Interactive Fiction Is The Devil's Work

Maga's IF Comp 2007 Reviews
Protecting America's Precious Youth from Moral Infamy

HERE BE SPOILERS.

Heroic Motherfucking Fantasy: incredibly, none.
Space Goddamn Opera: Across the Stars, Orevore Courier
I'm Most Likely To Have Totally Underestimated: Beneath
Greatest Incitement to Vitriolic Fury: The rope puzzle in Eduard the Seminarist
Games Which I Abandoned Due to Deep Apathy And Revisited Due to Pricks of Conscience: Across the Stars, Press [Escape] To Save
Will Piss Me Off by Placing Far Higher than it Deserves: Wish
Will Produce Lamentations by Placing Far Lower than it Deserves: Deadline Enchanter
Most Undeveloped Potential: Varkana
Top 5 Prediction (in no particular order): Varkana, Lost Pig, An Act of Murder, Lord Bellwater's Secret, Orevore Courier
Golden Banana Prediction: Ferrous Ring
Adjectives I Overuse In The Following Reviews: sparse, awkward

Across the Stars: A Z-code game by Dark Star and Peter Mattsson

Title Suggests: Space opera. Fuck.

I suppose every comp needs an uninspired game set in a deserted spaceship. I wandered around, seeing nothing whatsoever that might indicate that this game might be superior to any number of terminally uninspired space-opera games. Then I ran into time-limit death. At this point, it would take an effort of near-superhuman charity to continue playing. I noted it down in the 'replay if I'm feeling generous' category, forgot to give it a provisional score, and then had forgotten absolutely everything about it by the time I came back, so I felt that to be honest I should really try again.
Oh. Yes. This. The game with the time-limit death beyond the scope of UNDO. All right. There is no individual element of IF that is beyond forgiveness, but there are some elements that require you to really come up with the goods in other respects. If a game has scintillating prose, unforgettably strong characters, elegant puzzle structure - in fact, any powerful redeeming characteristics - and it puts me into obnoxious-to-avoid death shortly after the first puzzle, then I might be motivated to replay, or at least bust out the walkthrough. An identikit space adventure game gives me no reason whatsoever to do so.

Rating: 3
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An Act of Murder: A Z-code game by Hugh Dunnett

Title Suggests: Detective fiction. Not a lot of ambiguity about it.

Moral Propriety: Exemplary. Involves hunting down those who would perpetrate musicals and dispensing the justice they deserve. This is the sort of pro-active policing that our society needs more of.

I betatested this game. No review!

Rating: NA
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Beneath: a Transformation: A Z-code game by Graham Lowther

Title Suggests: Horror.

A status bar declaring 'a segment of your brain is atrophied' is, um, interesting. I am unsure as to whether I should be wasting perplexity on it, or whether it's just a Wacky Game Element with no further significance.
I randomly wander about, and swiftly get thrown into a prison cell, where some unknown object destroys my sanity. Restart. Wander around slightly more, pick up some random stuff, find some weird goings-on in a forest, can't find anything else to do. Quit and think about maybe coming back later if I feel really, really generous.

Rating: 2
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The Chinese Room: A Glulx game by H Giles and J Jones

Title Suggests: IF as philosophical experiment, failing to be either illuminating or fun.

Now, the game says up front that it's just going to be a series of philosophy jokes. I am all in favour of as many philosophy jokes as humanly possible, but I'm not sure that they constitute a complete game concept. The humour is hit-and-miss; lighthearted, sometimes very good, but often the sort of self-conscious injoke that isn't really amusing even to those who are in on it.
The trouble is, the game captures the flavour of the more picturesque and well-known philosophical set-pieces while not actually making them useful; being didactic is no good unless you're also persuasive. The John Stuart Mill puzzle, for instance, just kills you if you make the choice the authors think is wrong. The starting puzzle - the Chinese Room - wasn't a philosophical chestnut that I was familiar with previously, but its presentation in the game seemed to contradict the position the authors advocate, even as you're forced to acknowledge it. The assumption, I suppose, is that since the game is a philosophy joke game the actual questions don't matter, and questions can be freely begged.
Implementation issues are somewhat frequent; very, very obvious synonyms are missing, some puzzles are very slightly broken if you don't do them exactly as the authors envisaged, and there's a low inventory limit that only exists so that you can get a holdall as a puzzle reward; the holdall then proceeds to not work very well. The automatic put-something-in-holdall-to-make-room code doesn't trigger when you acquire an object by any means other than TAKE (such as being given it), so you then have to put stuff in the holdall manually before you can take anything again; objects are often not automatically taken out of the holdall when you use them; in summary, it's a pain in the ass (though not as much as it is to describe). There are many other examples. More testing needed.
The game also suffers from a lack of motivation or aim; it's laid out in that old-school style which consists of wandering around, finding some puzzles, and solve them Just 'Cause. Which is fine, but it works best in a relaxed, multi-session style of play. The authors admit that the game isn't the ideal size or pace for the Comp.

