patrickbrianmooney - Tumblr blog

patrickbrianmooney · 5 months

Text

IFComp 2023: Daniel Stelzer’s Death on the Stormrider

This is a review of a game entered into IFComp 2023, the twenty-ninth annual interactive fiction competition. This year, there are 74 games in the Comp, all free to play. There’s some good stuff in there this year! Anyone is welcome to play and vote on the entries during the Comp period, and you need vote on only five games by the middle of November for your votes to count toward the games’ overall scores!

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

On the last day of Comp voting, I thought I'd be able to squeeze in one more game before the ballots closed. "I can take two hours, anyway," I thought. "That's the point at which I have to stop playing long enough to rate the game, anyway, according to the Comp rules. Anyway it says it's only an hour and a half."

LOL. It was a fun game, and (four-plus days later) I'm glad I played it. It was also more than a little maddening.

It's a steampunk premise: you've taken on a job as a laborer in an airship that transports cargo from one end of a nebulous Empire to another. You and your brother are working to pay your passage home, and you're a linguistic minority, two of the only three people on the small crew of eight who speak your native language, Arali. The rest of the crew speaks Kishadu, the language of another Imperial province. The only other crew member with whom you can communicate verbally is Udan, who hired you in the first place.

Then Udan is found dead, and circumstantial evidence points to your brother, who is locked up. Your task as the ship approaches home is to find evidence that exonerates him. This is of course complicated by the fact that communicating with all of the remaining crewmembers is impossible. So the game starts out tense, with a real motivation to solve the puzzles, and oh boy are there some puzzles here.

There's a lot to like here. The game does a really good job of recreating the interior of a small ship in a surprisingly large number (25, by my count) of individual in-ship locations. Most of the ship is off-limits at the beginning of the game, and only gradually do other areas open up; there's a series of gates to the map that start off by opening larger areas, then, later in gameplay, single rooms. Not once does he game simply require you to locate a key; there are places where chests are opened or doors unlocked with various tools, but much of the time, access to new areas has to be gained by manipulating one of the other crew members into doing something that will provide you with access. In fact, around half of the individual puzzles are solved by manipulating a crew member.

This is a clever idea, and it's of course made more complicated by the fact that it's impossible to ask or tell the crew members to do anything: you have to figure out what they're doing, observe the routes they take as they move around the ship, understand their motivations, and then take an action that will cause them to do open a locked door or hatch. Variations include watching a crew member use a machine so that you can use the machine, hiding from a crew member as they make their appointed rounds while trying to move contraband, taking actions that change the route a crew member will take, etc. etc. etc.

I think the idea works really well overall—and it directly avoids one of the typical problems that parser IF has with the detective genre, which is that conversation is very hard to do well in parser IF, and detective fiction often turns on conversation to a substantial degree. In this case, conversation is impossible, so it's purely physical clue-seeking. There's a variety of clues to be found on the ship, including the murder weapon, at least three things that the ship is smuggling, facts about the dead body, and the placement, or lack thereof, of objects relative to where they're expected to be.

I think there are places where the game would benefit from more polish, though. One of these is that the commands needed to accomplish some of the actions get kind of guess-the-verb-y (or, at least, guess-the-necessary-phrase-y) from time to time:

>hide in netting There is no room inside the webbed barrels to hide! Qarrad paces in, treading and retreading the same steady circuit of the deck. >hide in net There is no room inside the webbed barrels to hide! >hide in barrel (the webbed barrels) There is no room inside the webbed barrels to hide! >hide in pallets There is no room inside the various pallets and barrels to hide! >x barrels (the webbed barrels) The netting holds them together on the sides, but it's loose at the top; you've made a bit of a gap there. You could probably fit on top of them, if you needed to hide. Qarrad paces away forward, treading and retreading the same steady circuit of the deck. >hide in barrels (the webbed barrels) There is no room inside the webbed barrels to hide! Just forward, you can hear sharp, measured footsteps departing. >hide in net There is no room inside the webbed barrels to hide! >hide on barrels (the webbed barrels) You scramble on top of the webbed barrels and try to hide.

These are assembled from several attempts. A problem here is that moving the contraband item I'm trying to move gives me only one turn to hide from the crew member making rounds, and getting the hiding command wrong means I have to take five or six turns to set up the opportunity to make another attempt. Yes, if I were smart, I'd have tried to figure out what the necessary phrasing is before I grabbed the contraband; but it would also have been nice for the parser to take the hint from other possible phrasings.

The other downside, I think, is that the lack of ability to communicate with the crew members makes the endings, even the "good" endings, feel perfunctory. The game has been so highly puzzle-oriented the entire time that I had been hoping to get some more of the backstory about character motivations from the ending, but it doesn't happen to the extent that I wanted it to:

show stick to shimat You hesitate for a moment. The shock stick was hidden for a reason. Are you sure you want Shimat to see this? y When Shimat sees you with the shock-stick, her first priority is getting it out of your hands. You try to look as non-threatening as possible, and for a horrible moment it seems like you've just doomed yourself too. But maybe the crew is fairer than they seemed. Instead of just throwing you in the brig, she brings it to Kasap to be analyzed. From the residues, he's able to figure out who used it last?and thankfully, his analysis doesn't point to you. Bashti tries to run, but Qarrad overpowers him easily. And in the resulting commotion, Kiang is unceremoniously released. You can't understand anything they're saying as they reconstruct the murder, figure out how Bashti got out of the locked room, ignore his pleas as he tries to justify it. But when the ship lands, it's Bashti who's taken away to whatever trial awaits. You and Kiang don't stick around to see the outcome. You're safe, and that's what matters. *** Bashti has been arrested ***

From the PC's standpoint, this is a perfectly acceptable outcome: he and his brother survive the trip, and his brother is exonerated. Justice is served, and the real killer is caught. From the player's point of view, though, it's less than completely satisfying.

But all in all, this was fun, with fair-if-difficult puzzles that had sensible solutions, and interesting premise, and pretty good execution throughout. I had a good time with it.

My rating: 7/10.

(I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

(This review is based on the revised version of 3 October.)

#interactive fiction #parser IF #IFComp #IFComp 2023 #2023 #Daniel Stelzer #Death on the Stormrider #detective fiction #language #foreign languages #imperialism #murder #smuggling #puzzles

2 notes · View notes

patrickbrianmooney · 5 months

Text

IFComp 2023: Max Fog’s Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

So I was looking forward to this quite a bit: it's an entry was partly written back in the Infocom days but abandoned unfinished when they stopped making games. The author has dragged out the incomplete source code and made it into a finished game. And, of course, it's the sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, one of the best (and most unfairly difficult) games Infocom put out.

And I think the author has largely done a good job with much of the game. They have their finger on the pulse of how the hard puzzles in the original Hitchhiker's Guide worked, and if the implementation of the new puzzles could be polished up a bit more, well, that's more of an implementation detail than a lack of basic understanding, because Fog is definitely doing a better than fair job of channeling the energy that Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky put into the original Guide game, what with the detail-oriented mechanical puzzles and the requirement to try unlikely and zany things to get the plot to advance. It's not perfect, but Adams and Meretzky left some pretty big shoes to fill, and a high-schooler picking up and rounding out forty-year-old code in an obscure language that's only recently had its syntax and toolchain reconstructed could have done a whole lot worse.

There are places where I wish the implementation had been, well, implemented more. Probably the most obvious example to me was running into some of the main characters from the novels in the eponymous restaurant:

You can see Ford here, laughing with Trillian and Zaphod. All of them are drunk. Ford's satchel is here. The first class idiot leaves the Dining Hall and walks into the First Class, passing through exits with the first class access card in one hand and sipping sherry. X FORD You see nothing special about Ford. X TRILLIAN You see nothing special about Trillian. A first class idiot walks into the Dining Hall, wielding a first class access card. X ZAPHOD You see nothing special about Zaphod.

Ford, Trillian, and Zaphod are major characters from the novels, the PC's traveling companions, so it seems that some description other than "nothing special" is warranted here. (Trillian is also the PC's long-time love interest, so it is especially egregious that "You see nothing special" about her.) This is a massive set of missed opportunities for characterization and observational humor, both of which were areas that Adams and Meretzky excelled at. There are other places where the tone of the writing misses the mark, failing to live up to the original's understated, often laconic humor. That's not to say that any of it was wildly off base, just that Fog's writing, which is often funny on its own, has not yet matured enough to let them effectively adopt the voice of other writers. But that's really what's called for in finishing off an unfinished game that's also a sequel to a much-beloved game.

The other major issue for me was bugs, and this one was a show-stopper: I finally got to a part of the game where I absolutely couldn't progress: it was impossible to solve the puzzle to get out of the "Dark" room, because the in-game hints and explicit walkthrough directions didn't result in the game progressing as described. The gag is that repeatedly WAITing is supposed to gradually reveal a path forward, if you can interpret the hints; but no path was revealed and the hints just kept cycling, even after dozens of turns. The turn count in the status bar stopped advancing, too. Re-loading from earlier saves and re-playing, even on a slightly different path, just got me back to the same stuck place. There also seemed to be a parsing problem at the same time: trying to do anything, including executing out-of-game meta-commands like QUIT and RESTORE, failed with the cryptic message "But ALL isn't close enough."

That was under Fizmo (specifically, fizmo-ncursesw 0.7.14 under Linux Mint 20.3), but I'd previously had other problems with the game: it wouldn't run at all under Gargoyle (2011.1 under Linux Mint 20.3), instead just resulting in a blank screen on startup. Similarly Frotz (2.44 under Linux Mint 20.3) initially ran, but repeatedly froze, unable to direct keyboard input to the 'terp. I think this was related to radio-caused in-game death, but I'm not sure.

