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I started off giving absolute scores, as is my wont, but this is a relative comp; I shuffled scores around quite a lot, mostly in the 3-5 range (where the gaps in quality are small but significant). The main rule I stuck to was that every game I enjoyed playing would get at least a 6, regardless of its literary merits or coding quality; no game I didn't enjoy would get more than a 5.
Should you wish to comment upon these reviews, positively or otherwise, I can be reached at magadog (at) gmail (dot) com.
10: (no games)
Amissville II:
A TADS-2 game by Santoonie Corporation
Wow. This makes almost no sense at all. I wander through a campsite and a maze-like forest. There are some people, about whom I can determine little (though I may possibly be expected to know them from the first Amissville, which I have neglected to play). I have a miniscule inventory limit, no idea what I'm trying to do, and a rapidly dwindling reserve of patience. Seems almost unplayable.
Rating: 1TOP
I'm mixed on this. The art is a very good complement, establishing mood a good deal more surely than does the prose; the buildup accomplished, however, it kind of falls apart on the reveal.
It seems pretty clear that English is not the authors' first language, and there are quite a few grammatical slip-ups as a result:
There are strong references to many latter-period IF classics, notably Photopia; but the more obvious parallel to draw here is with Tapestry. From early on this seems to be a work with a more clearly defined moral stance than the latter, and swiftly becomes solidly Christian before descending to a level barely above that of a Catholicised Chick tract (albeit with Gaimanesque beings around the edges).
One of my favourite quotes: the detective co-protagonist and his assistant have just explored a Secret Lair of Evil, complete with upside-down crucifix, bloody dagger, skull and all the usual BDSM impedimentia of imagined-demonic-pagans. Here our hero demonstrates the cutting intuition so characteristic of IF detectives:
Rating: 5TOP
This quote, from the initial text, gives some indication of the overwriting of the first section:
The second section in particular I saw very little point in. Its sole merit lay in introducing me to the idea of avocado and black bean pizza, a deeply wonderful concept which I will doubtless explore with infinitely greater enthusiasm and enjoyment than the section itself.
Prose is, for the most part, pretty good; the game's weaknesses are design and depth of implementation. I have a vague suspicion that this may be This Year's Game That I Was Deeply Wrong About.
Rating: 4TOP
This repeatedly crashed Cugel, the OS X 'terp recommended for Glulx games in this comp; I could have dug out another 'terp, but being lazy I played in tandem on Jacqueline Lott's laptop. This proved to be a good thing, since Jacq's an EMT-1 and has taken enough anatomy classes to know a great many Latin names translatable as 'sort-of-knobbly bit that is halfway' and suchlike. Without this intimidating level of medical knowledge I'd have been at sea. Even so it was by no means easy; this game seems designed by medical students for medical students. There's a lot of jargon; a lot of the time you can do any number of things to a body part before you realise what on earth it is. It looks like more of a toy than a game, and more of a revision aid than either. It's sad, then, that when we finished the game it turned out that you deal with the same four patients with the same complaints every time - a waste, it seems, of the game's impressively vast array of options.
That said, it was one of the more enjoyable games I've played this comp, despite breaking an awful lot of the Rules for Writing IF. There is (effectively) an immense list of special commands which are almost the only significant means of interaction. You will >PALPATE a lot. Disambiguation requests are endemic; a lot of them look like something you'd make up as a joke, something along the lines of 'most implausible disambiguation request ever':
We broke out the search engine and diagnosed the everloving crap out of our patients. We got pretty confident diagnoses on all four. Then we had to look at the spoilers, because that's the only way to tell how you've done. We felt all warm and glowy about having diagnosed every damn one correctly (even if about half of our methodology was just second-guessing the lab guys and then confirming our guesses with examination). And we did get to poke and prod our patients in completely unneccessary ways a lot. As puzzles go, this was very, very enjoyable.
It's very easy to feel lost. The help topics are vitally necessary to orient you, and even these are difficult to digest all at once; we spent some time trying ineffectually to take blood and urine samples before we realised that we weren't allowed to do that, and had to contact the lab instead. If we hadn't been online, and willing to do outside research, the game would have been frustratingly impossible.
On the graphics front, the authors have obviously struggled to lay their hands on enough non-copyrighted images; the images of the hospital surroundings don't really add much and could have been omitted with no great loss, but the shots of the patients contribute a lot to the tone, which is that of a medical textbook. We went 'ick' a lot.