Rating: 6
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Deadline Enchanter: A Z-code game by Anonymous

Title Suggests: Heavy basis in old Infocom games. Unbearably precious.

Hey, I did a SpeedIF with this basic idea once: gamefile as supposed artifact of fictional society, obliquely describing that society, with the arrogant fictional author as the narrator. It was considerably less developed than this, but about as playable. So, yeah, I agree that the basic concept is pretty cool, but the execution's somewhat too thin to live up to it.
The world hinted at has Infocom-like elements: the world is a blend of high-fantasy magic and mundane modernity, although the tone is such that the juxtapositions feel sinister or macabre rather than wacky. IF is a big part of the world; there are in-game walkthroughs without which the game is near-unwinnable. The game is massively underimplemented. This is intended to represent that the game's fictional author implemented it quickly, as a bodge-job; consistent, perhaps, but loses more than it gains.
Your mother couldn't pick you out of a crowd. That's the point, love.
By turns grotesque and touching; as a piece of writing, it's very good. It manipulates the player through parser interaction - it's highly uninteractive, but there's an illusion of interactivity that's effective even when it's obviously an illusion. Participation is important even when it's only symbolic.
There are some interesting attempts at building up a vocabulary for the world; it doesn't seem like a comprehensive effort, but it does add a lot of flavour nonetheless.

Rating: 8
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Eduard the Seminarist: A Z-code game by Heiko Theißen

Title Suggests: Incredibly monotonous game about the virtues of quiet, secluded piety and serious theological research.

Moral Propriety: Dangerously subversive work that suggests theologians live boring and illogical lives.

Super-terse prose. An easily-extinguished light source that makes life really difficult once extinguished. Lack of polish:
Your fellow seminarists X and Y would not appreciate being woken up by your nightly roaming through the whole building.
The rope puzzle isn't intrinsically bad, but it's scrappily implemented and too fiddly to be enjoyable. When I found that I had tied the rope to the wrong thing, and could neither re-enter the window nor drop off the end of the rope, it took every shred of willpower I possessed to restart instead of quitting. Then it turned out that I couldn't move the bed because I might get in trouble for it, and there's nothing else to tie the rope to. I howled in fury and quit.

Rating: 2
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Ferrous Ring: A Glulx game by Carma Ferris

Title Suggests: Unsure. Sci-fi?

Surreal and apocalyptic. The game does several weird interface things, and compensates for this - and the difficulty of understanding the world and the PC's motivations - by including very powerful help features; the game includes a truly non-interactive mode. This ties into the game's inevitable-fate theme, but as an artistic statement it's not as big a deal as it's made out to be.
I had trouble ranking this; I vacillated between an 8 and a 5. There's effective hint-don't-tell worldbuilding, which combines with a general sense of social decay and inescapable doom. There's a strong sense of the protagonist's mind being broken in some undefined and important way; the line between conspiracist fantasy and reality is intentionally blurred, which works well early on but becomes a liability towards the end of the game, when it's not clear whether we've descended entirely into fantasy or, if not, what exactly's going on. I am not a fan of total disorientation as a writing technique; it works well in small or medium doses, but when an author brings it out in force it's usually to cover for something.
Probably I am not getting everything here; certainly the author didn't mean me to get everything, and would like me to interpret this as evidence of the game's deep profundity. To which, enh.