But this is a promising and, in a lot of ways, really enjoyable first draft of a game; it just needs a lot more polishing to measure up to the high standard that it's set people up to expect. It absolutely looks like the author is capable of meeting that standard in a future release, which I hope to play someday.

My rating: 5/10.

(I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

(This review based on the updated release of 13 November 2023.)

1 note · View note

patrickbrianmooney · 5 months

Text

IFComp 2023: Onno Brouwer’s One King to Loot Them All

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

This was a fun, clever entry, willfully embracing the camp atmosphere of high-adventure fantasy of a hundred years ago, especially and notably Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian novels, which it parodies rather closely in some ways. You play a barbarian king who has slain a demon with (of course) his sword immediately before the game starts, and who decides that simply killing the demon who killed his priestess is insufficient: he has to track down the magician who sent the demon. So he crosses the river separating the realm of the living from the realm of the dead, passes through the Gates of Order and Chaos, and travels through dark symbolic spaces to defeat a necromancer. It's more than a little ludicrous—standard parser IF verbs are supplemented with SMITE, SEIZE, TREAT WITH, PRESENT [object], and others—and the author's gonzo approach to just leaning into the wacky zaniness of the whole premise carries the game a long way.

There's also a nice clever metagaming twist, in which what I'd initially taken as merely inflated descriptive verbiage early in the game turns out to be a clever hint:

help [...] The following "meta commands" are for the Player rather than the Barbarian: HINT (a whisper of direction at a price - a bounty of pride), UNDO (reverse the flow of time to a moment just passed), QUIT (sheathe your blade and rest your battle-weary soul), SAVE (preserve the essence of your adventure), RESTORE (recall the essence of your preserved adventure), RESTART (abandon your path and make a fresh beginning), and ABOUT (reveal the very essence of this realm).

Having progressed halfway or so through the game, the barbarian king encounters a sage who explains that the king is not currently able to defeat the enemy wizard:

Crypt of the Sage An old white-bearded man sits cross-legged atop a moss-covered, phoenix-engraved tomb. To the south is an ornate archway leading back to the corridor. The sage fixes his piercing gaze on you. You are carrying your axe (wielded), a bottle of wine (open but empty), and your loincloth (being worn). > x sage The sage fixes his piercing gaze on you. > smite sage As you raise your axe, preparing to smite the sage, a surge of energy emanates from his presence, blocking your attack. "Violence begets violence," he admonishes sternly. "Seek understanding, not bloodshed." > treat sage "Hail, Child of Destiny," the sage says, "and listen. A primal force of Corruption has arisen and walks the mortal plane once more. I have summoned you here to guide and prepare you for your destiny. Show me the weapon you used to defeat the minions of our enemy." > present axe You present your axe to the sage. He touches the blade of the axe and the blade's edge becomes translucent for a moment, radiating ethereal energy, before it reverts to normal. "You have faced entities of the ethereal plane," he says. He hands the axe back to you and continues, "Walk the Path of Justice with her blessing, fulfill your destiny, and bring balance to this world once more." > treat with sage You explain the paths of Order and Chaos that you have traveled together with Alcaz, and that in the end, only the paths of Life and Death remained. "Peace!" the sage says. "I fear your friend has been deceived. The paths of Order and Chaos are treacherous and cannot be fully trusted. Too often, the learned study writings shaping the reader's mind, ensnaring them to do their bidding." "Reverse the flow of time and find a companion who can guard themselves from spiritual interference. Only then will you stand a chance of finding the right path. When all paths seem lost, strike the monolith thrice, and I will open a path and provide you with protection against the force of Corruption," the sage concludes. > treat sage "I am no god," the sage chuckles. "Occasionally, a priest blunders into my crypt, and I find it amusing that religious leaders don't expect their gods to talk back to them, much less complain." "Now reverse the flow of time and fulfill your destiny!" the sage says. > march south The sage warns you, "hold, Child of Destiny. Walking back does not reverse the flow of time."

It is of course necessary to use UNDO several times to get back to the beginning of the game to find this companion: the priestess slain before the game even begins can be saved, and the PC must then retrace the steps he'd taken the first time around, with some relatively subtle differences, in order to finally defeat the evil necromancer. It's a likable concept that subverts the basic conventions of parser IF quite well while being a very playable homage to early sword & sorcery tropes.

There are some downsides: notably, there's a fair amount of guess-the-verb, and some disappointment that the game's alternate vocabulary sometimes means that standard vocabulary isn't recognized. Some of this is ameliorated by the game's "story" mode, in which the player can just hit RETURN without typing a command to advance one step along the solution path. This is a neat concept, allowing the player, especially the Comp player, to jump one move forward if stuck. I used it several times when I'd butted my head against a puzzle for more than a few minutes, or when I can't figure out when the magic command that the game expects me to type is. A disappointment, though: doing this doesn't show what the typed command would have been, so it doesn't help to enlighten me about what verb I should have used in a guess-the-verb situation.

Beyond that: the game is very much on rails, as much as any piece of IF I've seen in the last few years. There is an Anointed Path that leads to victory, and the PC is shuttled along it. Wandering is not permitted; attempting to go in the wrong direction results in a rejection message telling you whey you're not permitted to go that way. Retreating to the previous room is described as unwise, without exception as far as I can tell.

Normally I find this level of player control obnoxious—you will note that I I previously complained about just this issue in Beat Witch two reviews ago—but it works better here, for reasons that I find surprisingly hard to articulate. Part of it is that the early Swords and Sorcery genre opens up an opportunity for the game to really lean into the Child of Fate trope, which this game does over and over; being shepherded along by Fate feels much more satisfying than being kept on track by restrictive game design. Part of it, too, is that the humor of One King makes less frustrating combination with the rails that the game installs than does the tension of Beat Witch: with One King, the player trusts that the rails are in service of humor and entertainment, while the rails in Beat Witch are harder to take because they are driving the player toward a confrontation that the player seems to have little chance of surviving against an incredibly powerful opponent. In both cases, the lack of meaningful choice serves the plot, but in Beat Witch, it provokes anxiety, not pleasure.

Maybe another way to think about this is through the lens of morality and player agency: there is no question about who the Good Guy is in One King: the player is playing the Good Guy! But the world of Beat Witch is less morally clear-cut, and there's a way in which a game about moral decisions causes itself interpretive problems by refusing to allow the player to explore options.

But in any case, I greatly enjoyed One King, flaws notwithstanding. It was a fun little game.

My rating: 7/10.

(I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

(This review was based on the revised edition of One King to Loot Them All, released on 27 October 2023.)

#interactive fiction #parser IF #IFComp #IFComp 2023 #2023 #Onno Brouwer #One King to Loot Them All #player agency #morality #Swords and Sorcery (genre)#game design #jumor #homages #Conan the Barbarian #puzzles #fate

2 notes · View notes

patrickbrianmooney · 5 months

Text

IFComp 2023: Jim McBrayne's Have Orb, Will Travel

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

So this is a very, very old-school parser game, written by Jim McBrayne, who's been writing parser games in various BASIC dialects for forty years or so now. That's a long time, and a lot of dedication to a single language! Have Orb, Will Travel is written in a modern, compilable BASIC, QBASIC64, a descendant of the QBASIC that used to come pre-installed with Windows. Playing this really took me back to my roots, playing puzzle-oriented parser IF on what was, in comparison to modern equipment, amazingly underpowered hardware. (Coincidentally, I wrote a bit last week about my early experiences playing parser-based interactive fiction.) It's a largeish game, with fifty-some rooms that I'd visited by the time I reached the end, and a number of puzzles standing between the player and the end of the game.

Seeing a bit of parser IF that fit right in with the better homebrew of the 80s was quite an experience; but it also really made me cognizant of how much the genre as a whole has gained since, say, 1982 or so. Have Orb feels in many ways like it resolutely refuses to learn from what interactive fiction has learned and how it has evolved since then: there are no NPCs to interact with, no puzzles that are not fundamentally about object manipulation. Puzzles involve a lot of guesswork and just exhaustively trying every verb on every object.

The descriptions of objects are more than a little laconic:

X UNDERGROWTH It restricts travel in several directions. X FERN They're of a type you've never before seen. X SHELF On the shelf you see a small book. X ROCK FACE It's pretty small as rock faces go. X CIRCLE It's embossed into the stone.

The location descriptions do a little bit better at being evocative, but really, the overall feeling is one of checking off the boxes of writing necessary room and object descriptions in order to fill the map with puzzles.

Similarly, interacting with the game's objects is often a struggle in ways that I wish had remained in the 1980s:

X BOOK The cover of the book shows… SPELL AND ASSISTS OPEN BOOK You open the book. READ BOOK Page 1 Where the choices are nine You shorten the time By considering prime G Page 1 Where the choices are nine You shorten the time By considering prime G Page 1 Where the choices are nine You shorten the time By considering prime TURN PAGE You turn to the next page. READ BOOK Page 2 - + + + - - - - - - + + + - - - - - - + - - - - + + + - - + + + - - - + + - - - - - G Page 2 - + + + - - - - - - + + + - - - - - - + - - - - + + + - - + + + - - - + + - - - - - PRESS RELEASE I have no knowledge of this "RELEASE" of which you speak. TURN PAGE You turn to the next page. READ IT [The page] Page 3 Limbok Spell ------------ The Limbok Spell is cast by invoking the words 'LIMBOK [object]'. It only affects items which can be carried, and causes them to levitate for just a brief moment or two. G [The page] Page 3 Limbok Spell ------------ The Limbok Spell is cast by invoking the words 'LIMBOK [object]'. It only affects items which can be carried, and causes them to levitate for just a brief moment or two.