Wooden wood!
Rating: 6TOP
So, this starts out as meddle-ye-not space opera, and then leaps into zany fairytale fantasy, and then back. Right at the end there are a series of menu choices which determine your ultimate fate; there is also, apparently, a series of alternative solutions involving violence rather than puzzle-solving. Rather incongruously, the solution-paths are named after figures from Greek mythology. In case it wasn't already clear, this is a game which doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. The plot is rather, um, shoestring; scientist concocts love potion, love potion runs amok and alters reality.
Implementation is, if not sparse, certainly utilitarian. See, the bizarre conjoining of themes isn't beyond salvage, in principle; Diana Wynne Jones' Hexwood managed something not entirely dissimilar, and pulled it off extraordinarily well. The trouble is that there's not enough reference between the two spheres (the stuff you do in the fairyland doesn't have any relation to anything in the sci-fi world, except for a single link) and not enough texture contrast. The prose, the level of detail, the style of play are all pretty similar in both worlds; you might as easily have stepped through a door as gone into a trance.
Rating: 4TOP
Plenty of trauma-inducing unpleasantness, though not to the degree I was expecting. You've survived a spaceship crash and now have to fend off monstrous beasties; it's kind of like that film whose title I've forgotten. The one with space Muslims and some wannabe-Sigourney chick and Vin Diesel being uncharacteristically non-shit.
Anyway, Distress. The writing is oddly awkward in a couple of places, but for the most part is pretty damn good. In the classic sci-fi style, it's not attractive prose in of itself but it gets the job done admirably. The environment is evoked well, feels well-developed and well-implemented, and is one of the more immersive of the comp. Bravo, sir.
The difficulty level is punishing; in particular, one puzzle relies on impeccable timing and kills you if you fail; what's more, if you've tried to defend your injured comrades earlier on (even if you gave up after one attempt), it becomes impossible. This puzzle moves you to a new area, which you can't return from; if you've failed to do necessary things before undertaking said puzzle, the game will be unwinnable. The author appears fully aware of this, and to be flinching pre-emptively in expectation of a critical beatdown, but, well. This would all be pretty unacceptable if the game was much longer; as it is, it's more or less okay, and (as Snyder is at pains to point out) without lots of death the game would lose a vital sense of urgency. It detracts a bit, of course, but not enough that it should have been reworked.
There appears to be only one non-death ending, though, which is a bit of a shame given how easy it is to miss one element of the fully optimal solution. A non-death ending without the explanatory infodump towards the end would have been appreciated.
However, and to its credit, the game's pretty robustly coded; every action that I had to take was well-syonymed, a vital feature for smooth play under any conditions but particularly essential with very limited time. The one time when the command was non-obvious - using the fang as a stylus - was in an untimed situation. There's also a pretty comprehensive, responsive hint system; clearly a lot of love and effort has been invested in this game. Overall, a good solid entry and one I enjoyed; but had I been less willing to use hints it would have been pretty frustrating.
Rating: 7TOP
This is yet another game of disconnected scenes with (at best) perfunctory connections. The sum result is that one feels that the author didn't really know what was going on, so anybody playing it will just get confused. It feels like an IF Whispers project.
Implementation very poor in places, particularly in the area which produces this on first entry:
Rating: 3TOP
So I'm on the Titanic. The game seems to be decently researched, although the author's need to demonstrate this gets in the way a bit, and the prose is lifeless enough to render accuracy irrelevant. I do get to rob Kate Winslet, though. Rating: 3TOP
Sometimes it feels as if there are more people trying to get the lowest score in the comp than there are genuine entrants.
Rating: 1TOP
Oh boy. More heroic fantasy, but in this case you're a wicked pixie trying to sabotage a cobbled-together heroic party. There's an attempt at humour, but it's not a very successful one.
There are a bunch of new, powerful verbs, which aren't really very effectively implemented. For instance, early on I >CREATE SWORD. There's no parser response at all, no sword in my inventory. Okay, maybe it was created somewhere else and I have to >SUMMON it. After a disambiguation, I appear to have succeeded. Still no sword in my inventory or listed in the room description. It's somewhere, however, because >TAKE SWORD then moves it to inventory. Doing the same thing for ARMOR enables you to WEAR but not to TAKE it, and it never showed up in inventory at all. On the other hand, it does appear to be rather comprehensively implented in terms of the number of things it can handle. You can summon virtually any object - scenery included - in the game, but half the time the game isn't able to deal with it effectively. You can summon Val's shovel while he's digging, for instance, and he'll just keep digging. The plotline seems fixed in stone.