Rating: 7
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A Fine Day for Reaping: An ADRIFT game by James Webb

Title Suggests: You are Death. You must kill people.

Moral Propriety: A game about conducting souls to the afterlife that makes no mention of God. Suggests that immortality can be gained through occult practises or new-age extra-terrestrial 'science'.

This game pretty much says up front that it's a Pratchett homage. This is a problem, because it invites comparisons, and they're unlikely to be good ones. It means that I'll be expecting a Pratchett story and be constantly disappointed when the prose, humour and characterisation don't come up to scratch. In conclusion, don't release fanfiction unless you're as good as your model. Here, the prose is trying to be funny, but most of it falls flat, and this grates constantly.
Anyway. You are Death. You have a magic skeletal horse who can go anywhere, but still have to deal with locked-door puzzles. Initially there's a list of five areas to visit, but there are a lot more that can be discovered - some through rather obscure and awkward routes. There are multiple solutions, and there's a substantial epilogue that varies depending on which solution you used.
I ended up using the walkthrough quite a lot. The thing is, there are a goodly number of rooms which are either red herrings, or feel like it; for instance, a crucial item is hidden on a counter in a shop, but it's a place you're unlikely to reach until you've already been through a great many futile locations full of this-is-a-kitchen-so-I-need-a-sink-item scenery. Further, a good number of the secondary locations you can find are revealed only by finding specific entries in random-selection books. A lot of the puzzle solutions are very convoluted and wacky; each specific step is clued and makes sense, but you often have no idea what you're working towards until you get there. Other solutions are logical and abrupt.
There's a time limit. It's not a totally unreasonable time limit, but I suspect that it's too short for most people to solve it on the first play without using the walkthrough, certainly if they pursue the more convoluted puzzle paths.
There are big textdumps, which occasionally switch to third-person, albeit in a consistent manner. This isn't an immense problem; the prose style is easily-consumable, if not actually enjoyable. The interface is awkward in places, in the way that tends to happen in ADRIFT whenever an author wants to do something marginally unorthodox; the verb USE crops up rather more than I'd like, in places where there are more logical synonyms, and numbers get unexpectedly used as verbs. I found a handful of minor doesn't-make-sense-in-context bugs.

Rating: 4
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Fox, Fowl and Feed: A Z-code game Chris Conroy

Title Suggests: River-crossing puzzle. Coding exercise entered in comp for reasons obscure. Spectacular tedium.

Moral Propriety: An upstanding game about the value of hard work and diligence. Five stars!

Well, it's the river-crossing puzzle, except that you're playing with uncooperative pieces. The prose is in a terse, mildly amusing and instantly familiar IF style. The basic cross-the-river setup is mildly complicated by some simple puzzles, mostly to do with uncooperativeness on the part of your cargo. I would say 'charmingly simple' if I hadn't been somewhat bored. It's okay for what it is, but what it is isn't much: there was nothing to really engage me. Failed solutions tend to be well-coded, but annoyingly justified: from the description given, I can see no good reason why tying the fox to the boat should make it difficult to manoeuvre.

Rating: 4
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Gathered in Darkness: A Quest game by Michael Millsap

Title Suggests: Spooky. Possibly high-fantasy, possibly Lovecraft.

For someone who presumably has some kind of professorial position, our protagonist's diary reads very much as if it was written by a very proper eight-year-old. The writing is not very good. There is a nice creepy setup lurking around somewhere in here - good enough that the stiff prose doesn't make me quit straight off - but it's not particularly well-realised.
Flashlight and batteries puzzle. Ugh. Given the suspense-horror tone, poking about with flashlights makes thematic sense; grubbing around for batteries, less so.
Ten minutes in I discover a newspaper clipping that indicates that the island I'm on was bought six years ago by an eccentric scientist - even on its own that would be a huge OKAY HERE IS THE ENTIRE PLOT NOW indicator - whose highly controversial research - unh hunh - involved the interrelation of genetics and demonic powers. Yeeeeeeah.

Rating: 3
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In the Mind of the Master: An ADRIFT game by David Whyld

Title Suggests:BDSM fantasies.