This need to manually open and close the book and manually turn the pages is extremely awkward; contrast how easy it is to get Ebeneezabeth to read the entirety of the journal that occurs in Ryan Veeder's The Little Match Girl 4 in this year's Comp. There are many other things about the parser that feel awkward in 2023: the inability to simple TAKE an object which is contained by another object (there are many places where you cannot simply, for instance, GET SPHERE, but it is instead necessary to GET SPHERE FROM DRAWER); the lack of synonyms for things, especially things with long names; the way that parsing error messages are sometimes misleading or inscrutable.

The puzzles themselves often seem random and unmotivated: manipulating an object affects something in the distance, but it's often difficult to determine what is affected, requiring substantial exploration after changing something. Solutions to puzzles are often clued in ways that have no narrative explanation: why are the necessary numerical settings for a device written down and left lying on a scrap of paper? Why is there a book containing exactly three magic spells (only two of which are directly needed to solve the game) and hints required to solve two puzzles? Why is the book simply left out, easily available to the adventurer early in the game? Why is another puzzle dependent on another scrap of paper rather than being put into the puzzle-and-spell book? Backstory could be provided, but is not; and it is no longer the case that the primitive hardware of our day regrettably prevents us from including enough text to explain the backstory. Similarly, if the solution to a puzzle midway through the game involves producing the first three prime numbers, why is there a hint at that written down at all, since it seems that anyone who designed a mechanical device to check for those three numbers would be able to remember the pattern instead of needing to write it in a book?

All in all, there are too many unanswered questions for it to be a satisfying story: why is this orb necessary to the safety of the country, and how did it come to be where it is? If the council hiring you hid items where you would need them, how did they know that you would need them, and where, and why didn't they simply retrieve the orb themselves if they had all of this information? Who are the people moving the chest around? Why is there a TARDIS in an underground cave? Why is there a set of three crystalline objects in the shapes of elementary Pythagorean solids? Why does retrieving the orb end the game, instead of (as the title suggests) begin the traveling?

The answers to many of these questions, I think, is simply that they are the result of constraints imposed by the QBASIC design system; but that's hardly a satisfactory explanation from the player's point of view: the player didn't choose the design system. There are additional awkwardnesses associated with the design system: save files can only be created in the game's own main directory, and names must be exactly 20 characters long, consisting only of letters and numbers; being unable to change the aspect ratio of the display to something other than the aspect ratio of my laptop monitor makes it hard to draw a map in a separate window; fully justified text looks rather awful when the justification method involves adding not pixels but whole spaces to whitespace characters.

And—this is a quibble, but was an annoyance while playing through certain parts of the game—having a constant background noise of birds chirping is pleasant but seems an inappropriate atmospheric sound to play during the parts of the game set underground, in caves, when I would expect that birdsong would be inaudible. Another rather quibbly complaint: the geography stretches the bounds of credibility in some ways. How big is this "cottage" that the player enters at the very beginning of the game and to which he keeps returning? Believing that it has a second story and a basement is one thing; but surely it stretches the bounds of credibility to see all of those secret rooms. Similarly, many branches in the mazes wind up being one-way passages that return to the cottage in ways that are not only annoying (lots of backtracking to get back to the junction where the wrong decision was taken), but also seem difficult to reconcile with the physical geography of the game (how on earth can that sequence of moves put me back there?).

There are places where the game is satisfying, but all in all, it doesn't make me eager to return to 1983-era parser IF.

My rating: 4/10.

(I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

(This review is based on the revised version of the game released on 25 October 2023.)

#interactive fiction #parser IF #IFComp #IFComp 2023 #2023 #Jim McBrayne #Have Orb Will Travel #design systems #programming #QBASIC #QBASIC64 #puzzles #classic parser IF

1 note · View note

patrickbrianmooney · 5 months

Text

IFComp 2023: Robert Patten's Beat Witch

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

This was an oddly engaging entry, mostly quite well-written, with an interesting premise and a really well-developed sense of urgency in its dramatic pacing. It has its problems, but I think it's going to be circling my head for a long time.

The premise is an unusual one—some women discover at the beginning of adolescence that they are "beat witches," who lose their voices but gain the ability to drain the life-force from people around them in a kind of vitalist magical vampirism. These women have a vulnerability to music, which can kill them. Predictably, the ability to drain the life-force from anyone around them makes them hated and feared, and their loss of voice leaves them unable to effectively advocate for themselves, so the official government policy is that they should be killed with music as soon as possible, by anyone who discovers them.

Shortly after the game begins, the PC is revealed to be one of these beat witches, but only after the player has made several moves and begun to orient themself within the game. Ostensibly, the player begins as part of a plague-investigation team trying to discover the cause of a large number of sudden deaths in the middle of a city, which quickly turn out not to be the result of a plague, but of a beat witch who is not the player character. The player character, we discover soon after, intends to find and kill the beat witch who is behind several thousand deaths.

It's not a bad setup, and Patten largely plays it quite well, creating a tense drama where the PC is struggling to succeed against all odds. He keeps the pressue on the player to move forward quite effectively; the game is essentially one action sequence after another. And the character gets a great deal of backstory throughout the game via flashbacks, which are handled well. (The villain gets pretty good character development via backstory, too.) And all in all, the writing is good, evoking sympathy and terror quite effectively. Too, the included music soundtrack is enjoyable and is tied directly into the action of the game in a satisfying way, and I really would love to see more music in parser IF, especially music that is directly related to the plot instead of just being mood-setting and atmospheric.

I think that there are two large-scale things that kept this from being as satisfying as it could be.

One relates to the premise itself: the idea of a "beat witch" is new and somewhat incongruous, and I want there to be some further development of what it means and how the mechanics work. Any fantasy-genre magic system, which is essentially what this is, needs to be sufficiently developed for it to be coherent in the first place, and this just doesn't quite rise to that level for me. What are we to make of the combination of elements: femininity, vampirism, muteness, magic, vulnerability to music? There are plausible explanations for many combinations of some of these elements, and I tried to read the game in several different ways by trying to understand it through various lenses as I played. It does not seem to be a misogynist combination of elements claiming that women are vampires, but neither is it explicitly a critique of ways in which women are silenced. Nor does it seem to take a position on how music can be a form of magic. None of the obvious combinations of elements seem to produce a coherent magical system, nor a statement about any of the elements.

If nothing else, I'd at least like some hypothesizing about what it is that causes all of these elements to co-occur in some women but not others. But no one, not even the PC, seems to have anything to say about this.

The other large-scale issue is that the game is kept so clearly on rails that it's hard to describe it as more than nominally interactive. At any point, there is really only one major way forward; there are occasional minor choices, but they don't really affect the outcome (provided that the play goes all the way through the plot instead of resulting in an early death, which is also quite possible in this game). There are places where any movement whatsoever moves the player on to the next encounter; and is one place where the parser itself is commandeered to force the player to write a particular command. The game is so strongly on rails that it's sometimes hard to see it as participating in the major conventions of parser IF, and I found myself occasionally grumbling occasionally to myself about how it would fit better into a choice-based IF authoring system. That's not exactly a complaint about the story, and it's not a complaint about choice-based IF; it's just a note that the tool chosen for the story's execution doesn't always seem to fit the story being told.

Perhaps another way to say this is to point out that there is very little freedom during most of the game to explore the game's literal geography; there's a literal geography that underlies the game's action, but the player is constantly being forced through it—by an NPC, by the need to flee threatening music, by an explosion—without getting more than a nominal chance to look around at what's happening. In most rooms, most of the time, backtracking to the previous room is impossible. It reminded me rather forcibly of something Graham Nelson said in (the eleventh item, it turns out, of) his Player's Bill of Rights, from The Craft of Adventure: "Being locked up in a long sequence of prisons, with only brief escapes between them, is not all that entertaining. After a while the player begins to feel that the designer has tied him to a chair in order to shout the plot at him."

The comparison that sprang to mind for me toward the end of the game, uncharitably, was to Matt Barringer's Detective, which is unfair: the writing here is much better than in Detective. But Detective had a similar approach to geography in some ways, and the comment that Baf's Guide made about Barringer's game, that "the author ... would probably be more comfortable writing hyperfiction," sometimes seems more than a little appropriate.

But this is a much more enjoyable game on its own terms than Detective was, and the writing really is much more competent. It just feels like the concept and the execution need to be worked out in more detail for it to be a satisfying piece of parser IF.

My rating: 5/10.

(I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

(This review is based on the revised edition, released on 1 Nov 2023.)

0 notes

patrickbrianmooney · 6 months

Text

IFComp 2023: Ryan Veeder's The Little Match Girl 4: Crown of Pearls

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

What a pleasure this was to play.

It's a silly concept — the Little Match Girl from the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of that name discovers that she has the ability to travel through time and space by looking at fire, which is, you have to admit, a more cheerful outcome to Andersen's setup than was Andersen's original ending to the fairy tale. Having discovered this, she becomes "a time-traveling bounty hunter/vampire slayer/heroine-at-large," as Veeder summarizes it. She has been adopted by Ebeneezer Scrooge (yes, the character from Dickens) and is in the service of Queen Victoria. In this, the fourth installment of the series, Ebeneezabeth (that's the player character's name) is seeking magical pearls to give to an infant fairy prince in order to avert a war with the fairy kingdom.