The environment is an embarrassment of riches, an exuberant fantasy landscape that's wildly over-the-top, difficult to mentally map and (here and there) attractive - albeit with an artificial, grotesquely stylised feel; a flower garden in a girly manga, or a paste-gem eighteenth-century masque. Often the implementation level is sort of unnecessary; what precisely do ten different objects for ten colours of flower, each with an identical description except for one word, add to the game? Apart from disambiguation issues, that is? One ends up with a very great deal of disambiguation to do, not all of it feasible:
> ask val about lake
Ellipses are badly overused, particularly in conversation; when this is combined with gay mages snogging dark handsome elves, the piece swiftly becomes redolent of a Quizilla poll entitled Which Bishuonen Hobbit Will You Marry. (Yeah, I snogged everybody. The plot wasn't advancing on its own and I was running out of ideas).
Even if the copious design issues were straightened out, the author's clearly aiming at a style which I'm never going to have a taste for. Points for ambition, though.
Rating: 4TOP
After the opening quote, these are the first lines of the game:
Rating: 3TOP
Wow. Unlike all the other games in the comp in which the protagonist is randomly teleported to some other dimension, I'm given a straightforward and prompt explanation of why, which dulls the pain somewhat. This accomplished, however, I find myself wandering around purposeless rooms quite a bit and then resorting to the walkthrough. Rating: 5TOP
The prose is sparse and unenthralling, and occasionally puts commas in odd places. For a game with a major conversational element, conversation's a bit slow and awkward, but it was pretty straightforward to work out how to extract information - points for that.
It reads rather like one of Rick's hero fantasies in The Young Ones - a bunch of unexplored platitudes strung together for no purpose other than self-affirmation. Note to future authors: if you're going to have a philosophy-student NPC, it helps to accord him slightly more complex philosophical views than 'RAR FREEDOM' and a basic ability to avoid falling into false dilemma.
There are apparently nine possible endings; however, it seems rather as if these are basically selected by a series of yes-or-no choices at various points. The first time I trudged through the route which the author was clearly wanting me to take - false dilemma isn't much fun when you're forced into it by a game, either, which is a major reason why moralistic games tend to be infuriating.
I don't know. Maybe the game was intended to have an effect akin to Tapestry: present you with ethical choices, pass no judgement and let you draw your own conclusions. If so, it signally failed; I was left with the impression that the author was either well-intentioned but naive, or else a rabid Randroid. Again, maybe if I'd replayed this would have seemed different - but I wasn't enjoying myself enough to replay.
The annoying thing is that there isn't really even the kernel of a good dystopia game in here - the Union doesn't really have the intriguing features of a Brave New World or a Lilliput. If you're going to execute a political satire, or indeed any extended world-metaphor, you will not be able to get away with it unless you make the world unique. If it's just a skeleton for you to hang your point on, you might as well be on Speaker's Corner.
Rating: 5TOP
THE BOOK OF PAUL
Bonus point earned for being terrible, but hilariously terrible.
Rating: 2TOP
Music is an odd and difficult choice for a theme to build a game around. It's not a universal language and it translates badly. Even if your audience knows all the songs - which many of them won't - they will not have the emotional resonance that they hold for you. Nor is it a theme which lends itself to being explained in text. To get anywhere near the sort of translation necessary to make the theme work, you'd need to have your audience around your place, consume a few units of the mind-altering substance of your choice, cue up the stereo and have a big conversation about it, and even that would be pretty hit-and-miss. In an all-text medium, the theme seems to guarantee a lot of failed communication, which the audience will be acutely conscious of. Also, a Nick Hornby quote is precisely how to antagonise me.
Anyway. I was out by a good number in my original guess - there's six songs, one of which I recognised. Pretty short for a mix tape, and it felt that way. Not really long enough to develop the characters and their relationship enough for me to care about them, and in a Game About A Relationship this is something of a problem. Even within the comp, this could have stood to be longer. Which may say something about the prose, which is consistently above-average for the comp an very good indeed in places; nothing makes a game drag out like bad prose.