Throws up a lot of weird text errors when run in Spatterlight, though I don't know if this is Whyld's fault.
This is, well, a Whyld game: awkward, gangly overwriting, interaction that's almost CYOA, an interesting plot that's ultimately unsatisfying. It always seems to me that Whyld has ideas which aren't bad, but which are really unsuited to IF, and would require a better prosaist and game designer to pull off effectively. And there's always that feeling that the game world can't be influenced in any meaningful way.
It strikes me that I am going to end up overusing the adjective 'awkward' in these reviews.

Rating: 4
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The Immortal: A Z-code game by Rob Anthony

Title Suggests: Thinly disguised Highlander fanfic.

Were a Bulwer-Lytton contest for opening paragraphs not obviously impractical, this would provide a strong contender:
Oooofff. A headache of unbelieved proportions. Grasping for breath, a small but desperate part of your wounded mind struggles to cling to consciousness. Something unknown, but absolutely terrible has happened. It's challenging to remain focused and alert, especially when pangs of desire for a chocolate eclair keep coming up.
Instantly, this tells me that the game features an amnesiac PC (yawn), that the author has an erratic grasp of English ("unbelieved"? Is that what happens when Cassandra gets a migraine?) and that there is going to be Wacky Juxtaposition Humour.
One-time events in the room description. Plainly this is going to be shit, and I should stop trying to be fair just to satisfy my vanity.

Rating: 1
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Jealousy Duel X: A Windows game by Alex Camelio

Title Suggests: Japanese dating sim.

Moral Propriety: Among the foulest ordure ever coughed up from the stinking bowels of videogaming, Jealousy Duel X draws from the morally bankrupt culture of Japan to directly target vulnerable teenagers into collecting 'phone numbers' as sexual scalps. A pit of moral degradation.

This is not really IF, but the comp organisers let it in and, for some reason, I'm not feeling cantankerous enough tonight to declare 'NOT IF. 1'.
So, kind of a riff on a Japanese dating sim, but gameplay-wise more like a very early graphic adventure. You're out to conquer hearts, but all you really care about is getting phone numbers with which to make your ex jealous. The writing is snarky, mildly funny, and maintains a tone of light but constant contempt for the protagonist; the basically tawdry nature of the game, from which most of the jokes derive, is offset by cutesiness. There are graphics, which are neither beautiful nor stirring but fit the game pretty well.
Often the options are considerably funnier than their responses. As a result, the protagonist (lack of face or name notwithstanding) swiftly develops into a sort of desperately extroverted nerd, possibly played by Matthew Broderick.
The difficulty level is high. There's death here and there, but it's fairly obvious when you're about to incur it; more problematic is that it's very easy to permanently shut off options, so the game seems to be about working out precisely the right order to do everything in. It's sufficiently big and difficult that I can't really see anyone finishing it within comp game limits: I worked out how to get five numbers (hooker, tough redhead, mugger, bug-eyed study group girl, celebrity) before time ran out, and by that point I was feeling as if I'd pretty much exhausted all the options.
I didn't enjoy this, per se, but... I kept playing. Compulsively. After a while, however, it pretty much degenerated into frustration and a feeling of having totally run out of options, which is perfectly congruent with the game's concept but doesn't make for rewarding gameplay.
Later on (after scoring it, I should add) I came back, found four more (girl with accent, barista, woman giving birth, grad student with headband) and won; it looks as if there are twelve possible numbers to get and you only need nine to win, so I suppose it's somewhat forgiving. I suspect that most people will end their two hours feeling stuck and frustrated, however, or feel stuck and frustrated and quit before then. There are, it appears, two possible winning endings, but - because it's not IF - playing back through to see both would be hugely monotonous.

Rating: 5
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Lord Bellwater's Secret: A Z-code game by Sam Gordon

Title Suggests: A Magician's Nephew -type game.

Moral Propriety: Although this game disguises itself as a tale of virtue rewarded, it ultimately attempts to subvert the Victorian values that made us great.