So it's a completely ridiculous setup, and Veeder plays it to the hilt, mostly by refusing to let the game notice that it's ridiculous aside from the occasional plausibly deniable side-eye joke. He traces out some of the implications of the basic ridiculous premise over the course of the game, but also adds numerous other layers of ridiculousness: one of the settings to which you travel is a vampire castle in the Austrian alps, in which you overhear vampires debating what to do with your future self, whom they seem to have captured. (There seems to be no way in this particular game to avert that fate, but it makes me want to play The Little Match Girl 5, assuming the author continues with the series.) The tone of the vampire debate is farcical; think Office Space politics. Another travel destination is a dinosaur society in Montana, 67 million BC; another is an old-west town in Arizona, 1922; another is a space ship orbiting a distant star two thousand years in the future. Another destination — the one in which the character starts, in fact — adapts GIlbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance.

So it's a zany mish-mash, a weird bricolage of pirates and dinosaurs, fairies and cowboys, ghosts and robots and vampires and aliens. (Come to think of it, those are the primary elements of Stephen King's Dark Tower series. The Little Match Girl 4 takes substantially less time to work through, though.) It's all unified by a treasure-hunting plot where you work through multiple mostly-disconnected map areas (eight! Well, five, if you restrict the count to areas with more than three rooms) all at once, where a technique you learn from a talking dinosaur in prehistoric Montana gives you access to another part of the map in Arizona in 1922, and also on a spaceship in 4044; or where the device you find in the spaceship is what you need to detect how to enter the vampire castle in the Alps. There's the pleasing feeling of working through all of the major sub-maps simultaneously; and that happens just because the author has put care into balancing map access in exactly the right ways.

Part of the joy of this particular game is simply that a lot of effort has been put into polishing it: partially right solutions result in responses that nudge you toward fully correct solutions; and none of the puzzles is too hard in the first place. Finding yourself stuck in progress on one map generally means you already know what you can be doing on another map, and going off and doing that will eventually unlock the forward path on the map where you're originally stuck. (The one puzzle that I could not figure out was how to awaken the sleeping lamplighter in Penzance; I tried SING, YELL, KICK MAN, SHAKE MAN — probably a dozen different things in all; maybe more — only to finally turn to the walkthrough and discover that the necessary command is something much like WAKE MAN UP. So I was just making the problem too hard for myself.) The points of real frustration in parser IF, in my experience, are points where it feels like the author just didn't have enough audience awareness to understand how to communicate to the audience how to move the plot forward. Granted, having a theory of other people's minds is a difficult thing to do in the first place, and the parser IF genre adds many wrinkles of its own to that problem, and no one is perfect. But Ryan Veeder is better than most at these things, and that's a big chunk of the reason why playing his games is such a pleasure.

Well, that and the simple absurd zesty joy of ridiculous situations that you encounter in his games: a gunfight with an alien space-pirate; learning to shoot flaming bullets from a ghost; transforming into a mouse to get past a room full of dullard vampires; smearing honey onto your face so a fake beard will stick ... I'm glad I didn't have to play through the first three Little Match Girl games to appreciate this one, but I am certainly going to do so once the Comp is over this year.

My rating: 9/10.

(I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

0 notes

patrickbrianmooney · 6 months

Text

IFComp 2023: thesleuthacademy's "Last Vestiges"

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

This was kind of a fun entry, basically competently executed, a one-room exploration requiring some object-related puzzle-solving and requiring the player to put some facts together to figure out what happened. While I could quibble about small things like wanting the NPCs to have more conversational range or wanting more synonyms for nouns, but the implementation here is basically solid throughout.

I think there's a lot of tension, though, between the game-as-game aspect of this particular entry, which is how I think most people will experience it in the Comp context, and the game-as-teaching-tool aspect of it, which the game declares at the very end when it says it was "[C]reated as a potential teaching tool for forensic science or medical education." That's not to say that that's not a worthy goal; but I think that it's not completely compatible with making a satisfying game-type narrative.

For one thing, the entry requires more medical knowledge, or at least willingness to do some independent research on the medical terminology that the player encounters, than other detective-type IF that I've played in the past; I went to the walkthrough to look at the answer to the last question because I had not bothered to look up the medical terminology while I was playing. Arguably, this was laziness on my part; but static detective fiction has a strong tradition of making sure that the plot is understandable to a reasonably intelligent non-specialist reader by the end of the narrative, and interactive detective fiction has a strong convention of making sure that a reasonably intelligent non-specialist interactor has all of the necessary information available in-game. An aspiring forensic specialist or medical-care provider might be reasonably expected to know more about the implications of cirrhosis, but I am neither of those things.

Similarly, several design decisions seem to be intended to direct the investigator's attention to the relevant medical facts, but are surprising in a police-procedural story. Perhaps the most surprising is that the PC is called to a crime scene to investigate a potential murder only to find out that other police officers have already removed the body and cleaned up the scene; this is certainly not a standard expectation for police-procedural narratives. I think this tension is also visible in interactions the player has with NPCs; I would expect that, if I were a detective awakened early on a Sunday morning and summoned to a crime scene, the other police officers would be more helpful about the results of the work they'd already done instead of just encouraging me to figure things out for myself.

There is also a secondary tension in the game between the game-as-narrative and the game-as-puzzle, which is of course the tension that IF games are traditionally used to negotiating. This occasionally gets fumbled just a little bit here, and it shows in departures from apparent realism, such as the way that the numeric code to the locked drawer is revealed: is it likely that the dead man would hide the four-digit code in that particular way instead of just remembering a four-digit code, or writing it down somewhere?

But all in all, it was a fun short game that I enjoyed mostly solving, with puzzles just hard enough to make me think without sending me to the walkthrough or feeling too easy.

My rating: 5/10.

(I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

#interactive fiction #parser IF #IFComp #IFComp 2023 #2023 #thesleuthacademy #Last Vestiges #pedagogy #crime fiction #detective fiction #game design #puzzles #narrative tension

1 note · View note

patrickbrianmooney · 6 months

Text

IFComp 2023: Handsome McStranger's "RPG Adventure 1: Hawkstone"

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

I have written before about why I think that writing parser-based interactive fiction in homebrew systems is generally a pretty bad idea. To avoid repeating myself here, I'll just say that this boils down to: writing in a well-developed IF-specific language gets a lot for the player, whereas writing in a homebrew system almost never benefits anyone other than the author. The player is already granting the author a lot of goodwill just by being willing to play the author's game: there are 74 games total in the Comp this year, and most people will not get to all of them. People have busy lives and limited leisure time and many options for how to spend that limited amount of time. If they fire up your game in the first place, it's good not to throw away the goodwill that they initially bring to the table by doing things that show that you care more about whatever it is you're getting out of your homebrew system than the player is getting out of their game.

This seems to be a pretty widely held opinion among people who play parser IF. In a 2012 forum post attempting to summarize good practices for Comp entrants, Dannii Willis wrote that "homebrew systems are looked down upon, and that unless your new system is brilliant it will severely hurt your comp entry." Later in the same discussion thread, Sam Kabo Ashwell wrote:

Homebrew systems have historically done poorly. If you enter a homebrew system, it should offer two things: It should be a system that genuinely offers something to the player that established platforms don’t. [and] It should be a good, substantial game on its own merits, not just a demo of the system.

And one of the basic pieces of advice that the Comp offers to people who want to enter the Comp is that they "Use an IF authoring tool," because "giving the player of an interactive story a good basic experience is hard, a software design problem at least as difficult as – and, in many circumstances, entirely separate from – the creative challenge of communicating an engaging story. Using an existing IF tool allows authors to worry less about the technology and focus more on the fiction."

So I think it's probably become apparent to even the least perceptive reader here where I'm going: Hawkstone is written on a homebrew system and distributed as a stand-alone Windows executable, and this has substantial effects on the player's experience -- at least, on my experience. Some substantial downsides, for me, of it not being written it in (say) Inform or Dialog were ...

No ability to save or restore a game, despite the fact that the game folder has a SAVEGAMES/ directory and the walkthrough seems to suggest that saving happens automatically at at least one point; no UNDO functionality. (This is compounded by the fact that death can happen relatively easily and the game actively tries to lead the player into death on at least one early occasion: if you're foolish enough to take the advice the game is offering you, you'll have to restart from the beginning.)

RESTART and QUIT don't work.

It's Windows-only. (Whereas a TADS or ADRIFT game can be made to work in an interpreter in Linux, my interpreter for this game is a VirtualBox installation of Windows. Because I don't run my Windows 10 VirtualBox very often, this meant that Windows quietly decided to update and reboot when I left the game open and went to bed, which ... once again meant I got to start over from scratch. I guess I could try to get it running under Wine, except that this is not the week that I'm going to finally create a new WINEPREFIX and a 64-bit Wine environment to play one Comp game.) Having to start a whole heavyweight operating system to play the game, and then dealing with the downsides of virtualization, gets annoying fast. (To pick one example: not being able to hit ALT+TAB to switch from the game I was playing to the mapping application I'm using, because I'm drawing the map under Dia in Linux, but if the game is frontmost, then so is the Windows environment, which intercepts the ALT+TAB keystroke combo and maps it to an application-switch that stays within the virtualized Windows environment.) No, the game author is not responsible for the vagaries of implementation for Virtualbox, Wine, or Windows, it is part of the baggage that the tech stack they've decided to require imposes on the player.)