The conversation prompts felt wrong. Which is probably a matter of presentation: if the same options had been presented to me as the first choices within a topic-menu system, I wouldn't have thought twice about it. As it is, they made it feel as if I was being shepherded into very few conversation options, which was reinforced when I tried some other likely-seeming questions and got nothing. Yet at another point, the walkthrough suggests asking Peter about a topic four or five times; that's a depth of implementation I wouldn't expect even if other topics were well-covered. Maybe the point is that Peter is a hopeless conversationalist who can only talk about music, but it certainly doesn't seem that way. Peter was a problem, too; in the frame-story he came off as patronising and cruelly self-obsessed, and the second scene mostly confirmed this. Even with the lovey stuff in the last third I still felt like a third party looking at someone else's relationship from a long way away. My reaction to the ooh-I-love-Peter scene was 'oh, for... you silly girl.'
Okay, so probably the relationship was meant to feel awkward, asymmetric and fundamentally broken, but... well, you know the deep tormenting agony you get in your soul when a friend breaks up with a significant other who you always disliked? Right. There isn't any. Again, if I'd had time to get a bit more into the protagonist's skin this might have been better... well, maybe not. I never came around to liking Michael in Anchorhead.
A tiny quibble: if I'm up on a cliff-top having my heart rebroken by my ex-boyfriend, I'd like the game to know what I'm thinking about when I type JUMP. If I'm flashbacking to better times with my ex-boyfriend, I'd like a better KISS response than Nothing obvious happens. I'm sure this wasn't meant to happen, either; this is the entire parser response:
So, in the second section, Peter asks me to cook something for him. In the true IF tradition, there's only one thing in the fridge, which I promptly overcook while poking around the apartment doing other things. A smoke alarm goes off. So my first instinct is to turn off the smoke alarm and open a window, neither of which I can do; neither can I dispose of the burnt lasagna, find a suitable replacement, inform Peter of my mistake, or apparently do anything except wander back and forth... and so I go to the walkthrough, and the correct trigger is SERVE DINNER. You can't do so by putting it on the table or giving it to Peter. Ach.
The game kind of wanders back and forth between this kind of awkwardness and very smooth, natural sequences of actions. Largely, I think, this is because it's heavily linear; when the flow gets disrupted, it has a difficult time of things. It's another game that rather feels as if the author is wanting to write a short story rather than IF - not to the same egregious extent as Mortality, since there's genuine interest in the environment, but it's still a problem. As I said, what mostly saves this is prose. I'm honestly not sure if I enjoyed this game or not; I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt (and thus a 7 rather than a 5) largely because of the writing.
Rating: 7TOP
As with a lot of Whyld's games, this isn't so much IF as CYOA with the occasional trivial IF interlude. So much so that the code shows through if you do anything incredibly unexpected, such as this:
It's okay writing. But it's CYOA.
The essential difference between this and the more linear Cadre pieces - Photopia, Shrapnel, 9:05 - is that the latter preserve the illusion not of player control over the plot, but of the importance of manipulating the IF world. If there's no authorial interest in a world that can be explored, manipulated, meaningfully inhabited, then the IF parser is just a shell for hypertext fiction. Nothing wrong with that, but (in this instance) it's closer to straight prose than to IF.
Even as hypertext fiction, it's not very widely branching. You know from the outset that you murdered your employer and conspired to do so with his wife; you're just filling in the blanks. There is a strong feeling of inevitability about even the post-murder thread. This would be more acceptable in a piece that was actually IF, that gave you immediate things to get your teeth into; but when you're just making menu choices, it makes your interaction feel arbitrary. Aside from the crippling not-really-IF issue, the pacing and structure is pretty good. The prose and theme are also competent, in a bland Hollywoodish Stephen King sort of way.
Rating: 3TOP
Disclaimer: game played and review written under influence of absinthe. (C'mon, I had to do this for one game for old times' sake).
Wow. In trying to be interesting the prose renders itself painfully awful. Furthermore, it doesn't bode well when the first two NPCs you see have 'You see nothing special about X' descriptions. The game prompts you to try a HELP verb, which it then doesn't recognise. This is a game with chronic implementation issues. Given this, it really shouldn't expect me, when I see a car described thus: The game ends on a poignant note, when one of those 'You see nothing special about Agent Someoneorother' guys I mentioned earlier died in a car bombing for no particular reason (there are CRIMINALS about, CRIMES HAPPEN). You tenderly lay the photo of the kingpin you put away on his closed coffin. Ah, Ensign Redshirt, what a tragic loss to the world, my heart brimmeth with tears.