A Classic Find-The-Clues Mystery Game in a one-room format. It works pretty well for what it does, but it really feels as if there should have been more of a hook in here, somehow. I can't really find any gaping flaws: it's logical, it's detailed and competently written, it's clearly been well-researched, there are multiple endings and a polite hint system, and a great deal of work has evidently been put into it. There's nothing very adventurous or avant-garde as far as puzzles go, but that's no crime.
But... there's a body of realist Victorian and Edwardian literature that is, I suppose, the contemporary equivalent of made-for-TV movies. There's a set of ordinary people, there are some circumstances, a conflict occurs, things are resolved, and a hundred years later I have to punch myself repeatedly in the arm to keep reading. This is the problem with Lord Bellwater's Secret. The story's just too flat and unexciting, and there's nothing that really compensates for this.
There's a twist, but it's not a particularly dramatic one. The protagonist's emotional responses are generally left unspoken, and - since I hadn't had any opportunity to emotionally invest in the principals - the events didn't elicit much response from me. The background is thorough, but it's just a straightforwardly-presented Victorian London without any slants or skews or style.

Rating: 6
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Lost Pig: A Z-code game by Grunk

Title Suggests: You're going to have to find the pig. There may be hijinks!

Moral Propriety: Tainted by the Satanic influence of Dungeons and Dragons, this game encourages children to aim no higher in life than the cretinous, violent migrant farm worker who forms the 'hero'. Encourages nudism, poor grammar and vending-machine theft.

I betatested this game. No review!

Rating: NA
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A Matter of Importance: A TADS 2 game by Nestor I. McNaugh

Title Suggests: Not a whole lot. Vague seriousness.

The stated aim of this game is to ridicule the idea of purposeless scenery objects, or possibly purposeless scenery objects that tell you that they're purposeless; it's not entirely clear. It then goes on to tell a story about professional thieves that doesn't really pertain to the stated aim much, but is probably more interesting than a game entirely about how nonpertinent scenery is annoying. It's still not a particularly interesting story, however.
Things I Am Tired Of: room descriptions that waste space by talking about the general nature of their class. I don't care about the PC's recollections of bathrooms in general, or have the function of a kitchen explained to me. I suppose that this fits into the game's purpose, but ergh.
Fundamentally unfair puzzles. There are hints, but this excuses nothing.

Rating: 4
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My Mind's Mishmash: An ADRIFT game by Robert Street

Title Suggests: Random scenes with little relevance to each other bolted together to produce a comp-size entry.

So, I'm a sixteen-year-old psychic controlling a giant robot. This is a) not my genre, and b) something difficult to make work in IF. It's no easy task to make a battle scene exciting and dangerous-feeling in an IF format, and this roundly fails.
Then it turns out that I'm someone playing a game about being a sixteen-year-old psychic controlling a giant robot, and now I have to sneak around the virtual-reality gameworld in order to escape from griefers. I am seized with ennui. I quit, telling myself I'll come back later if I'm possessed by an uncharacteristic attack of fairness. Right now I'm thinking that a 4 would be generous.

Rating: 3
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My Name Is Jack Mills: A Z-code game by Juhana Leinonen

Title Suggests: Fight Club.

Moral Propriety: Although the protagonist supposedly represents the forces of law and order, the piece continually glamourizes the criminal lifestyle, emphasizing the stylish clubs full of bare-breasted women and underimplemented hotel rooms that are the earthly rewards of sin.

Unlovely prose. Detective-noir only works if the writing's packed to the gills with witty language; without it, it falls flat.
The game is abruptly curtailed after what is supposed to be the dramatic final confrontation, which comes very quickly. The plot is a series of fortuitous contrivances. All the puzzles are extremely easy (this is acceptable) and dull (this is not).

Rating: 3
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Orevore Courier: A Z-code game by Brian Rapp

Title Suggests: Space opera oh joy.

Moral Propriety: A manual for voyeurism and suicide.