No ability to create a play transcript. The SCRIPT command doesn't work, and it's not possible to record a transcript with terminal-recording software, even though it plays in a terminal; it seems to play tricks that prevent the WindowsPowershell transcripting utility from capturing text. Because it's Windows-only, I also can't record the terminal in which I'm playing it with ASCIInema. (I hate not being able to create a transcript. I want the game to keep track of what's been said, both so I don't have to take notes and to help me when I'm writing reviews. Where I should be able to trust that all the text is captured without worrying about it and then just copy and paste text to quote in a review, instead I wound up taking several dozen screenshots and have retyped everything that I quote in this particular blog post.)

Lack of flexibility: the game says it only works at 120 columns x 40 rows, and accidentally changing that at one point confirms that the screen looks awful, and is hard to read. But playing at 120 columns wide means that the game takes up almost all of my screen, even at my laptop's maximum screen width of 1920p; that (again) makes it hard to draw and use a map in another window. (When I'm playing another entry in QTads or Gargoyle, the 'terp window is a relatively narrow column, and most of my screen is taken up by the map I'm drawing. Forcing me to 120 columns makes that impossible; the easiest workaround would be to ALT+TAB between the game and the map; but, as discussed before, making me play it in a VirtualBox rules that out.

Text that's 120 columns wide is hard to read. Another game-related decision that breaks standard IF conventions and increases the amount of conscious effort that I need to put toward the materiality of the text is the fact that room descriptions, item listings, and exit listings are always at the very top of the screen, whereas commands are entered at the very bottom of the screen and scroll up to allow for the program's immediate response. This means that I have to look at both the very bottom and the very top of the window after every command, and also to be moving my eyes from left to right and back to the left while tracking individual lines in order to parse the text. This is far more visual effort than I would have to expend if the columns were narrower and new text always appeared together, in one blob at the bottom of the screen. (It's also necessary to look up at the top of the screen after every single command, because sometimes that information changes in a way that's not effectively signaled by the bottom-of-the-screen responses produced by the game don't sufficiently indicate what has changed; sometimes that's only noticeable if I'm playing very close attention to changes at the top of the screen. For instance, there's an early puzzle where you managed to pull down a high-up clay pot. The text at the bottom of the screen notes that the pot breaks, but not that a bush has appeared; nor has the earlier text mentioned that the pot contains a bush. Only if you are paying close attention to the items-in-room listing at the top of the screen will you notice that there is now a bush in the room. Interacting with the bush is necessary to progress. Taken altogether, this feels exhausting, and sometimes a bit player-hostile.)

Having a better parser would be a real boon to the player, as the one the game provides is more than a little clunky:

---What now?--> e Something prevents you going that direction. ---What now?--> cut thorns With what? ---What now?--> knife huh? ---What now?--> cut thorns with knife object is cuttable. You have a cutter. You cut the impassible thorns with a bowie knife

Similarly, it's often necessary to refer to an object by its full name:

---What now?--> look pretty leaf You examine the pretty leaf closely. It looks just like a regular pretty leaf ---What now?--> get pretty Is it even here? ---What now?--> get pretty leaf You take the pretty leaf.

As the previous examples may have shown, a lot of the text is default text, and that gets boring quickly. Also, it's often not helpful, especially if you're trying to get additional information (say, about what something is) that the game really ought to supply:

---What now?--> look matchbox You examine the bengal matchbox closely. It looks just like a regular bengal matchbox

Default procedurally generated text is sometimes extremely verbose, and I suspect that at least some of it includes text that's meant to help the programmer trace action-processing while debugging, not to entertain, motivate, or provide information to the player:

---What now?--> use rope on pot You try REACH. The plant pot above gate is unreachable but you have something that will reach. You move the plant pot above gate. You did a thing! You did something! You lasso a branch and pull it down from the gate post.

Messages rejecting an attempt to perform an action are often confusing and misleading, as in this example, which seems to simply signal that the command wasn't effectively parsed:

---What now?--> look You can't perform an Adventurer's Search[TM] without perception and a shovel.

All of this is stuff that using an established IF-specific language would provide for free to the player, and it's frustrating to be asked to play without it, especially as the system seems to provide no compensatory benefit to the player.

There are other problems: logical consistency is one. (You are told initially that you can't pull a blade from a tree trunk because it would "take some special kind of hero to remove it. Or maybe just someone clever enough", apparently á là Arthurian legend, but simply attaching a hilt to the blade a few turns later pulls the blade out automatically, turning it into a "bowie [sic] knife." Which seems a bit anticlimactic, being neither heroic nor particularly clever.

Another problem: There is a place where the player has to cut their way through thorns with that "bowie knife"; the game responds by coyly saying that you see "something" after cutting back the thorns. But the game doesn't tell you what this "something" is, and the parser does not recognize "something" as a noun you can refer to. As far as I can tell, the only way the player can know that it's a ring they found, and to take it, is to consult the walkthrough.

A final problem before I stop commenting: having a nonstandard command set and an unusual setup for the game world and a whole set of changes to basic parser-IF conventions really begs for better documentation, either in-game or along with the game (ideally both). There are in-game hints which you can "purchase" but spending in-game currency; but I did not find any of them particularly helpful, and they are tied to specific objects. There is a walkthrough, but it doesn't really help orient the player to the game world, nor does it always make it sufficiently clear what needs to be done. For instance, here is one segment from it:

(look butterfly) attack the butterfly *YOU DIE AND GO TO LIMBO* go under stick *YOU ARE NOW IN THE UNDERWORLD / DIRECTIONS ARE THE SAME, BUT THE WORLD IS DIFFERENT* e (look grey pillar) (look at green pillar) (look red pillar) (look globe) (go globe)*DENIED UNLESS TIME IS RIGHT*

What does "time is right" mean? How do you determine in-game time? There are hints later in the walkthrough, if the player reading the walkthrough thinks to glance ahead, but they didn't help me figure it out. Similarly, what does "directions are the same, but the world is different" actually mean? I don't know.

This is, by the way, the point at which I stopped trying to finish the game. The walkthrough had brought me here, and following it no longer worked; the game was coy about what I needed to do, and I was burned out on trying to wrestle information out of it.

All of this is particularly frustrating because there are some interesting ideas and funny writing here; the game system itself, with its weapons and armor, its stats and bonuses, its turn-based combat, seem like the elements of a system that a good game could be built on top of. Similarly the bits of the game that are there show promise: there's some interesting silliness, and the lightly sketched-out beginnings of an interesting combination of elements that might lead to a sort of recognizable style in the Scott Adams or Infocom tradition; but they're not in place yet. They need to be built, dug out, and polished, and there needs to be a lot of editing, in the broad sense, of game elements, with an eye to what a player who is not the author will be able to figure out about the game.

I'd like to see it if that ever happens. I suspect that it would be easier to re-implement the game from scratch in another language than to keep trying to build it in the homebrew system, though.

My rating: 2/10.

(I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

#interactive fiction #parser IF #IFComp #IFComp 2023 #2023 #Handsome McStranger #Hawkstone #RPG Adventure (series)#fantasy #retrocomputing #game design #homebrew development systems #walkthrough writing #game writing #puzzles #humor #narrative

1 note · View note

patrickbrianmooney · 6 months

Text

IFComp 2023: Alex Harby's "Honk! A Fair Game"

This is a review of a game entered into IFComp 2023, the twenty-ninth annual interactive fiction competition. This year, there are 75 games in the Comp, all free to play. There’s some good stuff in there this year! Anyone is welcome to play and vote on the entries during the Comp period, and you need vote on only five games by the middle of November for your votes to count toward the games’ overall scores!

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

This was fun. I really enjoyed Harby's 2020 IFComp game, Vampire Ltd., and I said in my review of it at the time that I'd really like to play another game by the author. Well, here I am, doing exactly that! And the author has done things that I said at he time I would like them to do. (Not, I hasten to add, that I have any belief that this was done for my benefit; I'm just pleased to have seen a little bit into which way the author was growing.) Honk! is a lot less on rails than Vampire, and has a bigger game world to explore.

It's a good concept: you're a clown at a circus, trying to prevent a mysterious character in a mask from ruining the circus's performances for nefarious reasons that aren't specified until the Scooby gang ... er, the clown PC and assorted circus friends ... pull the mask off at the end of the game. It's not an original concept, but it's very well-executed in a lot of ways, and as with Vampire, what really makes it work is the way the author leans into a series of absurd situations and gives new life to worn-out tropes. Of course the identity of the Phantom is signaled at the beginning, but not in a particularly obvious way; of course the troupe of misfits pulls together, but the characterization, though one-dimensional most of the time, is gloriously and unabashedly so: you really feel that you know the NPCs. All in all, the setup and the execution are polished and well-timed and well-characterized. When an NPC has a running joke, they keep playing it, and playing it well, for new gags (Jenny blowing up the balloons, for instance, is funny on I think three separate occasions.)

Foiling the mysterious Phantom requires setting up for, and then intervening in, the performances of three other circus folk; and there's a period of exploration before that, with no time pressure. There is of course a denouement after all three performances, which the Phantom is unmasked and his identity is known but he manages to escape and has to be chased down for a final confrontation. For the most part, the puzzles are not difficult and are well-clued, though a few of them (the goose performance, especially, at least in my opinion) are a bit fiddly; and one or two feel under-clued. (I'm thinking specifically of the puzzle around the death-defying escape here, which sent me to the walkthrough.) But this is mostly a quibble; the game was a lot of fun.

