SPAG Issue 53

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SPAG

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SPAG (The Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games)

ISSUE #53

Edited by Jimmy Maher
November 16, 2008

SPAG #53 is copyright (c) 2008 by Jimmy Maher.
Authors of reviews and articles retain the rights to their contributions.

All email addresses are spamblocked -- replace the name of our magazine with the traditional 'at' sign.

IN THIS ISSUE

• Editorial
• IF News
• A Cry for Help!
• IF Comp 2008 Reviews
• The Absolute Worst IF Game in History
• Afflicted
• Anachronist
• April in Paris
• Berrost's Challenge
• Buried in Shoes
• Channel Surfing
• Cry Wolf
• A Date with Death
• Dracula's Underground Crypt
• Escape from the Underworld
• Everybody Dies
• Freedom
• Grief
• The Hall of the Fount of Artois
• LAIR of the Cyber-Cow
• The Lighthouse
• The Lucubrator
• Magic
• A Martian Odyssey
• The Missing Piece
• Nerd Quest
• The Ngah Angah School of Forbidden Wisdom
• Nightfall
• Opening Night
• Piracy 2.0
• Project Delta: The Course
• Recess at Last
• Red Moon
• Riverside
• The Search for the Ultimate Weapon
• Snack Time!
• Trein
• Violet
• When Machines Attack
• IntroComp 2008 Reviews
• Bedtime Story
• Fiendish Zoo
• Nine Tenths of the Law
• Phoenix's Landing: Destiny
• Storm Cellar
• The Bloody Guns
• Other Game Reviews
• Ausflug am Wochenende nach München
• Recluse
• What Happens in Vagueness
• SPAG Specifics
• Photopia
• Rendition

EDITORIAL

So, another Competition has come and gone, and once again I'm left here trying to decide what I think about it. It was an odd year, I think, with some encouraging and some not so encouraging elements. After a few years that seemed to show that authors were finally beginning to understand that they simply must test and polish their entries, this year was a real slide back. The entries that received substandard scores from me, and as usual there were a lot of them, virtually all suffered from the same problems, to the extent that at times in writing my reviews I felt like I was simply running out of ways to explain that beta-testers are not an optional luxury. The number of authors who put considerable work and spirit into their games only to neglect this mandatory step continues to amaze me. My amazement here is rivaled only by my surprise at the number of authors who continue to roll their own games from scratch in the belief that this will be somehow good enough. At least the number of people doing the latter is much less than the number doing the former.

Also notable this year was a certain lack of ambition on the part of the average author. A surprising number of the entries not only fit easily into the two-hour time limit but could be completed in thirty minutes or less. I don't really think this is a problem in itself taken in isolation; after all, one of the most fascinating works of IF I've ever played is Aisle. I do, though, wonder why more authors aren't willing to stretch themselves a bit more.

More encouraging are the sheer number of settings and genres to be found in the Comp. Space opera, urban fantasy, horror, comedy, Tolkien-esque fantasy, romantic intrigue, and more were present and accounted for. Some games, especially Freedom and Buried in Shoes, were even brave enough to tackle very difficult subjects, and another (Opening Night) almost made me cry. As someone who has made his wish that we spend less time talking about IF as a form and more about the content of our stories all too known, I'm cautiously optimistic about future developments.

And this Comp gave us a dozen or so games that are well worth playing, in addition to a handful of others that just need some more polishing and testing to get them there. Twelve out of 35 ain't so bad, really.

I'm going to spare you more thoughtful (or at least more extended) editorializing in this issue. Between reviewing 35 Comp games for my personal website and reviewing yet more games for this issue of SPAG, I'm feeling a bit like a lemon that's been squeezed dry, at least when it comes to the subject of IF. Let me recharge the old batteries and (to mix the metaphors a bit more thoroughly) add some gas to the tank, and I'll be back next year with more brilliant essays on The State of IF Today. Before I go, though, let me take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed to another issue that I am very proud of. Nate Dovel, Dark Star, and Valentine Kopteltsev make up my crack IF Comp 2008 reviewing squad; Paul Lee and David Monath contributed additional reviews; and Victor Gijsbers contributed not one but two more extended SPAG Specifics pieces that take IF criticism to a whole new level. Thanks, one and all!

And thank you for reading and continuing to support IF. Have a great holiday season. I'll see you in 2009, when SPAG's next issue will feature interviews with the winning Comp authors (assuming they agree, which they always do) and lots more good stuff which you'll just have to wait to find out about (and I'll have to figure out what it's going to be).

IF NEWS

IF Comp 2008 Results
The 2008 edition of the annual IF Competition has just closed. We have reviews of all of the games in this issue, and will feature more Competition coverage in the next. Congratulations to Jeremy Freese, whose Violet took the top honors. Here's the top five finishers (see the IF Comp website for the full list of final rankings):

1. Violet by Jeremy Freese
2. Nightfall by Eric Eve
3. Everybody Dies by Jim Munroe
4. Afflicted by Doug Egan
5. Piracy 2.0 by Sean Huxter

http://www.ifcomp.org

IntroComp 2008 Results
Out of six entries (each representing an introduction to a propose full-length IF work), Phoenix's Landing: Destiny by Carolyn VanEseltine was judged by the IntroComp judges to be the most worthy. I didn't get a chance to play the introductions during the judging period due to minor little Real World things like getting married, but I did play them after the fact and can state without hyperbole that every single entry has real potential to be the seed of a great larger work. You can check out more of my opinions in this issue, or you can just download the entries and see for yourself. I'm sure the individual authors would love to get your feedback, even if the judging period is over.
http://www.xyzzynews.com/introcomp/

One Room Game Competition 2008
Francesco Cordella will be hosting the one-room game competition again this year. Entries are due by midnight, November 23 Central European Time, and may be written in English or any other language. The judging period will run until midnight, December 28 Central European Time.
http://www.avventuretestuali.com/orgc/orgc2008_eng

iFrotz
Eric Idema has recently released an early beta of (yet another) a new web-based Z-Machine interpreter. Unlike Parchment and others, this terp runs on the server side rather than through JavaScript alone, which should mean it will run games (particuarly Inform 7 games) at a much better clip. It's got a long way to go, but looks like it has real potential. Check out the webpage and the tiny demonstration, and think about signing up for beta-testing if you find the project interesting. I think that if we continue to support projects like this one will eventually emerge to become the full-featured, practicial web-based terp we're all looking for. And then we can start to think about Glulx...
http://ifrotz.org/

AutoBlurb
Conrad Cook has created a tool for would-be IF authors who are struggling with trying to come up with plots. His AutoBlurb will randomly generate simple, rather generic plots which you can then flesh out into full-blown IF stories. The tabletop RPG aid Inspiration Pad Pro 2.0 is required, but it's a free download as well.
http://misc.conradcook.net/autoblurb

The David Fisher Mini-Comp Bonanza
The indefatigueable David Fisher will be hosting a series of six mini-comps over the course of 2009, each highlighting a particularly difficult or interesting area of IF design theory. Many judges have already been recruited, and IF Wiki pages have been set up. The deadline for entries into the first of the comps -- SimComp, focusing on, you guessed it, simulationism and emergent behavior -- is February 1.
http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/SimComp

Back to Table of Contents

A Cry for Help!

Are you a reasonably experienced IF player who would like to lend a helping hand to help raise IF's profile a bit? If so, I've got just the opportunity for you. Let me allow my friend Harry Kaplan to explain:

Do you have what it takes to join the IF Diplomatic Corps?

Mission: to explore strange new websites, to seek out new IF enthusiasts, to boldly go one where no one - all right, no one but Emily Short – has gone before.

Adventure Classic Gaming, a website primarily devoted to graphic adventures, has reached out to the IF community for help in developing an IF track. The intention is not to create a major IF site – hey, we’ve got them, and they preach to the converted – but to expand the gaming world of ACG’s readership to include IF old and new. Jimmy Maher, having a modicum of exposure to this particular subject, has been kind enough to let me interview him on the history of IF, and the first half of that interview should be posted on ACG in the relatively near future (stay tuned). We hope the piece will attract interest not only at ACG but also within the IF community as well, since Jimmy has challenged me to take the interview into some intriguing areas not fully covered in his published IF history, “Let’s Tell a Story Together.”

I think this is a perfect outreach opportunity for IF, but I will need help from the community in order to make it work. If you would be interested in writing IF articles and/or reviews targeted at a community of gamers who have indicated a real desire to explore IF but need some friendly Sherpa guides to show them the terrain, please contact me at harrykaplan SP@G adventureclassicgaming.com. As I see it, if we can make this happen, everybody wins.

As Harry says, this is a great opportunity for someone(s) to do the kind of outreach we need a lot more of. Over the last few years we've been relying on Emily Short, Stephen Granade, and one or two others to do this kind of thing, but that's a bit unfair, wouldn't you say? They have games and other projects of their own to work on, after all, and there are hundreds if not thousands of us. Won't somebody step forward and take the plunge? I believe that Harry will be looking to kick off Adventure Classic Gaming's IF coverage with a "getting started with IF" sort of article, but who knows where things might go from there. Play your cards right and you might even have your own little IF soapbox like I have here at SPAG.