Okay. Points in favour: there were many complete sentences, few spelling errors, and you had some idea of what the hell you were meant to be doing.
Rating: 2TOP
Using a Windows-only homebrewed platform is a completely legitimate and sensible way to go about writing a game for the comp. This is because if you don't write it for the comp, nobody will be stupid enough to play it. And this is why:
Rating: 1TOP
Not really very zany. Heavy references to Taxi Driver quickly establish the kind of tone the author's looking for, and although it goes through the motions it fails to establish the intensity of TD; the feeling of isolation is there, but it's not exactly furious intensity against a sordid world of moral decay. The mirror-fronted building doesn't feature strongly enough for it to be convincing as a target; what the protagonist is really unhappy about is old age and the passing of his world, and he operates by manipulation, tricking the passengers off his trolley so that he can ram it into the building. Every other character seems old as well. The game doesn't have an optimal ending; a secondary PC can die to prevent the attack. Everything is narrated in a tone of withheld judgement; there is no moralising about the results, no explanation of whether the old man's paranoia was justified (it seems unlikely that it is, but this isn't ever established).
Rating: 5TOP
The first room has a shockingly awful poem in it; the question this asks is 'is this poem meant to look like sincere-but-really-dreadful-teenage-angst?' Surrounded as it is by similarly overwrought prose, my initial reaction is scepticism.
It gets more and more teenage-angsty. Horrendously so. Too horrendous to be a parody. The tone is fixed: world vale of suffering, true love redeems world, martyr-complex melodrama. Sincere, doubtless, but artless in its artifice. The all-too-familiar redeemer fantasy that those of us who've been depressed out of our gourds find so delicious. And Gollum fighting Smeagle? Come on.
A work like this inevitably draws attention to the author, and makes it difficult to criticise the text without analysing the author. This is not an unfair way to approach things, but it can be an unpleasantly patronising one, and I apologise if I slip up. Four years ago I could easily have written fiction with precisely this tone (except that I was too depressed to finish anything). The optimism-out-of-tragedy motif is one I can completely identify with. It's just... gah, melodrama is not tragedy. Tragedy needs Dionysus. Depression is not a qualification to write poetry. Intense emotion (of any variety) may be very useful to the poet, but it's a secondary tool. And the whole Christ-suicide deal at the end... well, that put me off even more, but it's the language one's brain works in at a certain stage of emotional development. I mean, never mind that killing yourself, supposedly to help her, is going to traumatise the everliving fuck out of an already none too stable girl, right? No! Dramatic Gestures Fix Everything!
The prose is so over-the-top that it draws a lot of focus off the functional game, which is fairly decent; symbolically-inside-neurotic's-head is an old chesnut but not a bad one, and (putting aside the OTT thematics) it's executed fairly well, and the puzzles blend well with the themes. Yes, it's Mentally Heal Rating: 5TOP
Actually, it's less of a rip-off of Camus and more of a rip-off of 28 Days Later. Shortly after the game starts, you have to start running away from 28 Days Later-esque carnage; there's nothing you can do for seven or eight turns but run, which is reasonably effective but not great gameplay. Particularly since, after running for a bit, you climb some stairs to reach a completely blank room from which you can't get out, and nothing further happens. This happened twice; I should have given up after the second time it failed in exactly the same way, but I'm a sucker for Wyndham-style apocalypses and hence continued. I mean, c'mon, it's the Underground. Few places are more suited to the apocalyptic. I may have to petition the Mayor's office to have some contagious zombies imported, because London was basically designed for it.
Trying to get a drink of water, boring: trying to get a drink of water in the aftermath of society's bloody collapse, healthy fun for all the family. Since this is a game largely about searching through the debris, it's good that search-fails responses are implented and described effectively; there are things I tried that weren't possible, and these mount up over a while, but overall I was pleasantly surprised quite a bit. The environment generally works pretty damn well, though admittedly it does so largely through drawing on the already-pretty-sinister Underground. Prose is, well, over-the-top, but subtle understatement is a problematic tone to adopt when describing zombies eviscerating a panicking mob. There are very hefty cutscenes, but they don't break up play much.