One thing that I missed in comparison to Vampire, Ltd. was that the writing was not quite as funny. Oh, it was still funny: absurd and well-timed comic writing, often leveraging weird juxtapositions in the options in the conversation tree. It often made me chuckle; but I never quite got the sudden moment of delight that results in an explosive belly laugh like I did with Vampire (though the updog joke in the first confrontation with the Phantom was glorious). Part of this, I think, was just that the circus was a less engaging premise for me than that vampire-infiltrating-a-corporation setup of the earlier game; but part of it is not just my own comparatively lower interest (which did not prevent me from enjoying the game), but rather that I think there's less inherent tension between writing and setup in this situation. In the circus, everything is already surreal and fantastic, and so there's less tension between absurd writing and absurd situation than there was between the absurd writing of Vampire and its job-interview situation, which is supposed to be taken as deadly serious.

That's a little bit of a quibble, but I think that it's also rather a fundamental distinction, and I wonder whether the situations in Honk! might have had more of an emotional effect if they'd been played for drama a little bit more. Still, though, this was a fun piece, and I am, once again, looking forward to Alex Harby's next game.

My rating: 7/10.

(I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

#interactive fiction #parser IF #IFComp #IFComp 2023 #2023 #Alex Harby #Honk!#Vampire Ltd.#puzzles #humor #absurdism #narrative tension #circus #conversation in IF

0 notes

patrickbrianmooney · 6 months

Text

IFComp 2023: Charm Cochran's "Gestures Towards Divinity"

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

Not a game, more of a simulated experience in an art gallery. Which is a refreshing and unusual thing to do with a bit of parser IF. You wander around the gallery, looking at several triptychs painted by Irish-English painter Francis Bacon, all of which are cast in relation to his muse, model, and lover, George Dyer. Each triptych has a middle panel that can be entered to converse with an abstract figure: one of these figures is one of the Furies appearing in the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion triptych; one is Dyer in the bathroom, from the middle panel of the Three Studies of the Male Back triptych; the last is Dyer's corpse after his suicide, from Triptych, May–June 1973. If this seems rather grisly subject matter, well, it is; much of the time spent in conversation in the game centers around Dyer and Bacon's relationship, Bacon's abuse and neglect of Dyer, and Dyer's death. Also frequently discussed with the various characters in the game are sadism and masochism, religion, death, and other rather weighty topics.

I didn't mind any of that; it was, in its own way, a pleasant interlude after some rather puzzly games; and though I've said in the past and still believe that I'm in general not a big fan of conversation-oriented games, this one is handled deftly and thoughtfully, with topics opened up clearly by other topics, a TOPICS command to hint to the player what obvious conversational avenues are still waiting to be explored, and a sensible conversation flow with few "wait, why doesn't he remember ... ?" moments. (Though not quite none.) The game's emphasis on Dyer rather than Bacon (the game's blurb says, in part, "Francis Bacon was ... This story is not about him") is an interesting move that re-centers Dyer as a subject (grammatical, experiential, of inquiry and critique) at the same time that it meditates on conditions affecting his subjectivity, and there's more there than I personally feel qualified to tease out from the game.

There's a nice balance, too, with the ability to interact with a few humans in the gallery, each of whom has her own well-developed conversational tree, and perform some simple tasks that the piece itself valorizes (there are 17 "achievements" to unlock along the way, around half of which are just doing simple things that a decent person might think to do). And, again, the game's conversational trees are well-developed and rarely (though not quite never) felt like I was simply lawnmowing all of the available options, even though the game also awards achievements for lawnmowing all of the conversational trees.

Not being an art historian, I was aware of Bacon, but my knowledge of his work was limited to a few paintings I'd seen in galleries, and a few dozen paintings I'd seen reproduced in books or online; and my knowledge of his life was limited to a few columns from Art Through the Ages. I know more now. (Or, at least, I think I do: but as one of the game's epigraphs reminds me, "everything I think I know" is something that "I don't know, but I been told.")

All in all, not much like what I was expecting, and not much like what I generally want from parser IF; but quite well executed and a real opportunity for reflection. This is something that's going to sit with me for a while after the Comp, and one of the better pieces of played through so far.

My rating: 8/10.

(I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

(This review based on the revised version released on 1 Oct 2023.)

0 notes

patrickbrianmooney · 6 months

Text

IFComp 2023: AKheon's "A Thing of Wretchedness"

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

So this is a "sandbox horror" adventure that, according to the game's blurb, is a companion in some way to the author's 2020 Ascension of Limbs, which I did not get to in (or after) IFComp of that year. But the blurb also says that no foreknowledge from the previous game is required, so I plunged on in. I think *Ascension of Limbs* was some sort of monster-breeding game where you run a Lovecraftian pet shop?

In any case, this is a weirdly atmospheric game in which the PC is an older woman, clearly grieving for her lost husband. You put this together by examining objects while puttering around the house. In the house with you is the eponymous "wretched thing," which is not explicitly described any further. Wretchedness is its primary attribute, though it can also be motivated to attack you. When you begin the game, there's a letter on the living room table asking about whether rat poison will kill a household animal of approximately the weight of a medium to large dog. There's also some rat poison in the kitchen pantry.

You can poison the thing, whatever it is; and you can help it to escape. The "walkthrough" (actually a brief strategy guide) suggests there is a third possible ending, though it sounds fiddly to get and depends on luck, requiring that the Thing happen to make some felicitous choices. It did not take the appropriate actions on its own during my playthrough, and I admit that I did not spend any substantial amount of time trying to get it to do so by taking any actions other than sitting at my keyboard and hoping.

There's really very little backstory aside from the deceased husband, and I think that this is a real weakness of the game. This is especially strange because the primary goal toward which the game seems to nudge you is poisoning the Thing: whatever it is, it's a living creature; and the letter expresses the PC's concern over whether the rat poison will cause it to suffer. Clearly, the Thing does suffer when it consumes poison; what, then, is the PC's motivation for wanting to kill it? The game dangles several possibilities, but none of them are presented in a compelling way, and not all of them are plausible motives for a PC. Is the Thing suffering? Did it kill the PC's husband? Is it just that the PC is nauseated at it because it is "wretched"? Is it because it is dangerous? (Would training it help?)

"Why am I trying to kill this poor wretched Thing?" seems like a rather crucial question for the game to provide some sort of answer to if it's going to succeed as a narrative, but there's just no motive there, aside from the PC's own disgust at the Thing and her belief that it is "wretched." It's a weirdly cavalier attitude to take toward the value of life, even (especially?) animal life. Calling the game a "sandbox" doesn't really resolve the issue, either; it just pushes the necessity of rationalizing this on to the player. All in all, a game where something needs to die because one person, who cannot look directly at it, thinks it's "wretched" is an uncomfortable metaphor for a lot of things that are happening socially and politically right now. This might have been an interesting set of points for the game to make, but it's another missed opportunity; there's no reflection on this at all, just as there's no reflection on any of the half-dozen or so other ways I tried to interpret the Thing symbolically.

The game doesn't really succeed as a narrative—there's no clear middle, the beginning is implied but obscure, and the endings are rather unsatisfying—but neither does it really succeed as a member of the other half of Graham Nelson's formulation: it's not a crossword, either. Having the solution depend on random chance precludes that. A crossword is a puzzle, not a saving throw; with a crossword, once you understand the answer, it definitely fits in, with no random elements.

All in all, there's some interesting ideas here. I don't know that any of them play out in a satisfying way, though.

My rating: 4/10.

(I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

(This review was written based on the updated version released on 7 October 2023.)

#interactive fiction #parser IF #IFComp #IFComp 2023 #2023 #horror #Lovecraftian horror #euthanasia #killing #wretchedness #A Thing of Wretchedness #symbolism

1 note · View note

patrickbrianmooney · 6 months

Text

IFComp 2023: Damon L Wakes's "Who Iced Mayor McFreeze?"

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

This was a fun, polished, well-written little gem, a quick puzzly play that took about an hour even with plenty of exploration and trying not to look at the hints, which I mostly succeeded in not looking at.

The premise is silly—it's a noir detective story set in what is, essentially, Candyland, though not in a close enough clone that Milton Bradley has any grounds for an IP complaint—and it might have been handled badly by a lesser writer, but Wakes takes it, runs with it, and makes it work, partly through a series of jokes that play off of both parts of that idea. The PC is, for instance, named Bubble Gumshoe, and if you examine the shoes she's wearing, you get an exasperated comment about how no, there's no gum on them. It's a nice little touch in a game full of nice little touches. I've got to say, too, that it uses the language and tropes of noir detective fiction better than many other IF pieces that attempt to do so.

The puzzles are fair, not particularly difficult (though the last puzzle is very fiddly in terms of the order in which actions have to be taken to solve it, and could be better clued as to what has to happen first), and mostly based around using machines, of which there are, not surprisingly, quite a few in the factory you're investigating. Some puzzle-solving objects are re-used in later puzzles, and all of them are sensible.

And the setting and characters are a delight. The writing is so good that the few places where it stumbles are jarring, and I think that one more round of polishing would have eliminated a lot of small incongruities that fall into that category.

Take this, from the game's overture:

"I enquired around town for the name of a reliable private detective," she says, sitting and taking a moment to mop her brow. "They mentioned yours."