Seriously, folks, it's a good cause. Please email Harry if you have the time and willingness to help out.

IF Competition 2008 Reviews

Rather than publish (or re-publish) reviews of the Competition entries weeks or months after the fact, I wanted to present them to you this year when the excitement of the Comp is still fresh. I therefore recruited a crack team of elite reviewers -- Valentine Kopteltsev, Nate Dovel, and the ever-mysterious Dark Star -- to divide up the entries and write capsule reviews of each of them for SPAG during the actual judging period. Their impressions of all 35 games, along with just a few of my own, appear below. If you're interested in reading my more extended opinions on all the games, you'll find them at http://home.grandecom.net/~maher/if/comp08.html

The usual interviews with the top Comp authors will of course be appearing in SPAG's next issue, due early next year.

During college, in an experimental film studies course, our class screened Andy Warhol's Bottoms.The conceit was to feature the many and diverse derrieres of Mr. Warhol’s friends, unclothed and close-up, as they strolled along a treadmill and talked aimlessly with Warhol.Most of the class (including the professor, interestingly) deserted by the 45-minute mark.I hung on through the whole 80-minute mess, but only so I could brag to those who left that they totally missed the amazing (non-existent) plot twist at the end.The only possible motive I could ever deduce for this butt-jiggling cinematic opus was the desire to make a completely pointless thing, the pointlessness of which people would nonetheless discuss, ironically giving it a point within the mind of the author.No doubt Warhol had a good laugh as critics tried to ascribe some meaning to it.

I blame the same motivation for giving us The Absolute Worst IF Game.The game is an indistinguishable maze with nothing to explore or interact with, victory or failure is awarded randomly (once I won by looking, another time by going east), and the only story is a single sentence about searching for a McGuffin.While it is clearly intended to be this dumb, it is not that endearing kind of dumb like The Toxic Avenger or those blank books entitled Everything Men Know About Women.There is no biting minimalistic commentary on the bland stereotypes of IF.No delightfully overwrought dialogue.No insanely but amusingly unguessable solution like "stick fish in ear".Like Bottoms, it is only a waste of time- I was going to write a "painful" waste of time, but it's not even that.Painful, metaphorically speaking, maybe gets you in the hospital with lots of beeping machines, strange patients, and free cable.This is just a papercut.

The game ultimately serves the author's sense of irony, not the reader's.Which is fine, if you're the author.I wrote a "game" once with one room and an exploding Pop-Tart.There was no goal, no story- the source code is maybe half a page.I found it hilarious.Anyone else playing it might wonder what was wrong with me.Which is why you'll never find it on the submission page of IFComp.Hammering a nail in the wall might be art to some people, but it's courteous to hang something interesting on it for the rest of us.

Score: 1 out of 10.

As story conceits go, a fastidious health inspector forced to scrutinize a disgusting, disease-ridden restaurant whose owner happens to be a fat, evil creature of darkness is pretty great.Afflicted has you searching the horrendous dive bar, looking for infractions which you dutifully record in your notebook.These demerits serve as your game score.This was entertaining enough just by itself, for some reason; maybe it's the obsessive-compulsive in me, but I loved discovering and documenting each new repulsive violation, making little humorously bureaucratic suggestions.It's like collecting Snapple caps for the factoids.

But you get the added bonus of a genuinely creepy story, as well!I'll try to stay vague to avoid spoilers, but at one point I reentered a room to discover something wholly unexpected and frightening, especially given a drastic event that had occurred just minutes before.It was a perfectly executed, somewhat surreal moment, layering one sudden nightmare on top of another, such that I anxiously realized I had no idea what I should do.Yet even when confronted with horrors, the tone of the main character remains amusingly detached, committed to his job with ludicrous enthusiasm.Finding a dismembered body part, for example, is not reason enough to summon the authorities; it does, however, cost the restaurant five points on their review!The characterization is top-notch. Your heart goes out to the rundown, miserable waitress, Angela, and her abuse at the hands of the repulsive, amoral sack of donkey dung that is Nikolai, the proprietor. The first thing I did upon encountering Nikolai was test if I was allowed to kill him outright. I usually at least examine an NPC first, see if they have any valuable information, before I childishly attempt to pull their legs off. But Nikolai provoked me right off the bat, a testament to the author's aptitude in creating an emotional connection with the characters.

Even the environment has a seamless, involving personality. Your curiosity is rewarded with detailed and satisfying, though not over-long, descriptions and an appalling variety of grotesque working conditions. Not only do the correct health code violations have great responses, but so do the incorrect ones, keeping the player engaged even when they stray a bit off-objective, a courtesy more games should provide. Most effective, though, is the tone: scenery, innocuous at first blush, grows sinister with further exploration. Every room has a smell. Rats and roaches will occasionally traipse before you. The change is palpable as you venture into the dim bar from the desolate but well-lit street, and once things get bizarre, it is maddening that safety is so brightly visible but unattainable through the dirty windows.

As of this writing, I have not finished the entire game, though I am eager to do so. I was into it enough to blow through my IFComp-adjudicating two hours just reveling in what feels like only the first third of the experience. Assuming it maintains the sense of gleeful dread and the admirable level of detail, it has earned my vote as one of the best of the crop this year.

I have to confess, I have a soft spot in my heart for anachronistic setting elements. Therefore, I had certain hopes for this entry. This was rather naive of me, as it turned out. As the author puts it himself, "If you're looking for a good story you won't miss anything by stopping after the first three paragraphs." The rest of the game is dedicated to roaming through several barren and essentially unrelated to each other worlds, trying to find out how the game mechanics work. Unfortunately, I felt very little (if any) motivation to do so, and thus played from the walkthrough. Therefore, I'm not the most suitable person to judge on that, but my impression was it would have taken me much more than two hours to beat the puzzles if I played "fair" (considering that some seemingly innocent actions are likely to lock you out of victory). Too many things were not obvious, and too many areas seemed to be just red herrings or decorations. There were a few implementation glitches. Besides, the author had some evident problems with English (hate to say that, because I have them too;); for instance, one of the commands suggested by the walkthrough isn't a correct English phrase. Still, the lack of motivation for the player to do anything is a much more serious issue for this work.

April in Paris is a short game written by Jim Aikin that brings to life a small street side cafe. It's a little challenging, in design and game play, but also enjoyable with an ending that ties it all together.

You play a tourist visiting Paris, while having lunch in a charming Parisian sidewalk cafe. It's a small enough place; but with the descriptions being so close together everything kind of looked the same, making it hard to know where I was and how to get around. This is mitigated a bit by being able to go to a particular person or object, but I probably should have turned right to the map in the beginning to get my bearings. It doesn't give away too much.

The puzzles are a little hard even though they fit right into the setting. I had one problem with an object not really standing out from the crowd, and dealing with the dog is practically a Bable fish puzzle that wouldn't end. I also noticed a few bugs with some of the objects and even the hints are bugged, not being able to type in a number over 9.

But in the end, much like the cafe itself, I found it charming. The characters had deep enough backgrounds to feel real, tying into one another that made for a solid cohesiveness. So if you don't mind looking a little bit at the hints to get you through, this is an enjoyable game.

The first thought I had after reading the intro was, what a dull writing. On the other hand, it dispelled any illusions I might have had about this entry from the outset, and did a fine work in terms of product placement, unambiguously defining the work as a traditional treasure- (or, rather, magic scroll-) hunty puzzlefest. Speaking objectively, the puzzles as such probably weren't bad, although they left me pretty cold. Some of them required lengthy (and not very motivated) wait&observe sequences. A couple had guess-the-verb problems that became even worse, since they weren't mentioned in the hints. To be honest, somehow the game managed to make it clear to me from the beginning there're going to be non-standard commands in it, yet the confined time of Comp play isn't suited for trial and error vocabulary research exercises very well. One of those problems I solved by decompiling the game (and I don't think I'd be able to beat it without cheating even if there wasn't the two hours limit, since a more common and perfectly reasonable synonym was dismissed with a very confusing message). Also, the player has to buy some items during the story. Getting the money for that represents an additional puzzle in the game, which is OK; however, you only can retrieve the funds by small amounts, and any additional purchase results in a tedious string of actions including running to your financing source through several locations, getting the bread, and returning back. The conversation system in Berrosts's Challenge induced me to practise some self-citing -- a sloppily implemented menu-based system isn't any better than a shoddily implemented traditional "ask about/tell about" system...

The game has its clever moments, too -- for instance, there are hunger and sleep daemons, as well as an inventory limit, but players who prefer to go without them can just turn them off any time. Still, as I was nearing towards the end of the two hours limit, I noticed I just wasn't having fun. Therefore, I acted a bit unfair -- I stopped playing and just read the ending out of the decompiled game file... And yes, the finale was a fine match for the previous story.