At the very start, you're given the option to read the introduction or not; however, typing 'y' gives the reply 'Please type Y/N only!', so you can't actually read the introduction. There are a lot of obvious actions that are left unimplemented. The waiting-room's description mentions you waving a torch around when I don't have one. Many locked doors can be walked through without their key-equivalents. The pole could be taken without the gloves that the walkthrough indicates should be necessary. The listing-exits thing is ugly, but makes for much smoother play. There's an inventory limit, though, which is a gigantic pain in the ass, particularly since the map is pretty big. And finally, at a point when (walkthrough says) I'm meant to give water to an injured survivor in order to advance the plot:
> give bottle to kate
It's really frustrating, in a game which I am otherwise enjoying a great deal, to come across so many jarring (and in some cases game-killing) bugs. The temptation to blame ADRIFT is strong. For the Kate Puzzle I fucking know it's merited.
In any case, if I hadn't run across such a host of bugs, this would be getting a 7; if all the puzzles worked as they were meant to, it would be getting an 8. However, in the shambolic state it's in at present, it gets a 6.
Rating: 6TOP
Superfluous comma and hideous misspelling in the first. fucking. sentence. Yes, I know I'm a pedantic bitch, but THIS IS A STUPID THING TO DO! The first sentence COUNTS! Do you WANT your audience to think of you as an illiterate gibbon? Even if you have terminal dyslexia, the most perfunctory betatest could not have failed to spot an error this glaring. No. Fucking. Excuse. And then I get THIS: Rating: 1TOP
So, everything up until the second scene suggested that this was going to be an attempt at a sequel to Till We Have Faces, and I had primed myself to lambast the failure of this attempt with layered, detailed, literary invective, possibly with diagrams (the latter featuring crude representations labelled 'C.S. LEWIS', 'YOU', and 'GABON VIPER PIT OF HUBRIS'). Sadly, despite some righteously awful flickers of highblown literary prose, the game's tone crystallised as Zorkish irreverence, which made me wonder why referencing Lewis was necessary at all; why not just go to the myth? Okay, so maybe we're playing Aristophanes here; Lewis builds Psyche up as ethereal and distant from the dirty violent mundanes, so let's make her lazy and pouty and force her to deal with goofy IF puzzles.
Unimplemented scenery, and not just in a nitpicky sense; it's rampant. Furthermore, if you're going to write a game whose crucial opening scene happens in darkness, it'd seem like a good idea to replace the default way Inform handles darkness.
I think this is likely to do fairly well, and I doubt that I'll be very annoyed. I mean, if it makes the top three I might foam a bit, but a top ten rating would be unobjectionable.
Rating: 4TOP
Damn, I'm good at this.
Rating: 1TOP
This is the result of the first action I took:
The NPCs appear to randomly-wander and interact on a level somewhat more complex than that normally expected of randomly wandering NPCs, but unfortunately they're not conceptualised or written well enough for this to improve the game.
It's easy enough initially. I made it all the way to drugging the blokomos, and then... nothing happened. Why did nothing happen? Because in order to trigger the next plot advancement I have to go and return the bartender's magazine. Which is a fair enough puzzle in itself, I just don't see any good reason to expect it to advance the plot. If I'd got desperate enough to wander around every room in the hope of triggering something, it'd have been suggested to me, though.
Then it commits THIS one.
I gave up after being killed by a blokomo and not being able to UNDO to a point where it wouldn't kill me. And I certainly wasn't going through that joyless rigmarole with the rubber hose again. Glancing at the walkthrough, it appears that the game is substantially longer than what I've seen; too bad.
Rating: 3TOP
All right, I think to myself as I glance through the ABOUT text. The Intro to Jabberwocky guy! On the other hand, the first room looks depressingly ordinary; but soon it becomes apparent that this is very much a multiple-PC game, and descriptions change according to the person you're controlling at the time. Pleasant device, though no longer novel; while the description switchovers are competent, they're not exactly glowing. Kaitlyn was probably the most distinctive of the bunch, but I think Susan Groom and Duke were missed opportunities. The opening line of Duke's text suggested that you would mostly be observing the world through smell, but it turned out that SMELL wasn't actually that widely implemented. Also, the section as George Samson dragged out rather too long.
For the most part, the horror element works pretty well. If you miss the (admittedly well-pointered) actions that trigger the monster's attacks, it can become a wander-around exercise which gets less and less spooky; but this didn't happen to me too much. The map I'm less happy with; the hefty number of non-cardinal directions, combined with lots of aysmmetric exits, made moving quickly and surely around the house awkward.