The last sentence is a bit infelicitous, but it took me a minute to figure out why. It's not because the pronoun "they" doesn't have a referent, as any pronoun grammatically should; that's fine, in context. American English in general, and noir detective fiction in particular, often uses "they" to refer to the group of people being discussed, even if it breaks the pedantic rule that a pronoun should refer to a specific phrase that the reader or listener can recall. But that sits badly, in terms of voicing, with "yours," a faux-pronoun that's (in context) a shortened form of "your name," This is an elision that's common for certain classes of people, but usually those are educated people who are more likely to speak an elevated diction that includes figures of speech like zeugma, which also distributes a middle term to save from having to repeat words and phrases. The beginning of the short sentence uses pronoun reference in a very different way than the end of the sentence.

The other real textual objection I had to the game was the massive text dump at the very end, which I think really would have better played out broken into chunks that the player needed to play through, even if only in three or four turns.

All in all, though, this was an awful lot of fun, and I'm definitely going to be playing some more of Damon Wakes's games.

My rating: 7/10.

(I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

#interactive fiction #IFComp #parser IF #IFComp 2023 #2023 #detective fiction #noir #pronoun use #zeugma #surealism #candy #Candyland #Who Iced Mayor McFreeze?

0 notes

patrickbrianmooney · 6 months

Text

IFComp 2023: Charles Moore, Jr.'s "The Witch"

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

I liked this one, especially at the beginning, and spent a week! (— which I'm noticing just now, jeez) putting all of my IFComp time toward picking at it, trying to unravel what's going on. I liked it less as the game went on, but all in all, it's a pretty impressive first game, where you play an (Keebler, not Tolkien) elf who passed out in a tree after drinking too much mead one night, and therefore became the only member of the elven village not to be kidnapped by a witch, and therefore the village's only hope of being saved.

So The Witch is old-school parser IF, unabashedly and intentionally so; it's a spare game with a relatively thin implementation, very much puzzle- rather than narrative-focused, with terse responses and difficult object-focused puzzles and an expansive map. It's Zarfian cruel (or at least nasty), has scoring and two old-school mazes, and has easy death and multiple ways to render the game unwinnable. At its best, it's a cleanly implemented game that really channels the spirit of mid-90s Inform-enthusiast hobbyist IF. (It's also channeling their tools: this is a version-five Z-file game written with Inform 6.)

And despite the fact that a lot of this is not my regular jam—I tend to prefer parser IF with a stronger narrative component, a game less directly and constantly focused on being merely a collection of puzzles, a game with at least a little more focus on character and less on objects—in a lot of ways, this works pretty well. It's apparent when you've found a puzzle, and you generally have some idea of how to solve it. The game supplies both hints and a walkthrough, and on the occasions when I couldn't work out a solution, a hint or two from the hint sheet pushed me back onto the path. That is to say, most of the puzzles were basically fair, in the sense that needing a hint and then getting it made me realize that, where, and how it had been hinted already in the game, showing me that it was me who'd missed the clue, not the author who hadn't put sufficiently good clues in. Even when the puzzles are rather fiddly or have their own time constraints (the rapidly dying lamp in the mine, for instance) — even when they have to be played several times to get them right — they still feel basically fair.

Some of the puzzles, though, were basically not fair under this definition:

Getting the beaver to dam the creek so the castle can be entered is something I never would have figured out without an explicit explanation.

Pretty much every sub-puzzle relating to the royal treasury was more or less out of cognitive bounds for me. I never would have figured out that one spot on the statue is magnetic, nor is it clear that the paperweight is made of anything that magnetism affects. Similarly, I probably never would have figured out how to open the glass case or the royal safe. (As far as I can tell, the only place where the password needed to open the safe is disclosed is in one phrase randomly uttered by a wandering NPC, who also utters backstory hints and a slew of amusing nonsense.)

The final sequence, involving delaying the eponymous Witch with slapstick traps, is a classic "Batman foiling the intruders with soup cans" situation.

All of this comes with a hard upper limit on the number of turns the player can spend during the game, a low inventory limit without a player's holdall, and a whole lot of red-herring objects that seem to serve no in-game purpose. This tends to make the game harder, overall, than I'd like it to be: especially for a Comp game, I don't want to be fiddling with the exact order in which things need to be done; I want to play through the game, solving its puzzles and seeing its content, without constantly being at war with it, constantly discovering that I'm banging my head against a pointless inventory limit or the fact that the firm upper limit on the the number of turns is only a little over twice the number of turns that the provided walkthrough takes to work out the shortest possible route to victory.

There's a nifty little feature for a rather difficult game: the SCORE command not only gives you your score and rank, but evaluates whether the game is still winnable. This is a great idea for a difficult game where simple actions can have non-obvious repercussions, because it tells you whether you've made the game unwinnable in some way that you're oblivious to ... except that, near the end of the game, it begins to misinform you by saying that the game is not winnable, even though it is! (On the walkthrough provided, the action that triggers the false report of unwinnability is POUR MEAD ON FEET, and the game self-reports as unwinnable from there on out, right up until you win.) This was what caused me to abandon my first play-through; also my second and third, which last was an attempt to just follow the walkthrough closely. That still didn't work, so I spent a couple of afternoons adapting some existing Python code so that it auto-played the game based on the walkthrough, noting the game's own reports about winnability and that, yes, it gets it wrong at the end, even if the walkthrough is followed exactly.

So that was a downer: and, really, it seems that the whole end-game sequence could be paced and puzzled so as to be a better, more enjoyable bit of the game; it seems rushed, or at least unpolished, compared to the rest of the game. But, as I said before, it's an impressive first game, and there's a lot to like about it. I'm looking forward to the next game from this author.

My rating: 6/10.

(I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

#interactive fiction #parser IF #IFComp 2023 #IFComp #fantasy #Charles Moore Jr #The Witch #elves #mead #2023

1 note · View note

patrickbrianmooney · 6 months

Text

“But, like a dumb statue,”

From the ground; confusion. But, like a dumb statue, froze to senseless stone; she took the city’s edge, looking within and garments every station a borough is come a quarrel, when they once beat Praise be Thine! Swam round and round, one way or t’ other, she quite bewildering. Then courts and passive obedience,—now raised around her father’s as good as God hath bene long ypent. Say, that’s said. Of annoy; stella, loadstar of desire, that dances as often as dance upon his fate. Their ears and down some sweet dim light of happier than not tell. As the deepest, where he threw him in, a stranger, she was most wonder, madam, if I move my side, the fair and fair.

2 notes · View notes

patrickbrianmooney · 6 months

Text

IFComp 2023: David Lee's "All Hands Abandon Ship"

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

There's a lot to like here: it's an escape-the-doomed spaceship game, lightly puzzly, with some funny writing. The environment is mostly implemented pretty solidly, and the author meets most of the basic demands of realism pretty well. There are shout-outs to SF classics (Star Trek and the Alien movies are the most noticeable) and to 90s alt-rock (which scores some points with me), plus there's a real pleasure in seeing someone just enjoy the hell out of the parser IF format, as the author clearly does. The documentation booklet is much better than the average entry in the Comp, and is well-designed and helpful. The puzzles are comparatively easy to solve and all have sensible solutions, All of these are real plusses.

But it also feels unpolished in a lot of ways. The major ones that stick out to me:

There are plenty of nouns mentioned in room descriptions that are not implemented at all, and many that have very thin implementations. Many other aspects of room descriptions aren't implemented, either: being told that you can smell something in a hallways, then typing SMELL and getting "you smell nothing unexpected" in response, is disappointing. Similarly, some things should definitely have smells: the old gym socks, for instance.

There's plenty of other places where default messages would benefit from being customized.

Plenty of items are mentioned in room descriptions, then collected again in a separate "you can also see ..." paragraph afterwards. Often they are not quite in the same form ("... and three bunks against the wall. [...] You can also see a bunk here.").

Not all room descriptions have exit listings.

Some messages are incongruous, or keep repeating: if you continue playing after the time limit, and still try to launch an escape pod, you get an error message. Which then repeats on every other turn for the rest of game. If you then try to get into the other escape pod and launch it, you will then have two identical error messages repeat for as long as you keep playing.

It would benefit from implementing a lot of synonyms. Sometimes the game does not understand the words it itself uses to refer to objects: you can let a "creature" out of a sample tube in a science lab, but the game doesn't understand CREATURE as a noun. You need to realize it's a call-out to Alien and refer to the creature as a "face hugger" (which is not a phrase used in the Alien movies, despite its frequent usage within the fandom).

So there's a lot to like about the game -- especially the moments where the writing is funny, as in the unfolding romantic drama between the PC and the ship's AI, and the twists that that takes.

But it could do with a lot more polishing.

My rating: 6/10.

(I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

#IFComp #IFComp 2023 #interactive fiction #parser IF #science fiction #David Lee #sinking ship #All Hands Abandon Ship #2023

1 note · View note

patrickbrianmooney · 6 months

Text

IFComp 2023: Larry Horsfield's "Magor Investigates …"

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

My uncle is the family genealogist. This means that when he goes on a vacation to, say, Normandy, instead of spending his time eating French food, seeing scenery, drinking French wine, taking photographs, going for walks in the countryside, trying to get attractive French people to help him learn more French, shopping, and taking photos, like you or I would do, he spends his time rummaging through old birth certificates and land-grant decrees and marriage and divorce and baptism and burial certificates in country records offices and churches and tombstones in churchyards.