Buried In Shoes is a short game that seems written for those just trying out interactive fiction. It feels a bit disjointed, jumping between flashbacks, but has a bone-chilling ending.

With a file size of only 72k the game should take you less than a half hour to finish. It accomplishes this small size with a succinct writing style that is terse and to the point. Personally I like this, it gets right to the game play and doesn't beat around the bush. Also, the story is paced out well, dropping certain hints now and then, and does everything it needs in order to set-up the ending, which becomes the focal point of the story.

There are no puzzles to speak of, another reason I think it will make a good candidate for first time players, with game play that is very intuitive. The player always knows what to do next, and there is never a need to fight the machine to figure out what needs to be done.

Overall I feel this game is flawlessly executed, though the subject matter is questionable at best, and I see it possibly becoming a game that is highly recommended to those unfamiliar with interactive fiction. Well done Kazuki.

This game impressed me to some extent -- maybe because the few previous works I played were outright weak. It's a dystopia of sorts, about how television manipulates people. Its probably neither very deep nor groundbreaking, but at least it handles the subject aptly enough. The protagonist finds himself in a row of episodes, each time with very limited options (even more so, since the implementation level keeps to be pretty shallow; come to think of it, it even might be deliberate, and meant as a way to demonstrate the player (s)he's moving through a fake television world). Anyway, the limited options make it easy to figure out what to do next. The only thing that gets in the way is, the synonyms' implementation is as shallow as that of the environment. I was a bit disappointed how my actions towards the finale of the game failed to affect the outcome; on the other hand, a happy end clearly would be totally out of place here, and I'm glad the author resisted the temptation (if there was any) to append one.

In Cry Wolf you play a veterinarian who is confronted with helping an injured wolf in the dead of night, but the story has a few twists as the plot unfolds. It's told over five acts, that have a real symmetry as they go from night to day and back to night, and the writing is wonderful, creating some vivid imagery even if there are a few typos.

The game is long; it took me over four hours to finish, but I did get hung up on one of the puzzles pretty early on. There are also a few bugs. I even found a conversation menu that stalled out, and so you might want to save at the beginning of each act. Also, some of the rooms are reused, but a lot of the objects don't update for the current time of day; and there are even a few sudden deaths, but all of those can be undone. The game is pretty ambitious, with a lot of code that needs tightening up.

The structure of the game is pretty standard IF in the first three acts, you'll need to get past a handful of puzzles while talking to a few characters. But the last two acts really becomes a series of conversation menus that have a lot of black and white choices. The game could have used a bit more subtlety here, with a few responses that could be a little grayer, giving the game a bit more depth and the players a little more agency.

I really liked this game. It's not perfectly executed, but it sets up some nice scenes, and it created an atmosphere that drew me in. The last two acts break away from the IF standard, but they help fill in the rest of the story, even though you see a lot of it coming. The game could use a bit more polish, but there is a game here, unlike a lot of the entries we've seen this year that took under an hour to finish. It's enjoyable and the story is fully flushed out. If you haven't played it already, I think you'll like this one. It really worked for me.

A Date With Death is a humorous game, in a Monty Python sort of way, that is based upon a deep lore with wild characters that are perfect for the setting. But it also suffers from frustrating game play, with puzzles that could be made easier, and occasional bugs that break down the mimesis. You might want to save often.

This is the third game in a series created by David Whyld, but you don't need to play the other two in order understand what's going on. Death is coming for you, because of what happened in the previous games, but everything is made clear within a few minutes of game play, and reinforced throughout the rest of the game.

You play a King, practically locked up in own his throne room, by a High Chancellor who controls most of the people you see; and he keeps your subjects in line with the executioner's blade. Keep in mind there's only about six rooms to move through, each filled with a lot of text containing a comical tone that rings throughout the setting.

A lot of the humor comes from when the High Chancellor calls upon you to oversee numerous problems within your kingdom. Talk menus here, which are handled numerically, make it easy to sort through the evidence and hand out your decree. A lot of the characters you run into feel like they're from Monty Python's Holy Grail, and the humor is handled quite well -- nothing too over the top -- with the King himself being the voice of reason.

The game is also frustrating to play. A lot of things seem buried; either in conversation topics, or in room objects that you might have failed to notice. Also, it has hard coded events that you can't get around, and you can run into time constraints. There is a hint system here, and I got really far using it; but I needed a walkthrough to complete the game; some of the puzzles really stumped me. Problem is, the game doesn't come with a walkthrough on hand, and you have to figure out the verb on your own in order to unlock this feature. I ended up e-mailing the author.

Some parts of this game are great and really entertaining, creating a tone that'll ring your funny bone. But you'll have to drudge through a few puzzles that are obscure in order to get to the end. It's sort of a sweet and sour mix, both frustrating and funny. But I'm sure it will be worth your time, and at least a few laughs.

By no means is this a good game -- lots of spelling mistakes (even if you remove the ones that are intentional), non-obvious puzzles... It also seems more like an intro than an actual game. Still, there also was at least one likeable thing about Dracula's Underground Crypt -- namely, its humour. Call me a pervert, but it is to my taste;). One of the most important things for a joke is to stop in time. Mr. Whitington managed to do so. Don't expect too much of this entry -- just perceive it as a little joke, and you won't be disappointed.

In this one you play a low-ranking devil who has gotten a bit tired of all the scouring and torturing that goes on in Hell. You've decided to make your escape up to the world of light.

I wasn't too impressed with the opening of this, and didn't have much hope for it in light of the dismayingly minimalist initial descriptions and its minuscule file size. A strange thing began to happen as I played on, though -- I discovered quite a nicely crafted little adventure game, not innovative or even overly memorable, but entertaining enough. Its puzzles are well done in their not too taxing way. While the implementation is rather sketchy, basically just sticking with the stock Inform 6 parser and library, the parser issues are not too horrific. Even the writing seemed to get better as time went on, and the game even offered up some lines that made me laugh out loud:

You overhear one of the demon administrators gossiping.

"... Hey Timothy, great news! The guy who invented the Microsoft Office paper clip will be cast down here on Friday. I can't wait to get to work on *that* guy!"

The game was thus doing surprising well for itself on my judging scale, until I got to the end. There, the little implementation and parsing problems caught up with me in a big way. I knew what to do to solve the final puzzle (or thought I did), but I simply could not figure out how the game wanted me to express my intention. I finally had to turn to the walkthrough for the correct syntax.

So, that bit left me with something of a sour taste at the worst possible time, and definitely cost the game a point or so in its final score. But its good qualities remain, and make it worthy of a qualified recommendation. The author even promises us a sequel at the end, which I would enjoy playing if he's willing to just pay a bit more attention to technical details and testing.

Somehow, this game made me think of Chris Mudd's works -- 1-2-3... and Jump; in Everybody Dies, you are railroaded through the story almost as blatantly. This said, I have to confess I enjoyed Everybody Dies a lot more, since you (a) don't need to play "guess the next topic" -- there is practically no conversation in the game, and (b) the whole thing is short enough, so that the railroading aspect doesn't really become a frustration. The story itself is well-constructed and tight, although when it's over, there's a bunch of unanswered questions left. It features character switching, nice comics sequences, and even a puzzle. The implementation level is somewhat terse, yet... adequate -- yes, that'll be the right word. While I still felt more like an outside observer rather than a direct participant of the story, I'm not sure whether it's the game's fault or mine.

This game begins with you standing in your apartment, never a particularly good sign. You have a handy to-list that tells you what your plans are for the day: buy groceries, check to see if a book you ordered came in at the local bookstore, and finally attend a meeting at the local college. All of the areas you will visit in doing this are "described" in two or three bland lines mostly concerned with listing the exits. Still, you might think at this point that you are in for a light-hearted slice of life satire, in which purchasing groceries requires solving a mountain of puzzles. Alas, no. Purchasing groceries in this game entails walking to the minimally described grocery store and typing GET GROCERIES. The other tasks are no more interesting.

The author provides a note explaining "some of the reasoning behind the game." Thinking this had to be good, I dutifully had a look. Well, it seems that the game is "intended to recreate the experience of suffering from a social anxiety disorder." That's a very noble idea, and sounds like a great application for IF. Unfortunately, I'm at a complete loss as to where my social anxiety is in this game. From the complete non-sequiter of a title to the arbitrary final "puzzle" to the author's fixation on normal grocery checkout lines versus express lines versus automated lines, this is one strange entry. I don't know whether this game is a joke or an honest (albeit spectacularly failed) attempt at exploring its subject. I do know, however, that it's neither fun nor informative.

Grief is a very interesting replayable puzzle game, with several different endings, that will take multiple attempts to come to the conclusion. It's short, so you probably won't even have to save. The game play itself is solid, handling the number of scenarios well, though the implementation could be a little deeper, giving it a bit more verisimilitude.