This is a very Varicella-like game, in terms of puzzle-structure; you have to accomplish a great deal within a miniscule time limit, and you have to do it all in the right order. Lots of stuff happens without your input, and your job is to remotely steer events from the safety of the security room. You can open and close doors, make recordings and play them back to people, and adjust the thermostat; that's about it. It is very easy to make the game unwinnable; the way to play this is to die repeatedly as you work out how to trigger things.
All the gamestate-influencing verbs are nonstandard; the decision to include a guide to the console was sound, and although it's kind of confusing on the first session, I found the commands relatively easy to pick up. I managed to get XMIT confused, though; somehow I thought it played recordings remotely, rather than toggling PLAY to play recordings remotely. I don't think the game actually misled me here. The other thing I had trouble with, puzzle-wise, was the temperature; it seems to take some time to adjust, but you can't be sure about this because there's no current-temperature display. In general, though, the puzzle design is solid, if unforgiving.
Given the time-sensitive difficulty of the game, I found myself wanting to use UNDO a lot, and this exposed a lot of the weakness of UNDO; if I have to look around to remind myself where the game-states are, I've wasted a turn. I want a verbose-UNDO mode that repeats all the text output of the previous turn and tells me what my previous command (the one before the undone command) was.
On the one hand, this is a game about pirates and zombies in space. On the other it's a dark horror game about sci-fi security systems. There seems to be a conflict between the wacky and the hardnosed aspects; the prose style is terse enough that it doesn't really knit them together. Sparse, but ultimately far more evocative in a few words than the average space-opera game; I would have liked some more texture, but that might have been a distraction.

Rating: 6
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Packrat: A Z-code game by Bill Powell

Title Suggests: A less-than-hilarious riff on the well-known habits of IF adventurers.

Moral Propriety: I'm sure that the pantaloons thing is unsavoury, but I'm sure as heck not going to explain why.

Awkward. The tone that's being aimed for is depressingly familiar: slightly (but only slightly) tongue-in-cheek fantasy, puzzles that feel like coding set-pieces, and little player direction beyond a distant ultimate goal.
Now, I am a lot less sympathetic to this sort of thing than the great majority of the IF audience, and even more so within a comp context - Risorgimento Represso was widely liked but annoyed the crap out of me, for instance - so I am not what you'd call an impartial judge.
There's a lot of unimplemented stuff; the world feels unresponsive. The moat code is broken; disembarking at the drawbridge put me in the moat, unable to move but equally uneaten by crocodiles. This gave me ample excuse to quit.

Rating: 4
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Press [Escape] To Save: A Z-code game by Mark Jones

Title Suggests: Dreadful look-at-me brokenness.

The writing is painfully, horribly bad. The plot seems like a horribly misguided stab at metaphysical fantasy, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but frankly I was suffering too much from the prose and characterisation to be able to judge any other game elements. Earns a 2 because there is at least some sense of purpose and direction, however mangled.

Rating: 2
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Reconciling Mother: A TADS 3 game by Plone Glenn

Title Suggests: Tedious, preachy, faux-sentimental game about patching up broken families.

The subtitle suggests that this is going, instead, to be a tedious X-Files setup in which soulless rationalists are forced to come to terms with spooky mysterious paranormal mysteries. The first room makes it obvious that the spooky paranormal stuff is Cthulhu. Five minutes later I'm communicating with a ghost, with the aid of 'psychic tendrils', as if this was the most natural thing on earth; I suppose I came to terms very quickly.
Stilted, ugly, bare-bones writing blends perfectly with shoddy implementation; on the other hand, you keep running into reams of bizarre description: exuberantly, compellingly awful. Nothing makes any sense, I have no idea at what I'm meant to be working at, and I continue playing largely because I'm fascinated by what utterly random shit is going to happen next. Then I hit a Room of Instant Death which didn't actually kill me, but had a death description as a room message and no exits.
I'm tempted to offer a bonus point for train-wreck fascination, but it's not really enjoyable train-wreck fascination in the same manner of, e.g., Jesus of Nazareth.

Rating: 1
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Slap That Fish: A TADS 2 game by Peter Nepstad

Title Suggests: Zany wackiness.

Moral Propriety: Given what the Greeks understood by fish, this is clearly a thinly-veiled metaphor for masturbation, and peverse, bizarre masturbation at that. Demonic. Avoid.

I suppose that this is meant to be a joke about how RPG-like combat systems are really dumb in IF. Well, point proven.
There are one or two amusing lines. But basically this is still a game about slapping fish; it seems suspiciously as if it was written to justify an amusing title. Given this, it's not as bad as it could be, but this is not high praise.