Then he comes home and we don't see him for two weeks, both because he's recovering from jet lag and because he's furiously updating his genealogical records. And then he sends out an updated copy of something I have to start a Windows virtual machine to view, and I go meet him for a beer, and ask how his vacation was. And instead of telling a story about bicycling through the countryside, or drinking too much wine and learning some French from a server at a bar, or a play he saw in Le Havre or Rouen, or the perfect baguette, or the quality of the wine, or what the light looks like in the late afternoon, he'll tell you how he spent four days visiting eight offices in three counties trying to reconcile the different dates that appear on seventeenth-century marriage certificates.

Which is fine! It's not my jam, but I respect his meticulous research and the fact that he's pursuing his interests, even if they're much more interesting to him than they are to me. By his standards — and whose standards are more important? — he had a really good vacation, and a big chunk of the reason why is because he finally cleared up that marriage-date question that's been nagging at him for more than a decade. Also he discovered several hundred new people in his ancestry who are now eligible to be the subjects of research themselves at some later date. And as I finish my third beer and get up to walk home, he'll conclude "We sure do have a lot of Norman ancestors." This is unsurprising, on the one hand, because we already knew that; he's got a pretty well-researched set of ancestors already, and that was already a fairly well-established fact. (And, on the other hand, it's really not surprising because his last name is "Norman." Which is kind of a tell.)

I say this to point out that genealogical research is not everybody's favorite thing; it's not mine. If it's yours, you might be intrigued to realize that this game turns on a question of genealogical research; but it turns out that the research itself is continually deferred almost until the end, as there are a number of other tasks that need to be performed before the research can be done, and the research, when it does happen, requires only a few commands; the answer is on the first scroll the archivist hands to you once you get to the "researching" part of the game. So if you came in hoping for a painstaking simulation of textual research on old documents, it's not there, sorry. What replaces it is fart jokes. (Well, fart jokes and castle exploration.)

There's no real problem with coming in in the middle of the story, which is a good thing because this is one of a dozen and a half or so games in a series, and I haven't played any of the others. But the in-game summaries made me feel at home enough with the relevant plot to avoid feeling like I had no idea what was going on.

I think what put me off about the game in the end, primarily, was just that the tasks didn't ever feel like they added anything substantial to the feeling of participating in a story. The puzzles were mostly relatively easy: you need to make an herbal remedy for the archivist's stomach trouble, so you have to go find the book containing the recipe, then go down to the herb garden and pick the relevant herbs. All of this is guided so explicitly, and is so straightforward in the first place, that there's very little actual interactivity. There's no real agency for the player; the game simply tells you what to do next, and you slog along doing it. The game keeps you on task fairly effectively; you're not allowed to pick the "incorrect" herbs from the garden, nor to explore in directions that the plot hasn't given you a reason to want to go in, nor to take many objects from the room in which they are found.

There's also just not all that much plot there in the first place: in order to find the relevant genealogical fact, you need to find the archivist; doing so, you discover he's ill, and you need to cure him; so you go find the recipe, pick the relevant herbs, and wrestle with the parser to get the tea made:

> pour kettle into mug Pouring the copper kettle into the ceramic mug won't help you in this game.

> put hot water in mug Sorry, I'm not sure which object you're referring to.

> put water in mug There isn't a faucet here.

> x kettle A copper kettle for boiling water in. On one side is a tiny brass plate and it has a handle and a spout. It is full of hot boiled water.

> fill mug from kettle Filling the ceramic mug from the copper kettle will not help you in this game.

> pour kettle I don't understand what you want to do with the copper kettle.

> get mug (from the archivist's table) Ok, you take the ceramic mug from the archivist's table.

> put water in mug Ok, you pour some hot water over the leaves in the mug. You must now wait until the goodness from the leaves infuses into the water.

> wait You wait while the chemicals in the leaves infuse into the hot water. Eventually, you judge that the infusion is ready for Stinker to drink. You have just completed task 5 - Brewing the Infusion

I suppose, in the end, the question is one of relevance and the amount of effort required to accomplish a task relative to the difficult of the task being accomplished. It took me 350 or so moves to finish the game; much of that was just poking around and looking at objects and trying to manipulate them. The parser was stubborn and lacked what I tend to think of as contemporary affordances: you're constantly being told that you can't do X, because Y needs to happen; why does the parser not just take the minimal step of doing Y on behalf of the player? It frequently feels like a finger-waggling gatekeeper: nuh uh uh, you can't leave he room until you've taken the scroll that you have to return to the archivist! OK, fair enough; a promise is a promise. GET SCROLL. Nuh uh uh, you have to roll it up first! And so how to complete even basic sub-tasks becomes part of the puzzle structure of the game; but it's neither an interesting nor a meaningful puzzle. It's just struggling with a prissy (or perhaps malevolent) rules lawyer.

And after spending an hour or so working at this, where I finally find an object I need buried in a dependent clause in the description of an object that's barely mentioned in the room description. And once all of the obstacles have been overcome, what's the narrative payoff? That two characters who appear in other games in the series and who appear briefly at the very beginning and very end of this game are, it turns out, sixth cousins. This resolves an outstanding mystery in the series as a whole; but if you haven't played the rest of the games in the series, you'd only know that if you'd paid very close attention to the supplemental plot information that's supplied in response to meta-commands.

So I suppose my real complaint, even more substantial than the difficult parser and the stock responses and the excessive hand-holding and the work required to get an ADRIFT game running on Linux, is just that the game as entered is too small a slice out of a much larger narrative panorama, and the writing, puzzles, and design aren't interesting enough on their own to make up for that, for someone who hasn't played the other (quickly counting) 17 games in the series.

There's an interesting nugget of a game buried in there, and I'd like to think that the other games in the series are better-chosen excerpts from that larger panorama, but I don't know; I'm just playing this one game that was entered into IFComp 2023.

My rating: 4/10.

(I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

#IFComp #IFComp 2023 #interactive fiction #parser IF #fantasy #medieval setting #Larry Horsfield #Alaric Blackmoon (character)#Magor Investigates #fart jokes #research

0 notes

patrickbrianmooney · 6 months

Text

IFComp 2023: SV Linwood's "Dr Ludwig and the Devil"

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

This was a fun little gem. It's a small game, only eight rooms, a few dozen objects, and four NPCs, but it's well-polished and the writing really shines (with infernal light) here. It's a mad-scientist story combining the two best-known plots in that genre—Frankenstein and Dr Faustus—but, as a good postmodern narrative so often does, it ditches the serious concerns and gloomy atmosphere of the source material it draws on and turns the story into a lighthearted, funny puzzlefest, full of humorous obliviousness on the PC's part and little pratfall-type jokes.

You play a mad scientist who had succeeded in animating a creature stitched together from grave-robbed body parts. Not content with simply creating a shambling monstrosity like those other mad scientists, your character yearns to create "true life":

Any fool can reanimate a body and have it shamble into town to terrorize the villagers, but to do more, to imbue it with true life? What I sought was far greater.

And so the PC, seeking knowledge, summons the Devil, trapping him (or her, if you prefer: you can set a preferred gender for supernatural beings during the game, if you poke around) in a magical summoning circle. When the game begins, the Devil is in your lab already, encouraging you to sign the contract that grants her your soul in exchange for knowledge. Your task is to sign the contract after finding a loophole that lets you keep your soul. There are of course complications along the way, and those form the majority of the puzzles.

Most of the, oh, say dozen or so puzzles are straightforward: they require you to locate objects and talk to NPCs to obtain information, and the solutions are mostly not difficult to figure out, because the game gently hints at what needs to be done. It also anticipates partially correct solutions that are on the right track, and tends to nudge the user in the right direction in a productive manner: for one magical concoction, you need eyes; well, there's a pair of eyes contained in another implemented object that would naturally have eyes, and the eyes are mentioned naturally, in a non-heavy-handed way. But they're out of reach. An object that can put them in reach is in another room, not far away, and getting it into place and usable is a tiny puzzle of its own; that puzzle, too, is hinted appropriately. Using the object once it's in place also requires solving a tiny puzzle; that's well-directed, too.

Many of these sub-puzzles are easy enough that they barely register as puzzles at all; and all of them effectively manage the player's knowledge and frustration level. In a lot of ways, this is really good puzzle design for a game that doesn't make hard-puzzle-solving its primary focus: it keeps things moving along, hinting as necessary; most of the time your first attempt fails, and often this is for reasons you could not possibly have anticipated without trying; but every attempt yields new knowledge or a small hint. All in all, puzzle design is great here. (Though one of the final puzzles, executing the find-the-loophole goal, is fiddly and could do with a bit more hinting; and another, getting the Devil to stop playing music, requires remembering an offhand fact from much earlier in the game. These weare the two problems that sent me to the walkthrough.)

An annoyance, though one that didn't affect my rating: the game contains an in-game to-do list to help the player keep track of sub-tasks that need to be performed, which is a nice affordance. Tasks that have been completed are marked on the list with a check-mark, or what I presume is supposed to be a check-mark. But on my system (playing with Gargoyle under Linux Mint 20.3), the check-mark just displays as a question mark, probably because the font the 'terp is using doesn't include the checkmark glyph the game is trying to use.

But all in all, I really liked this: excellent characterization, funny upbeat writing throughout the game, and a much-better-than-merely-competent management of game pacing and structure. I'm going to have to go back and play this author's IFComp entry from last year, which I missed.

My rating: 9/10.

(I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

#IFComp #IFComp 2023 #interactive fiction #supernatural fiction #comedy #monsters #Frankenstein #Doctor Faustus #SV Linwood #parser IF

3 notes · View notes