Found a few bugs. The first happened when I confronted the shadow as Susan, attacked it twice and then retreated:
You stab the sword deep into the shadow's stomach, and it lets out a horrible gurgling noise as it slides to the ground.
>g
You stab the sword deep into the shadow's stomach, and it lets out a horrible gurgling noise as it slides to the ground.
The number of bugs is largely the product of all the head-jumping, and all things considered the game is robust enough; it must have been a very great deal of work to get it working as well as it does now. A post-comp release would be much appreciated, though.
Rating: 7TOP
Surprisingly, not really that frustrating, just boring. Explore a revolting derelict motel in order to get your mobile phone charged so you can call for a tow truck. On the way you will discover an intricate, world-spanning conspiracy involving the US media monopoly, a seductive order of Ukrainian warrior-nuns, and the aliens who created humankind... nah, actually it's just a game about charging your phone. Requisite stand-on-something-to-reach-something puzzle, requisite fiddle-with-electrics puzzle. It's not unplayable by any means, but it's not really interesting to play.
Minor bug: when on the other side of a closed window from a phone I can dial numbers on it.
Rating: 4TOP
How's this for horror: civilisation has collapsed and the only survivors are overcaffeinated militarist conspiracy nuts. If you don't get killed by the aliens, you'll perish of dehydration or get your head blown off for slandering American foreign policy.
This is the dark future of Space Horror I, a future where CYOA masquerades as IF and HTML as Windows executables, and where the last remaining humans are so cretinous as to declare their intent to form a resistance movement in an open internet forum, while giving their locations. (In the grim future there is still electricity). It's not IF, but the writing's reasonable for the most part, although whenever anybody opens their mouth it instantly becomes supremely awful.
Rating: 2TOP
Heroic goddamn fantasy, indeed. An awful lot of default responses in places where non-default responses would have been Very Good Things.
The writing is terse and lifeless. The quote below is pretty representative of the room descriptions; there are a lot of utterly superfluous rooms that could easily have been replaced by a single block of text describing a long journey.
The skeleton charges towards you, intent on your death!
>hit skeleton with sword Rating: 2TOP
Hmm. Like A Doll's House except with awful cringeworthiness. Rather akin to My Dinner With Andre. Delicate, fragile girly-girl, who has up to this point allowed herself to be protected, indulged and patronised, is spurred by the awfulness of her boss and boyfriend into getting a fucking grip. The character's nicely traced out; ineffectual girliness (she's particularly pathetic in the opening scenes) slowly giving way by a propensity for sarcastic observation and tough resourcefulness. The theme's not exactly original or uniquely handled - with its characters herded neatly into goody / baddy camps and then into their respective stereotypes, it's a plot straight from some Hallmark tearjerker about Independent Woman Seizing Her Destiny - but it all fits together pleasantly enough. (And let's be honest, Wendy hasn't been allowed to develop enough personality to think in non-stereotyped terms, though this explanation may be a little generous.) A really key element: the prose is attractively readable - there are rather considerable textdumps in places, but I never felt as if I was being textdumped on. (The one thing that riled me about the prose was a use of 'subsequently' where the author meant 'consequently', but the prose is generally agreeable, so I can live with that).
The puzzles, on the other hand, are less than obvious; they make sense, but only in retrospect. Had I not had a walkthrough I might have become rather frustrated. With the Barkley puzzle the action that I thought was the most obvious seemed to put me in an unwinnable situation (in fact it didn't, but it was demoralising enough for me to UNDO and go to the walkthrough). The two other major puzzles were, if anything, less straightforward than the first. On the other hand, all the obvious things I thought might be solutions were deftly anticipated and good reasons were given against them. Some multiple solutions (not necessarily the ones I tried) would have been really appreciated, however.
One significant bug, which gives away future developments:
[** Programming error: coffee shop (object number 135) has no property cheater to read **] Rating: 7TOP
This is a pretty fucking good candidate for Most Egregious Textdumping. The intro section is extraordinarily long, ill-delivered and tedious. Intro sections are for introduction: developments should be carried out over the course of the game, not thrown at you in a gigantic heap before the game proper with occasional perfunctory actions to break up the textdumps. By the time I'm in the main explore-and-do-stuff area, I'm already sick of this game. That is one enormous fucking design error. It is an error which, if I quit after an hour's play, will erase all possibility that I might have a pang of conscience and go back to work at it some more. It doesn't help that the protagonist has had all traces of personality (aside from a trace of sanctimonious-hero) bioengineered away.