You start out waking up from a dream, and right away your goals become very clear, but if you do get stuck, there's a great hint system to help you along. The play area is small and easy to navigate, which is important because you'll be running through it several times, but the overall feel of the game is a bit claustrophobic.

Only the essential rooms are in the design, and I feel this cheats the mimesis. The office building really suffers by this, with only the hallway and your office implemented. Even though it's not necessary, it would've felt more like a real workplace if there were a few extra cubicles, perhaps a bathroom, and even a cafeteria. Your home suffers in the same way too, missing a living room and a bathroom. There could even be a few extra objects in the living room that could confuse the player, yet set up the ending.

But all nitpicking aside, this is really a great game with a story that is set up right from the start. It has multiple endings, and a fair amount of agency. I do feel it suffers from a lack of implementation that makes the game feel like a series of props instead of a simulated world; but I figure most people will overlook this, and really enjoy the sort of meta-puzzle here needing to be unlocked.

Every year's Competition gives us a few time-capsule games, games that are blissfully unaware of the past two and a half decades of IF evolution. Artois is one of this year's batch. It's written from scratch in BASIC, just the way the old-school kids used to do it, and features all the old-school text adventure standbys: a large and complicated map, plenty of darkness problems, a timer, some guess the verb fun, inventory limits, and, inevitably, a maze. It seems you have been asked to free the old Artois family mansion from a curse. And so you begin at 7:00 PM, with exactly twelve hours to explore, solve puzzles, and hopefully accomplish your mission.

By the rather underwhelming standards of its sub-category, Artois is not a complete disaster. While the writing has a few problems here and there, it's downright verbose and descriptive by old-school standards, and manages to conjure a believable-enough facsimile of an old Victorian-style mansion. Every manipulatable object in each room is listed separately at the end of the room's description, which might not make the best aesthetic impression but does at least save you from trying to fiddle with a bunch of unimplemented scenery to see what is actually needed and what is just for decoration. While there are plenty of things in its world that don't make much sense (why can I see in some outdoor rooms and in others find it too dark?), I didn't find any aggressively obscure or ridiculous puzzles in my hour or so with the game, although I certainly can't promise they aren't there.

By the standards of modern IF, however, this one is loaded with problems. The parser, as is typical of these home-brewed efforts, is not really a proper parser at all, but more of a simple pattern-matcher, as I found when I typed LOOK UNDER SCONCE and was greeted with a room description. There is no SCRIPT command, no VERBOSE, not even the abbreviation X for EXAMINE. (No surprise there, I guess -- Infocom first implemented X around 1986, long after this author apparently stopped playing text adventures.) Some good news: there is a SAVE command. Some bad news: theRESTORE command doesn't work, at least on my Windows XP machine. The game locks up and finally, after consuming several hundred megabytes (!) of memory, crashes.

Like many of us, I played plenty of games like this back in the day, and I tried to give this one a good-faith try, if only for nostalgia's sake. The lack of a working RESTORE command in this game with a time limit and at least one learning by death puzzle, though, taxed my willpower, and when I found the "greatest maze in England" I just couldn't continue.

LAIR Of The CyberCow is a strange game at best, with a collection of eclectic characters borrowed from fantasy and science fiction. The game is poorly implemented to the point that the player has to frequently turn to the walkthrough to get through it.

The first problem I ran into is that the file won't play under the latest ADRIFT Runner, and I had to convert it using the ADRIFT Generator. Not a good sign. Apparently even converting the file is a bad thing, and you'll have to find an older interpreter to run it.

Well the game starts out at a bus stop, but gives the player no real direction to go in. It should at least mention that the PC has received a letter, but the letter is no real help either. The layout of the game is small enough that you don't need a map, and it was kind of fun to wander around checking out the surroundings, but when it came to actual game play it feel apart real fast. For example, the description for the chapel yard is useless:

Chapel Yard. 
It is daytime.  You can move north, east, south and west.

It doesn't describe what's around, let alone that fact that there's a well right in the middle of it. I had to go to the meadow in order to see the well. This makes the game all but unplayable. The game also needs to have better responses for negative actions. "The parser didn't understand that..." makes it sound like the action can't be done, but under the right circumstances it can.

It doesn't describe what's around, let alone that fact that there's a well right in the middle of it. I had to go to the meadow in order to see the well. This makes the game all but unplayable. The game also needs to have better responses for negative actions. "The parser didn't understand that..." makes it sound like the action can't be done, but under the right circumstances it can.

Overall the game is practically unplayable, and you'll have to turn to the walkthrough to get through it. The story makes no sense, and leaves you asking questions like: what is a CyberCow, why is it at the bottom of the well, and why does it have a well furnished, teak modeled, lair. In the end, I'd give this one a pass.

This is a very unambitious and short game -- in fact, it can be finished within as little as thirteen (pretty obvious) moves. It seems more like an exercise of its author in learning Inform than an actual game. At least, it wasn't too annoying, didn't take too much of my time, and probably was entered with good intentions.

When I first loaded up The Lucubrator, I had no idea what the title meant, though it sounded enticingly pornographic.One visit to dictionary.com later, and I determined it meant "one who engages in laborious work, study, thought, etc., especially at night."This is an apt title in only two ways: 1) Killing people and eating their brains is probably hard work, and 2) It was way too much of a chore playing this game.

You play a scientist waking up to discover that your former co-workers- unrepentant assholes, the lot of them- have killed you and resurrected you as a zombie for undisclosed reasons.Probably because they're two-dimensional, uninterestingly melodramatic characters who couldn't find a better use for their vaunted intellects. Obviously, things do not go as planned, and everybody but you dies painfully.I lament my survival, however, because this game pulls off the IF Holy Trinity of Problems: confusing design, bad story, and lazy editing.

The first room's challenge was actually quite promising. I had to figure out how to free myself from the autopsy table while my cocky captor rhapsodizes about his awesomeness and my stupidity.This made it all the more satisfying when he finally lay in a pool of blood at my feet.

Afterward, though, the room didn't feel it needed to explain how to exit.I managed "enter door" finally- awkwardly- only to uselessly find out later it was to the north.I realize writing, "A door is to your north." is not terribly eloquent, but this is interactive fiction.That stuff needs to be crystal clear.

That's just one of many annoying but surmountable nitpicks.The real problem is the second puzzle, the killing of a security guard.I had a traditional weapon, but trying to use it just gets the default "Violence isn't the answer to this one."OK, fine, but since this is a horror game and every solution involves violence, you'd think I could get a response more relevant to the story, let alone a clue about what act of violence I'm meant to commit.Maybe a "Your rocket launcher is out of ammo!Your rocket-shaped pet ferret consoles you with a lick."Furthermore, the missing link doesn't even seem necessary for what it helps accomplish- think brushing your ferret before you stuff him in the bazooka, so he'll be more aerodynamic.I would suggest using the walkthrough, unless that hypothetical sounds intriguing.

The story is brief and forgettable.Each enemy is either a juvenile moron with a mad scientist persona scotch-taped on or a hapless but dull bystander you feel fleetingly guilty about slaughtering.I like blood and guts as much as the next fellow, but it's much more satisfying to snack upon the innards of a well-developed character.

Finally, I know it's petty, but it bugs me when the tense switches for no reason mid-sentence, or the perspective jumps from "you" to "we", or easy words are misspelled.A little proofreading goes a long way, that's all I'm saying.

The potential for fun is here, but too many roadblocks and potholes kept me from enjoying the mindless mayhem.If you like Troma horror flicks with all of their bad dialogue, poor lighting, and continuity problems, you might enjoy this story.Otherwise, rent Dawn of the Dead.

Geoff Fortytwo’s Magic is subtitled “A Story of the Dangers That Magicians Can Face”.However, magic- in this case the kind practiced by birthday party entertainers- has surprisingly little to do with the story.The story begins with your public humiliation by a crowd of skeptical and derisive children.After fleeing to the trusty magic shop, you find a spell which lets you metamorphosize a limited range of items into something helpful to finding and destroying your homicidal stage rabbit and his cronies.

But you might as well be a plumber or grocery clerk for how much magic concerns the story beyond that.The player character’s personality is decidedly neglected after the initial birthday fiasco.He neither redeems himself as a magician nor commits more career-related gaffes until an incidental and frankly irrelevant ending coda prompted not by logical narrative flow but by simply winning the game.

I don’t want to be too down on it, though- there is some great humor, spent often on casual moments rather than invested in the broader story.The various ways you can die made me chuckle, and the vicious rabbits, while the motive for their madness goes completely unexplained, are endearingly strange.The NPCs have great possibility- each is unique and engaging at first, but they only dip their toes into the pool of the humorously odd, never really cannonballing in as I wish they would.A dead mime in an interrogation room, a boisterous, explosives-loving surplus store proprietor, a devotee of a rabbit-worshipping religion, an apathetic vagabond- I want to know more, but I’m given few personal details.Their gaming purpose, it seems, is paramount to their character depth.The final joke, though- just prior to defeating your nemesis- is really quite amusing.I do so love word play, though you’ll have to be a Monty Python fan to get it (though who isn’t?).

