Review: Lethe Flow Phoenix
Gareth Rees
A text adventure game by Dan Shiovitz
ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/tads/lethe.zip
[In order to consider the game seriously, this review necessarily
contains some details of the plot and events of the game, but gives away
no solutions to puzzles.]
It is universally acknowledged by writers of fiction that realistic
characters are hard to do. Any adventure game programmer would add, I
am sure, that maintaining that realism while making it possible to
interact with characters is well beyond the current state of the art.
So what to do? Keeping the interaction and accepting the loss of
realism is one approach, but a second possibility is to lose the
interactivity and try to salvage the realism somehow. Infocom's games
often toyed with this approach, from the mysterious gentleman who
occasionally robs the player in "Zork", to the unseen and unsettling
presence of cousin Hector in "Hollywood Hijinx". David Baggett, in his
game "Legend", experimented with a variation on this approach, by
confining most of the character exposition and major turning points in
the plot to "cut scenes", long conventionally narrated passages which
break up the more conventionally puzzle-oriented interactive action.
Dan Shiovitz's game "Lethe Flow Phoenix" (1995) takes this approach to
its logical conclusion. In this game, ALL plot, characterisation and
background is confined to the cut scenes, and the interactive portions
are completely unrelated to the ostensible plot. The effect is
unnerving and surreal.
The matter of the plot is this: you play an unhappy young man or woman
experiencing an existential crisis. While travelling in the American
desert to try to make sense of your life, a supernatural force pulls you
off a cliff, and you find yourself in a fantasy world. After some
exploring, you find a fallen angel called Daniel who explains that the
Earth is being invisibly taken over by alien invaders, and that you are
one of the chosen ones intended to fight this secret war. If you can
meditate on your life and come to terms with your memories than you may
be reborn as the Phoenix of the title. You experience a tearful reunion
with the ghost of your dead father, find yourself able to forgive your
parents for their ill-treatment of you as a child, and the game ends
with the promise of your doing some good in the world.
It's hard to imagine how an adventure game could get to grips with this
kind of powerful and emotional material, and Shiovitz doesn't even try.
The interactive parts of the story are conventional puzzle-solving
involving a talking tree, a levitating gazebo, a magic mushroom and
other fantastic trappings. Various aspects seem intended to suggest
Brian Moriarty's game "Trinity" (1986): there are giant mushrooms, and a
sun that moves and casts shadows on a giant sundial. All very
entertaining, but it seems rather petty when compared to the
Earth-shaking apparatus of the plot.
The most curious aspect of "Lethe Flow Phoenix" is how well done the
individual parts are! The puzzles are uniformly excellent and
well-motivated (except for one curious action, which most players will
eventually work out for lack of anything else to do). There are several
impressively complex interactive mechanisms, which all seem to have been
coded flawlessly, and there are as many synonyms and alternate ways of
expressing actions as a player could want. On the plot side, the
writing is very fluent and readable despite the weightiness of the
material (although not up to the task of compressing God, angels, alien
invaders, human avatars, a deprived childhood, adolescent angst, family
breakdown and forgiveness into the space of a few screenfuls - as if any
writing could be!). But the plot and the puzzles make a game bolted
together like a Frankenstein monster: neither side supports the other,
and the result is neither successful as a game, nor as a story.
Still, I look forward to Shiovitz's next game with interest; if he can
produce a game and story which go together to make something greater
than the sum of the two parts, the result will be very impressive.
--
Gareth Rees
Gerry Kevin Wilson
I tend to try and get permission to republish these sorts of posts in
SPAG, and have done so in the past.
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Adam J. Thornton
Christopher E. Forman <cef...@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu> wrote:
>Gareth Rees (gd...@cl.cam.ac.uk) wrote:
>: presence of cousin Hector in "Hollywood Hijinx". David Baggett, in his
> ^^^^^^
>Just a minor nitpick - it's cousin Herman.
Oh, quit hectoring the poor man.
Adam
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"Double integral is also the shape of lovers curled asleep":Pynchon | Linux
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You can have my PGP passphrase when you pry it from my cold, dead brain.
Christopher E. Forman
: So what to do? Keeping the interaction and accepting the loss of
: realism is one approach, but a second possibility is to lose the
: interactivity and try to salvage the realism somehow. Infocom's games
: often toyed with this approach, from the mysterious gentleman who
: occasionally robs the player in "Zork", to the unseen and unsettling
: presence of cousin Hector in "Hollywood Hijinx". David Baggett, in his
Just a minor nitpick - it's cousin Herman.
Very nice review; I'm hoping to see more.
Is anyone out there archiving these separately from the other UseNet posts?
--
C.E. Forman cef...@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu
Read the I-F e-zine XYZZYnews, at ftp.gmd.de:/if-archive/magazines/xyzzynews,
or on the Web at http://www.interport.net/~eileen/design/xyzzynews.html
Gareth Rees
> posts?
Well, I'm archiving my own stuff at
<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/gdr11/inform/reviews.html> and trying to
keep an up-to-date list of pointers to reviews of Inform games at
<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/gdr11/inform/games.html>.
--
Gareth Rees