As for other motivations, well, I have:
a) save manipulative gold-digging bimbo, who I'm not even going to get busy with, since I'm psychologically asexual;
It further doesn't help that, when you strip away the vast reams of backstory, you're left with a decidedly limp game. I really don't feel like the Awesome Super Elite Government Biotech Warrior that I'm being built up as, because I don't have any abilities that I can actually use in the course of gameplay (as opposed to in cutscenes).
There's also an infuriating violation of the principle that, if you have a vital switch to flip, all the possible synonyms to do so should be implemented. Gyah.
Rating: 4TOP
Hey, this is pretty good. The brutal, inhuman, ugly medieval backdrop is brilliantly evoked with careful, ascetic prose; once again, the best Christian-themed IF gets written by a non-Christian. The environment's excellent; terse but highly effective description
A prominent feature of gameplay is praying to saints for strength in saint-appropriate tasks. The way in which this works feels very medieval-Catholic: enigmatic, stern, and you only get one shot.
There are occasional hints of black humour: "The Eucharist often gets larger in times of stress" made me smirk.
Esther 1413:335? Ruth 347:84? Esther only goes up to 10, and Ruth only goes up to 4! Even the longest books don't go anywhere near that high! Who's Baruch - oho, wait. Clever. Me likey very much. This is a game worth playing with a Bible on hand, if only so you can check the context of the genuine verses; the fire-making one is particularly sneaky.
The floor is pulled out from you very sneakily. When Cecilia asked me to pray to her, I was a little confused, but guessed that either the author was intending this to be a piece about Saint Cecilia (and had got confused about doctrine along the way), or the abbot had let his Catholicism run away with him. The former suggestion is obviously carefully played on; I (and 99% of players) certainly knew bugger all about Saint Cecilia, or if she was a medieval figure credited with saving a monastery from the plague, or even if she lived in a period after the legitimate saints you could pray to.
It's not perfect. The section in the cellar was confusingly implemented - probably because it involved a nested room in darkness. A little confusion given the circumstances is legitimate, but I had to UNDO quite a bit. There's also a bug which, for one section of the game, crops up whenever you talk to Cecilia:
Also, best Rough Guide to Christian Ethics ever:
Rating: 9TOP
There's a certain style of IF prose, regrettably widespread and instantly recognisable by its pathological aversion to distinguishing features. The only such feature, in fact, lies in its intermittent and feeble attempts to excuse the terminally lacklustre prose by being a smartass, invariably along the lines of 'X sure is kind of crappy, huh?'
It's odd, really, that the types of environment with which people are most familiar are also the ones which are described in the most banal ways. To some degree I can understand it if people can't come up with compelling features with which to adorn their starcruisers or medieval dungeons, because they don't actually spend a great deal of time in those. Surely it's not too great a mental effort to embellish the familiar, though. Or is there a vast supply of IF authors who live in apartments, cities and campuses entirely designed along minimalist prefab lines?
We are quickly introduced to Kevin, obviously intended to be the Core NPC, and of whom the author clearly feels the need to point out 'This guy is definitely a character.' every five minutes. This is a good thing; I'd never have worked it out otherwise, given that his principal character trait is cracking jokes which in any normal social context would be grounds for merciless ostracism. This is quite enough to render him more personable than the protagonist, however.
Cutscenes. Long, long cutscenes. No NPC interaction except in cutscenes, in an NPC-driven plot. Rigid linearity interspersed with lots of aimless wandering if you miss the appropriate pointer (and hence the next triggered event).
What we have here, then, is a game that's trying to evoke the mood of a bland American college movie; life is a series of cliches with all the edges smoothed off. Reminiscent, more than anything, of terminally uninspired webcomic Everything Jake. Blech. By Wednesday the author is as bored of this as we are and starts to mercifully elide some of the action, although this mostly just makes one wonder why this couldn't have been done to the entire game up to this point. By this point, though, I'm tired. Tired tired tired. When the game tells me it's time to go through the rigmarole of walking to the cafeteria, ordering a cheeseburger, paying for it and sitting down to trigger a cutscene for the fourth (or fifth?) time, the last shreds of willpower I had left evaporated like cheap vodka from a JCR carpet.
Rating: 3TOP |