As for the mechanics, the magic trick is intriguing and the tutorial fairly helpful.Let’s say you have a pair of scissors and a lawn.The trick lets you compare the scissors to the lawn, thus transforming the scissors into a lawnmower.But even the tutorial itself admits that the transformations are seldom so conceptually logical, rather that you have to “guess at [them] based on what you really need to achieve”.In other words, be ready for a lot of head-scratching until you figure out that comparing the turtle to a pile of rocks will get you turtle food.Fortunately, an optional (and rather funny) hint system will dole out progressively transparent clues if you get stuck.And you will.

There are also some minor glitches and bad editing here and there.After performing a transformation early in the game, I returned later to find both the pre- and post-transformed items paradoxically co-existing and not existing at the same damn time, and neither functioned normally.Sound confusing?Try working it out on a rain-soaked roof.A little post-design polish might have cleared this up.Magic is a somewhat dull and misleading title.Almost Magic is a bit more apt.Play it for the amusing in-jokes and chuckles, but don’t expect much more.

This entry has such a wonderfully generic title (and an even more generic subtitle -- "a science-fiction text adventure of space exploration and interpersonal communication"), and it must be said the game lives up to the expectations aroused by its name. The writing, indeed, is as austere and unremarkable as the Martian landscapes it's describing for the most part. This has two effects: lack of motivation to do anything on the player's part, and puzzles becoming more difficult than they should (and were intended to) be, because it's often problematic to get an idea what an object looks like from its description. This made me resort to the walkthrough from the very start, which I never regretted.

However, there was at least one outstanding thing about this game: namely, its size. More than 50 Mb! I didn't do any special research in this respect, but I think it could very well be the largest text adventure ever published -- at least, in terms of occupied HDD space. However, most of it can be attributed to the soundtrack, it seems. (BTW, I couldn't find any way to turn the sound off other than muting the loudspeakers of my PC -- which kind of sucked, and cost the game at least one extra point).

P. S. OK, later I learned AMO was an adaptation of a Sci-Fi story, but it didn't make me feel like changing anything in the review. Not even the phrase about the generic title (although it probably wasn't as generic in 1934, when the work AMO is based on was published).

This is a text RPG. It's obvious how much work has been invested into the interface -- and it really works, never getting in the way. I'm not a fan of RPGs, but it seemed to me the game is pretty well-balanced, letting the player going on step by step, allowing him to deal with monsters he can beat, and to leave the ones that are too strong for him until later. The part of the game I saw hadn't much of a plot (and I doubt most players would see more within the two hours limit - the battles take a lot of time!), but it's probably OK for the genre. The descriptions are anything but verbose, and there are very little puzzles. Still, I'd certainly rate this entry at least one point higher if RPGs were my cup of tea.

Nerd Quest is a home-brewed text adventure, written in Java, that fails on a number of levels. There's not much to do, the goals aren't clear, and the interpreter suffers by not implementing a number of IF standards.

In this game you're a developer for an IT company that doesn't want to be late for a date with his girlfriend, and a hacker has broken into the mainframe. You're locked in the server room by your boss and forced to fix the broken terminal; but the goal the game sets up isn't the real goal of the game, a discrepancy that makes it hard to play from the start.

Other problems abound in this hand-coded interpreter. It doesn't understand commands like restart/save/restore/quit/verbose or transcript, though I couldn't put the game into an unwinnable state. Shortcuts like 'l' for look aren't implemented either, and standard verbs like 'examine' are missing too.

The writing in this game is minimal, if you can call it writing, and it's very frustrating to play because you don't know what or how to interact with the few things that are implemented in the rooms. I quickly lost confidence in the interpreter and turned to the walkthrough.

Also, if you use the run.bat file to play the game it will end abruptly, and you end up missing the final remarks. In order to see what takes place you'll have to run it from the command line. Of course, I'm a PC user.

I think if this game was implemented in something like Inform or TADS it would have held up a lot better. The interpreter is weak, along with the room descriptions and interactivity. There's not a lot to enjoy here, and you'll probably find yourself turning to the walkthrough early on. I can't see it doing very well in this competition; the home-brewed aspect just kills it, but at least it's short.

The Ngah Angah School of Forbidden Wisdom looked like it was going to be pretty good. There was a translatable alphabet that came with the game, and I always had fun with these when I was a kid. But in practice, the alphabet turns into a guess-the-verb puzzle that I couldn't figure out, and without a walkthrough, I didn't get very far.

In this game you're trying to complete three magical tests to get into the school so you can be with your girlfriend. It never captured me; the very motivation for going through all of this doesn't seem to be there. The first test is right up front, so after looking around a bit, I found myself trying out all sorts of combinations to get past it. The instructions aren't really clear here. I'm not sure that I'm supposed to be trying to guess a magic word, I just think that's the goal, and the translatable alphabet is only failing me. Maybe if the game supported graphics for the symbols. I don't know if Alan can handle graphics, but there are tools out there that can, like Hugo. So after guessing for a while, I gave up.

Maybe it's because I've come to the end of the competition, but I didn't feel like struggling with another game that didn't compel me with its setting or story. One thing that I've learned throughout this competition is, if you're going to do puzzles, you better do them right; and having one that bottlenecks the game right at the beginning is just death for the thing. Others might enjoy it, but I'm more of a zombies/vampires sort of guy, and I can't recommend this one. So I guess I failed to enter the School of Forbidden Wisdom.

Us reviewers can be so predictable sometimes, even to ourselves. When I first scanned over the games entered into this Comp and the authors who wrote them, this was the one I was most immediately interested in playing for the simple reason that Eric Eve is my favorite currently working author of IF. Nightfall fell near the end of my randomized playing schedule, and all through playing through its predecessors I kept hoping something would wow me sufficiently to be worthy of a ten. A few came close, but it never quite happened. Failing that, I was almost hoping that Nightfall would not be quite on the level of Mr. Eve's previous efforts, and would itself not be worthy of my ten. That didn't happen either. And so here I am, having awarded exactly two tens in three years of judging Comps -- and both of them have gone to Eric Eve. I think I've officially descended into hopeless fanboyism.

As Nightfall begins, your city -- an anonymous English town set right here in our own time and universe -- is being evacuated due to the approach of some unknown Enemy. You decide at the last moment to stay behind when you realize that a mysterious woman you've had a crush on for years has also decided not to flee. You have the vague hope of saving her from some ugly fate by convincing her to come to her senses -- and, of course, being a typical male, of parleying your newfound collateral into the relationship you've been pining for all these years.

The game takes place entirely within the darkened, deserted confines of your city over the course of a single evening. The only other people left are some police officers who are combing the streets for stragglers like you, along with a drunkard or two with nowhere else to go and, presumably, the woman you're here to "rescue." It's an eerie, tense play. You don't know just when this Enemy is supposed to arrive, or even what its true nature might be. Mr. Eve plays the tension up with the expected but effective series of mysterious sounds, sightings of distant unknown figures, mysterious lights on the horizon, etc. As you learn more, your sense of unease does not decrease but rather the opposite.

At the heart of the game is your relationship with this mysterious and beautiful woman you have been so obsessed with for so long. This sort of thing isn't exactly new territory for Mr. Eve, mysterious and beautiful potential femme-fatales having become something of a staple in his work. However, the relationship does develop differently here than does the relationship in The Elysium Enigma. You have very little direct contact with the woman this time around. Rather than through conversation, here you must piece together your judgments about the woman through a series of memories that are triggered by visiting various places in the city and through clues you find that shed light on her personality and motives. You and the woman have a long history this time around, and thus much of what you are doing here is discovering backstory that the actual protagonist is already aware of, at least at some level. Now, at one level this is a decided step down in storytelling ambition. It's no bold assertion to say that in general we rely too much upon discovering backstory, as opposed to making a story of your own, to make our IF narratives compelling. (It's also no secret why that is, of course, interactive storytelling in general being so damn hard.) Mr. Eve makes it work really, really well here, however, and for once it feels like this was simply the best way to tell the story he was trying to tell, as opposed to being a shortcut put in place for technical reasons. In other words, the foreground story of discoveries here is the one he is really interested in, as opposed to just looking for a device to convey the backstory in an interactive medium.

The game design works equally well. The game is by no means puzzleless -- there are in fact plenty of challenges to overcome. None are huge stumpers, however, and there are multiple solutions all over the place. Say you find a window which you want to use to enter a locked building, but that is set into the wall just above your head. As you would expect, there are various objects you can find about the city that might allow you to get inside. When something should work for solving a problem like that, it does, or you are at least provided with a plausible reason why it does not. Further, you by no means have to solve and find everything to complete the game. In fact, you'd have a very hard time doing so on the first playthrough. When you finish the game, Mr. Eve even gives you a helpful list of things to try next time to piece together more of the story. Thankfully, though, going everywhere and solving everything is not necessary to get the gist of the situation and get a perfectly satisfactory ending.