Rating: 4
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Varkana: A Glulx game by Maryam Gousheh-Forgeot

Title Suggests: Um. Heroic fantasy? New-age dumb-hippy fantasy?

Moral Propriety: Unabashed new-age pagan propaganda. Condones library theft and women serving in the armed forces.

So, y'know, high fantasy isn't my genre. Girly High Fantasy is more suited to IF than Manly Heroic Fantasy, I think.
There's a very big dump of text and info at the beginning, which had the effect of making me forget my goals for a while and wander around aimlessly. Not that this was a bad thing at first, as location is beautifully evoked and it was pleasant just to explore; there's a sort of Islamic / Mediterannean feel that's never laid on too thick. I wanted more to happen in this setting; I enjoyed it enough that I'd have liked to spend more time just wandering around and interacting with the world for the sake of it, slowly building up a connection to the place and the political situation and stuff. I suppose that would be a bigger, non-comp sort of game, though.
The art complements the setting well, although its use feels a bit random. Characterisation is light but effective. In particular, Farahnaaz seems to experience things very physically; there's lots of references to your skin and your body and so forth. This is not particularly complex, but it's not something that I'm used to in IF, I suppose. There's a strong feeling of attachment to the city, too, which makes Nivanen's cooperation with the book-thief seem somewhat contrived; he turns out to be a Good Adventurer Guy afterwards, but at the time it doesn't make a lot of sense.
This encapsulates the problem I had with this game: the fantasy/sci-fi/heroic elements start out very light and become increasingly prominent. I am not wild about heavy fantasy elements. I prefer them low-key.
There's a definite feeling of railroading. Not a terribly strong one, but it's there. I suspect that this is partly because Farahnaaz and Nivanen don't really have much idea about what's going on; there's a feeling of being at the periphery of the really important stuff. This is particularly true of the second half. Conversation is mostly automatic upon TALK TO, and ask/tell has limited responses.
Fairness? Once you get into the final section, there are quite a few ways you can lose, and at least one of them requires a great many UNDOs to fix.
It ended on an anticlimax; huge expostulation textdump, and then the game ended, leaving me with a feeling of incompleteness. It feels like the first chapter of a fantasy epic that may or may not ever get finished. As it stands, there seem to be two games here: a swashbuckling high-fantasy with airships, and a calmer exploratory light-fantasy about art and community and place. If the game was big enough that one could predominate, it might work better; since they're about equal, it feels uncertain.

Rating: 8
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Wish: A Z-code game by Edward Floren

Title Suggests: Um. Hmm. Not much, but my guess is something fairly sappy.

First line:
There is goodness in innocence: Sarah knew that.
To me, this is like a game opening with 'Despite what everyone says, the programs of National Socialism really had a great deal to offer Western civilisation.' NO! NO THERE ISN'T! QUEEN VICTORIA IS DEAD, AND IT'S TIME TO GET THE FUCK OVER IT UNLESS YOU'RE WRITING STEAMPUNK I GUESS. Ahem. And while we're strolling through the minefield of my personal tastes, Christmas-themed games are another great way to earn yourself a prosthetic leg. OK, I'm done. Probably.
The writing is super-sparse. I suppose that this is meant to produce an air of childlike simplicity, but it mostly just feels like cheap implementation. Particularly since the cutscene writing isn't great either. The characters are painfully sweet and generic, and trying very hard indeed to be charming. There are definite Carroll elements here, including the tangible edge of patronising saccharine perviness. "Your wide blue eyes sparkle with curiosity."
It all feels fairly pointless. Small girl really loves her grandfather; grandfather has heart attack and girl passes out to wander around in surreal dreamland; after a while, the girl wakes up, the grandfather's not dead, and the dream makes the girl think she accomplished this by wishing. There are a couple of simple puzzles along the way. Everything is sugary and bland, apart from the stuff that's weirdly Freudian (tunnels lined with dripping gel? a hairy, muscular and semi-naked 'stunning specimen' of a man?); but (aside from a few moments of fury at the first line) I could never really summon up anything more than indifference.

Rating: 2
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