiple
deaths-and-UNDOs to solve. Many of the late-game puzzles hinge on
manipulating clouds, which are somehow tied to the player character's
chosen one-ness, and they're less than intuitive. Picking up one cloud
to bash others makes minimal sense, and I'm still scratching my head
over whether there's a way to input the correct code into the
cloud-cross that blocks exit from the police station besides trial and
error. Towards the end, there's one puzzle which felt very much like a
read-the-author's-mind challenge - ASK ROB ABOUT GUN isn't clued at
all, and in fact the resulting dialogue has nothing to do with the
command - and in many cases, more synonyms could be provided (despite
knowing exactly what to do, I had to resort to the hints to figure out
OPEN STAFF WITH SONG).

The plot behind the gameplay tries to pick up the slack, but Xen has
some storytelling issues. The slow pace acts to leach much of the
momentum out of the narrative, but a graver problem is the author's
tendency to introduce new characters whenever he gets a free moment.
It's hard to keep track of all of them - to the extent that, when one
of them was revealed to be an alien agent, my first reaction was "wait,
I've never met this guy, have I?" Worse, there are too many balls in
the air to allow for a satisfying resolution for all of them. The
player character's pursuit of Marie drives most of the opening
sequences - but just as soon as things are starting to get
interesting, she's dropped from the story (and replaced by a different
attractive coed). Minor characters are killed off without very much
narrative impact at all.

Indeed, the first-week-at-school elements interleave poorly with the
sci-fi action; at one point, the player character is headed to go
clubbing with some friends, when one casually mentions that a mutual
acquaintance has just been murdered. They head on to the club anyway.
The protagonist later saves an NPC from assault with a crowbar, and
neither really mentions it afterwards. As a result, the thriller
elements feel like they're part of a different story completely.

(On an aesthetic level, I should note that the central narrative tropes
- teenager is the intergalactic chosen one, meets all sorts of cute
girls who are interested in jumping his bones, eventually sleeps with
the alien babe who needs his help to save her people, etc. - don't
really appeal to me on a personal level. But a chacun son gout, and
all that).

Xen also suffers from being on rather stringent rails. In just about
every important scene, my input was limited to banging the spacebar at
paragraph intervals while the excitement unfurled automatically around
me. Really, I think the most important choice I made in the course of
my playthrough was which flavor of beef I wanted for each meal. Given
that the central conceit of the game is that the player must choose
between backing two alien factions, it's rather egregious to not even
let the player voice an opinion on the matter.

And, just as a personal matter, I find the blanking out of curse words
with "[expletive]" to be really silly. I'm not sure if it's meant to
model the experience of listening to the Nixon tapes or what, but at
one point the protagonist reacts to a brutal slaying with the outburst
"that was my [expletive] friend, you [expletive] [expletive]." I don't
think this is meant to be comedy, but I had to chuckle.

There's some promise here. Xen is a long game, and manages to be
stable throughout - I also didn't notice any spelling or grammar
mistakes, which is quite an achievement. I do think the emphasis on
daily life is a good idea, if ineptly executed. The depiction of
college life feels rather shallow, but somehow right - meeting lots
of people and being utterly convinced within a day or two that you're
really good friends already, really, is about how I remember the first
couple of days of school. "Calculus: Your Only Friend" is funny and
likewise lines up uncomfortably well with my own college experience.
And the concept of alien Jains is pretty neat, even if nothing was done
with the concept.

But there just isn't enough interactivity, the pacing is off, and the
overstuffed plot fails to register. Xen practically plays itself, and
the poor player is left to take care of meals and naps while
desperately attempting to keep up with a profusion of supporting
players. Unfortunately, this isn't enough to sustain much interest.

[Victor Gijsbers]

mar...@columbia.edu wrote, about 'On Optimism':

> On a more thematic level, the player character is a Romanticism-addled
> victim of a messiah complex gone horribly awry.

This couldn't have been said better.

Very good reviews, by the way!

Greetings,
Victor

[Richard Bos]

mar...@columbia.edu wrote:

> Escape to New York:

> The ABOUT text indicates that the ship on which the action unfolds was
> a real vessel, and given the author's attention to detail, it isn't
> hard to believe.

Erm...

.

spoiler space...

.

.

.

Unless I'm very much mistaken...

.

.

.

...and there was another big liner that sank in the very same year,
which I rather doubt...

.

.

.

...it's meant to be the Titanic.

Good reviews, btw. I didn't even mind the tropes ;-)

Richard