Can I complain about anything here? Oh, of course. One or two puzzles are a bit two "text-adventurey," particularly the one involving a certain wino who will not let you pass until you give him something. The whole thing in general is so polished and well-tested, though, that it lives up to the standards of Mr. Eve's previous work easily. I may be predictable, but I must say that this is a superb piece of work, and qualifies easily as my game of the Comp for 2008.

There weren't too many unconditionally likeable entries in this year's Comp. However, Opening Night was one of the few lucky exceptions for me.

In this game, you are a worker who spent his last money to buy a ticket for a musical his favorite actress is starring in. But they won't let you in, because you're not dressed fine enough...

The story is very strong, with a big surprise for the player waiting at the end. The impact was immense, which was to a no small degree the merit of the wonderful writing.

It's difficult to talk about Opening Night's virtues without spoiling the aforementioned surprise for the reader; thus, let's turn to a topic that is much more habitual for an old nitpicker like myself;) -- the faults that prevented me from giving it a ten.

Well, the main complaint I have about this game are its puzzles. Its opening puzzle (overcoming the dress-code obsession of the guard at the theater entrance), to be more precise. It's not bad on its own -- but it is a total misfit for the rest of the game, since it is entirely based on adventure game logic (the solution would work with a probability of less than 5 % in your everyday life), and thus, in my eyes, entirely unsuitable for a work intended to be realistic. I spent quite a time trying solving it; at the very moment I was opening the walkthrough file I thought, "well, maybe I should try *that*!" My second (dismissive) thought was, "no, that can't work here, this is AGL!" Yet, a second later I ascertained this was the correct solution...

Even if, as one of the members at the Russian interactive fiction forum suggested, this was done deliberate in order to confuse the player -- well, this device didn't work for me. I can understand the idea, but the same approach could have been used more elegantly (as it is done, for instance, with other puzzles: at first glance, they might seem like a misfit too, but as the story progresses, it becomes clear what they mean).

Then, there were a few implementation issues. The game sometimes persists on carrying out mundane actions that should be implied too much (this is very similar to the UNLOCK DOOR THEN OPEN IT problem that was discussed some time ago in SPAG). For instance, in a scene, you find yourself standing on a trash can. If you decide to leave your current location, you can't just type a direction -- the game will tell you you have to get off the trash can first. But even DOWN doesn't work -- you have to explicitely enter GET OFF TRASH CAN, or (thankfully) just OUT. Besides, there were a few outright bugs -- like, an empty room, which the player can enter by going in a direction not expected by the game author, or another location telling you there are paths running in all directions, but saying you can't go that way if you try following any of them. Of course, those are pretty minor quibbles, and they only get annoying because of the overall quality of the work; in a less impressive game, I probably wouldn't have noticed them at all.

Finally, this game is about theater, and, like in a real theater, there are moments where you are a passive spectator, just hitting "z" turn after turn. These sequences are rather prolonged, especially in relation to the (rather small) overall game size. Well, this wasn't really a problem for me -- the wonderful writing I mentioned before really helped to enjoy those periods of inactive waiting; speaking objectively, though -- a fair amount of players might not like it.

Despite all these cavils, though, I rated Opening Night an 8 (which means "excellent" on my scale).

And from Dark Star:

Opening Night is an interesting piece that sets up many questions, but delivers before the curtains fall. It's a tight design that only took me an hour to finish, unveiling a back-story that really draws you in, but some of the puzzles might force you to turn to the walkthrough early on.

You play a factory worker attending the opening night of Miranda Lily's latest show. This game focuses on story over puzzles, though in the beginning the direction wasn't clear; but as the story progresses, it smoothes itself out, with game play becoming more playable. The implementation is solid, with almost all the scenery present, but it lacks any real NPC interaction. Also, a few of the puzzles do bottleneck the game, which caused me to turn to the walkthrough. A bit of redesign would really help here.

There's a really enjoyable narrative going on, that's propelled by the undercurrent of the back-story. The code is solid, though some of the puzzles are a little hard. If it throws you in the beginning, stick with it. The game does pay off in the end.

Another very oldschoolish game. Here, you have to defeat the pirates who captured your spaceship. Contrary to what the author is saying, the game isn't very suitable for a two hours play. It requires a profound approach -- alone finding out how all the ship control systems are operated will take a lot of your time. It's also very likely that you'll have to grope for the winning strategy by trial and error (or, in other words, by saving and restoring). As you might have guessed already, it's a puzzlefest -- but a very solid one.

There's not a lot to say about Project Delta: The Course.The author calls it a "prequel" in the introduction, but it's more accurately just a demo of a new IF system the author has designed.Instead of exploring and interacting with the simulated world via a verb/noun/prepositional phrase command, such as "hit nate with the frying pan," you have a palette of five or so options listed after a short block of text describing where you are and what is happening.Type the number next to the command, and you carry out that action.I appreciate this clean, simple interface, and I imagine this is an ideal format for IF newbies who get annoyed that the game doesn't understand "grab Nate by the collar and slap some damn sense into him."However, in trying to simplify things, the author has thrown out the baby with the bath water. By outright listing each possible action, any challenge the game might have presented is lost. Gone is the sense of your presence in a physical space you can explore creatively at your discretion. By necessity, any inconsequential but interesting actions such as "eat pencil" are missing, because the list of options would grow far too long if it enumerated every frivolous possibility. It might have been a better idea to have a few of the major actions for the current location listed in this way, maybe even just the exit choices, but still allow the player to explore their surroundings through text commands. This way, the player doesn't get stuck, they have the benefit of the clutter-free display, but they also get to exercise some freedom.

As for the game portion, the prose just isn't very well written. You are told "you are a young and white female with shorter hair and a smooth body making a fit impression" who is "wear[ing] a black tattoo." A smooth body? Wearing a tattoo? What, am I an alien gym instructor with detachable skin? That said was in a manner awkward sentence. Helped would have proofreader. The plot is something irrelevant about being an amnesiac, elite agent for a secret military... whoa, just nodded off there.

The game is far too short and the final goal is unforgivably lame- you shoot a target. That's it. Hope I'm not ruining anything for you. Note to authors everywhere: IF is not meant for tests of hand-eye coordination or spatial accuracy. There is no challenge or satisfaction to typing "shoot target," or in this case especially, selecting the option "shoot target" from a list of EXACTLY ONE OPTION. There is a great medium for this: the game industry calls it a first-person shooter, and they pump out approximately nine hundred thousand each year. One of them must be hiring. Or you could just build a better dart board. The plot would be better than Halo, at least.

Recess At Last is short game in which you play a fourth grader who can't go outside due to not turning in your homework. The goals are clear, and the implementation is solid, but the game play is too easy. There's not much here, just a few puzzles that have no real challenge. Also, it didn't feel like fourth grade; everything was sterile. None of the kids were picking on me, no classmates were throwing spit wads, and there weren't any children playing around behind the teacher's back. It wasn't humorous, and the ending left me flat. Maybe if the game made some sort of point it would have worked better for me, but that's kind of hard to do in a fourth-grade setting. This one probably isn't worth your time.

The game reminded me of Symetry by Rybread Celsius (although I think the similarities are pure coincidence). It is very short, but it's not easy to beat, and can be ended in several ways. Once you get the idea of how to go about winning it, though, you probably won't have much trouble finding the alternative endings.

Unlike Mr. Celsius, the author of Red Moon managed to create a satisfyingly scary atmosphere; however, there seemed to be some problems with the way the story was told. Me, for instance, misinterpreted it, and had to read the accompanying materials to get it right. But this is a minor issue. My main complaint about this entry is, it simply doesn't work on its own in its current form; making it a scene in a larger game suggests itself.

Riverside made me think of a passage from the IntroComp FAQ:

WHAT'S TO STOP ME FROM JUST ADDING "AND THEN THEY ALL DIED -- THE END" TO MY ENTRY AND THEN CLAIMING MY PRIZE? BWAHAHAHA!

Indeed, it looked like an IntroComp game entered in the wrong competition... or like a bad joke.

The stub of story before the abrupt ending was told very nicely, although there was some gentle but obvious railroading present. There were no puzzles to speak of -- in each of the four episodes, I received a rather clear (and pretty trivial) goal, and had to master it to advance the plot. Apart from the baffling ending, the only serious thing to complain about was the scarce implementation -- most items mentioned in the descriptions couldn't be referred to, and of those that could many reacted with generic responses.

Still, the whole thing was quite likeable (thanks to the prose for the most part)... If only it was finished!

Do you know those Asian kung fu movies -- or parodies of Asian kung fu movies -- in which the dialog is horribly translated, horribly acted and dubbed, and often doesn't make much sense at all? Well, playing this game is a bit like watching one of those movies. The nicest thing I can say about it is that it almost attains "so bad it's good" status, in an "all your base are belong to us" sort of way.

You play an historical Chinese figure, a woman named Wu Mei who will eventually go on to found a new school of martial arts. At the moment, though, you are concerned about finding an "ultimate weapon" with which to take revenge on a prince who has murdered your family. Perhaps I can convey some of the flavor of this one by saying that its title is completely earnest, meant with no irony whatsoever. I am quite certain that the entire game is written in the same spirit. This means that although the martial arts master you talk to speaks exactly like Yoda, this is either pure coincidence or accidental pop culture channeling. Which makes it ten times more funny than it would be if it was intended as an ironic bit of fun, of course.

So, then, finding this weapon involves visiting a monastery and learning from the monks there. The master there gives you a couple of puzzles to solve, and after doing so you learn -- no surprise here -- that the ultimate weapon was within you all the time, yadda yadda yadda. At the end you get to demonstrate your new wisdom by -- no surprise here -- electing not to give into your hate and kill the prince.

So that's the (bad) plot. But that's only the beginning of the problems here. I have the impression that the writer is not a native English speaker, as revealed by his frequent strange and inappropriate choices of words. She has all kinds of problems with tense, veering from past to present not just from paragraph to paragraph or even sentence to sentence, but within individual sentences. The game is also badly bugged. When I talked to Yoda for the first time, he gave me the first of two tasks I had to carry out to gain his assistance. In my general messing-about, I accidentally completed the second task before completing the first or even being informed what the second task was. Sure enough, when I returned to Yoda he announced that I had completed my tests and was now ready to receive enlightenment. His big insight was that the guards at the evil prince's palace take a nap every afternoon. This leads to two questions: 1) Couldn't I have figure this out for myself, just by observing things a bit? 2) Didn't anybody at the palace ever think that nap-time for guards might be a Bad Idea?

Other things are just as weird. The game has a day / night cycle. Okay, fair enough -- except that by my calculations each turn must use at least an hour of real time. Taking my inventory requires an hour; looking at an object requires an hour; etc. Perhaps I am just so hugely enlightened that I give myself over to these simple tasks so completely as to lose an hour at them -- but that doesn't explain why walking from the isolated monastery to the palace of the prince absorbs the exact same amount of time as looking at the hoodie I'm wearing. (No, I didn't know that people wore hoodies in ancient China either.)

This game was created using a system called SUDS. It's hard to judge the system fairly when playing a game written by such an inept author, but I nevertheless wasn't much impressed. SUDS plays fairly similarly to Quest -- all manipulatable objects appear in menus which you can select with the mouse. Verbs are given icons at the top of the screen. Luckily, it's possible to play the old-fashioned way as well. I found the entire presentation rather garish, but some of that may be down to the game author's choices: each phase of the day reveals a more unreadable color combination than the last, and the text inexplicably doubles in size occasionally for no reason I could see. On the other hand, the interpreter does not do MOREing, and the parser is (alas, predictably enough) atrocious.

I'll give SUDS a more thorough critique, however, when I find a more competent game written with it. I've complained enough here as it is.

A story told from a unique perspective can make a good game great, or even a bad game mediocre.I can happily live the rest of my life without another game starring an armored space marine or a simple commoner thrust into an epic struggle or a spunky Japanese anything. Put me in the shoes of an octopus shoe salesman, though, and I don't care how lame the gameplay is, I'll at least have a memorable chuckle, even if I only play five minutes.Snack Time! is a fine example of the good made great.You play the authorial bulldog.In a charming twist, though, you view your human caretaker as your own dimwitted but lovable pet who you must influence with your canine abilities in order to satisfy your munchies.This is a simple game with a simple story, but I loved every minute of it.It is a brief adventure, to be sure (I finished in under an hour, and I play very deliberately) but it is often hilarious and rewarding.

The progression is not difficult but does require some thoughtful interaction, as your character does not analyze his world like a human.Simple things like toilets and socks become mysterious and amusing irrespective of their intended purpose, and to use them effectively, you must learn a stable of new, well-implemented verbs, such as "lick" and "chew".You do not have the infinitely deep pockets of a Zorkian cave crawler- you can carry only one thing in your mouth at a time.And you cannot directly converse with the most important interactive element, your master, so you must be creative to gain an understanding with him.All this creates an immersive experience which encourages curiosity and rewards experimentation, though such dense variety comes at the expense of a short leash.I would love to see a follow-up set in a larger world, perhaps a park or a kennel.

It is entirely possible that one must be an animal lover to enjoy this game.Like most pet owners, I often wonder what my furry companions think of the world around them, and me specifically- am I well-liked, or just patronized because I know how to open the kibble bin?How much power do I wield over them, or more importantly, how much do they subtly wield over me?One who is not interested in this relationship as I am may not get the same satisfaction I did from Snack Time!Put it this way- if you know what "lolcats" are, and they bring you great joy, you will have a great time with this game.If not, you at least get a short, quirky experience peppered with a few eye-rolls and snickers.

Trein, first and foremost, is in dire need of proofreading.Spelling and grammatical errors are rife.The narration cuts awkwardly back and forth between ornate period language, full of "shalls" and "dare nots", to clunky modern phraseology.The total amount of descriptive text can probably be cut in half, mostly by eliminating unnecessary wording, like starting every other sentence with "additionally" or "presently".A new sentence implies the presence of something additional!We know the events are happening presently, we're playing a game in the present tense!I'm sorry, but excessive wordiness is like walking around with Jell-o down my boxers.A couple of spoonfuls may liven things up, but stuffing the whole mold down there just makes it hard to concentrate.I don't think an understanding of language and structure, the basic essentials of readability, is too much to ask for.

You play an aide to a medieval lord, who has sent you to investigate the strange goings-on in a town called Trein Hill.You must gather evidence that a conspiracy is afoot.That's about as detailed as the story gets.You are never told the specifics of the crime- the final MacGuffin is laughably referred to only as "an Evidence."Eat your heart out, Matlock.The NPCs are all gratingly flat, their contributing dialogue being exactly one scant nugget pertaining to whatever the next plot point is.Don't bother asking the bartender about the bar, the town, or those boisterous guards at the next table.She has nothing to say about any subject save the next link in the rather short, dull chain of events.

On the surface, the atmosphere is dark and foreboding- the town has clearly seen better days and almost conveys an intriguing melancholy.Almost.Then you realize the author has not bothered to go into any detail about your surroundings.At one point, I encountered a location where, according to the room description, a roof had collapsed into the street.Curious, I type "examine roof".I was graced with "You can't see any such thing."This emptiness hits you constantly, like you're merely a blind man amongst studio backlot facades, not a fully realized environment.Bizarrely, some items have the opposite problem.Investigating the potato bag yields this helpful tidbit:"You look at the Bag- yes, it contains potatoes."Some rooms describe their decorations and furniture in detail, only to have the automatically generated list of the room's contents redundantly and blandly rattle it all off again because the author forgot to program them as scenery and not something that might fit in your pocket.

The "puzzles", as the walkthrough generously refers to them, are all of the mundane lock-and-key variety.There are multiple endings, but none of them seem relevant or even worthwhile, since your character has almost no personality and your quest no substance. I would suggest this fiction might be better told in a non-interactive medium, such as a short story, hopefully forcing the author to be more focused in both preparation and execution.But as an interactive world it is ultimately a sloppy and uninteresting chore.

This game does something with the avatar / narrator relationship which I can't recall ever seeing before. You play a procrastinating graduate student who desperately needs to complete his dissertation. You need to do this not only for the obvious reasons -- career, money, the indignity of being perpetually in school while all your friends long ago got real jobs, etc. -- but also because your girlfriend has told you she is going to leave you if you don't get on with it and get finished so that the two of you can start the next stage of your life together. She has sent you to your office as the game begins, giving you the choice of either writing 1000 words or of having her fly back to Australia and out of your life forever tomorrow. And here's the twist I mentioned: the whole game is narrated to you by said girlfriend, the eponymous Violet. It's certainly a clever conceit, and one that works pretty well. As you play, you learn more and more details about your and Violet's personalities, your relationship, and how exactly you came to this impasse, mostly through Violet's comments upon the various items in your office and upon your actions.

Aside from this very notable wrinkle, Violetis an extremely well-implemented one-room puzzle game. Winning requires, obviously, that you find a way to write those thousand words. Willpower not being your forte, you must eliminate a whole host of distractions: the temptations of the Internet, the temptation to eavesdrop on the conversation of your ex-girlfriend in the office next door, that book on your shelf that you haven't yet read and feel you must before you can get started actually writing, etc. Gameplay, then, comes down to a sort of modern version of the famous Hitchhiker's Babel Fish puzzle. You eliminate distractions one by one through extremely convoluted means, until at last you can find no possible reason to procrastinate any more.

Violet is at first glance very much of the "IF as casual game" aesthetic that has emerged in just the last few years, of a piece with games like Suveh Nux, Child's Play, and even to some extent last year's Comp winner Lost Pig. These games offer simple, light-hearted plots onto which are fashioned the "juicy" style of gameplay that Emily Short wrote about somewhat recently in her blog. They very much encourage their players to experiment with actions, offering coherent, often humorous responses to even the craziest. They also share a certain similarity of tone: humorous but never offensive; difficult to solve as puzzleboxes but at the same time never overly demanding of their players' emotions or time. They are well-written but light; were I a Marxist I'd be tempted to call them the quintessential bourgeois games. While I appreciate the craft and effort that go into games of this ilk, craft that makes them in some ways among the most impressive works of IF being created today, the overall aesthetic is just not my favorite. They are impressive games that just don't really hit my sweet spot.

I was ready for a while to dump Violet into this category, motivated not only by its style of play and general tone but also by the sheer mundaneness of its subject matter, especially in light of my own life. (Playing the role of a procrastinating graduate student struggling to complete his dissertation is, shall we say, not exactly a big stretch for me.) And then, as my frustration mounted with the puzzles, I began to loathe the weak-willed sponge of a man that is the PC and to get almost equally irritated with Violet's own jocular, oh-so-Aussie tone, which descended in my mind from fresh and charming to overbearingly twee as my time with the game went on. In the end, though, Violet rose again in my estimation, first by delivering some dribs of real emotion and tension amidst the drabs of light humor, and then by offering an ending which is actually moving and inspiring.

But I still have complaints about the gameplay. These puzzles are hard -- really, really hard, and hard in a very frustrating way. I spent the full two-hour judging period just overcoming the game's first significant challenge. Faced with beating my head against what I assumed would be at least a handful of similarly difficult challenges, I went to the walkthrough out of sheer exhaustion. I'm glad I did, as I don't think I ever would have solved a couple of these.

The game's design makes solving each puzzle rather unrewarding. In a conventional adventure, a difficult puzzle solved usually means more rooms to explore, or some sort of significant narrative development. Here, it just means that you get to be thwarted in your efforts to write by something else. Sure, you're making progress, but it doesn't feel like terribly rewarding progress. And the thing is, the puzzles don't need to be this hard. All of the game's strengths -- the try anything to see what happens playfulness, the amusing narrator, the endless little gags and clever asides, and ultimately the resolution of the PC's romantic and career crisis -- would have stood just as well with more straightforward, clearly clued puzzles. In fact, they would have stood in sharper relief, unobscured by the player's frustration with the brick-wall difficulty of the puzzles. Yes, the game has hints, and they're very well done, but no one likes to solve a game by reading the hints. A fighting chance of the player getting there on his own would leave him better served.

But even if I am a bit disappointed with the puzzle design, the amount of care that went into this is rather breathtaking. It's by far the most technically impressive game of this Comp, does something genuinely new with the player / narrator relationship, and stands out for the sheer quality of its writing. I suspect this one will challenge for the #1 slot overall, and while it's a bit too frustrating for me to give it that honor on my personal scorecard, I'm nevertheless very impressed.

This game feels like a wild mix of impressions and adoptions from a whole bunch of sci-fi horror works poured out on the unknowing player. There are problems everywhere: the story is full of contradictions, stretches and outright nonsense; the writing -- of spelling mistakes and unnecessary tautologies; the implementation demonstrates many features revealing WMA is a first attempt -- like, the repetitive messages that keep popping up at the end of each turn even if the previously displayed description made them obsolete. It takes somewhat longer than two hours to finish this work -- and that even if you play from the walkthrough. If I played fair, I'd probably spent the whole judging period of the Comp trying to beat WMA -- not only because of its size, but also because on several occasions it's not clear what to do next, and some puzzles require prolonged sequences of mundane actions to be solved. It's also very difficult to navigate through the game world without mapping it out -- it's effectively a single maze, with the exits often not mentioned in the descriptions (oh, and those that are mentioned often don't match the actual directions you have to go in to leave the location). The game features a few overlong railroading sections (the most annoying were the trip through the plant at the beginning, and the one towards the end, where I had to hit "z" nineteen times). All in all, this entry was one of the rare occasions making me feel that my urge to carry through any affair I've taken up is a bad habit.

IntroComp 2008 Reviews

While I wasn't able to play the six entries in this year's IntroComp during the judging period, I did play each of them shortly thereafter. In the interest of assuaging my guilt for not participating as a judge, I here present short reviews of a very worthy batch of games that are all to one degree or another worthy of serving as the basis for the sort of IF epics some of us still miss and pine for.

Authors: I have more or less complete transcripts of my time with each of these. Just drop me a line if you'd like me to send yours to you.

Bedtime Story is the tale of a prince in a fantasy kingdom who is attempting to rescue his inevitable princess. Yawn. But wait, don't go... for this game is really the story of a father and son who are concacting this slab of fantasy gobblygook together. I say that you are working together because your son, as children will do, constantly interrupts to clarify small points or point our your story's flaws and incongruities, or just because the story starts to go in a direction incompatible with his current whims. Suffice to say that by the end of this very short introduction the troll guarding the entrance to the castle that holds the princess has turned into a robot due to Danny's recent interest in Space Rangers.

I'm not generally the best audience for slices of domestic contentment like this one, but I found this effort completely charming and far removed the from the sort of cloying sweetness its concept might first suggest. Mr. Müller makes your interactions with your son not only funny but completely real. Clearly this is a man who has been in this particular situation. In its own unassuming way, Bedtime Story plays with the player / avatar / narrator relationship in a similar way to Violet. I personally found Bedtime Story to be even more effective, as its constant breaking of the fourth wall felt more natural and less overbearing -- or perhaps just because I liked little Danny and his father more than Violet and her procrastinating boyfriend. It stands as my favorite entry of this IntroComp.

Verdict for the Author: This is a fine, fine start. Finish with the same level of care and quality that you've begun with, and you've got a winner.

Fiendish Zoo casts you as curator of a zoo in (I think) Hell, whose inhabitants are manticores and cockatrices rather than the usual tigers and bears. Its overall tone reminded me quite a bit of Escape from the Underworld from this year main Comp: a sort of comical Pratchett-esque portrait of the nether regions as places just as banal to its inhabitants as our world is to us. Less fortunately but also like Escape, Fiendish Zoo is quite underwritten and underimplemented, which serves to bleed a lot of the potential out of its setting and runs the risk of turning its puzzles into an extended round of Parser Fun. Also, the game's subject matter makes it a bit of a balancing act that I'm not sure this author is prepared for. A cute little kitten is present, a kitten which is strongly implied as earmarked to become manticore food. Thankfully, this introduction doesn't make me carry through with delivering the kitten to its fate, but if it did this animal lover would be guranteed to quit and never return. Jokes about torture and death as everyday banalities are one thing; making us directly engage in hellish activities is quite another.

Verdict for the Author: The idea behind this one is clever, and could result in a fine little light-hearted adventure. However, you need to raise the bar on your descriptions and your implementation level substantially, and always remember thathellish cruelty might be funny in the abstract but it's nothing to laugh about in the specific.

The author describes this old school puzzler as "difficult," and that's a description that few are likely to argue with. The author also describes his game as "fair," but that's a description that might arouse some debate. Absolutely nothing is spoonfed to the player. You begin the game as some sort of immoble plant-like creature, and this is pretty much what I remained for a long, long time, until finally realizing that the first puzzle is in fact a guess the verb that requires giving some thought to the cliche that is partially formed by the game's title. If similar puzzles continue to crop up, this game is likely to be completely inaccessible to folks who are not very familiar with English and its common cliches and idioms, a fact which gives the lie to the author's contention that "no special external knowledge is needed" to solve this one. That's not meant as a blanket condemnation; Nord and Bert is one of my favorite games. It is, however, something for the author to be aware of and think about.

This is quite a large entry in IntroComp terms. In fact, I'd say that even in its IntroComp form it's larger and more ambitious than at least half the games that were entered into this year's regular Comp. It presented such a challenge that I didn't want to struggle with it too much knowing its was incomplete, but what I saw did impress me in its way. The writing and surrealist atmosphere rather reminded me of one of my all-time favorites, the obscure old homebrew classic t-zero. I would love, absolutely love, to play an old-school epic puzzler with that kind of feel again.

Verdict for the Author: I really like the feel of this one, but pulling it together into the tough as nails but solvable puzzler that I think you want to create will be no small task. Lots of tweaking will be needed to get the balance right. Pull it off, though, and maybe you've got a classic on your hands.

This entry wows with its sheer ambition. It's a fantasy tale set in a quite well-developed world that generally (if not completely) manages to avoid outright cliche, even if it's quite obviously in debt to plenty of genre literature. The game begins with a well-realized RPG-style character creation, done not through assigning blocks of numbers and skills but rather through an intuitive series of choices presented in the context of the story. After this there unspools quite a lengthy and varied -- if linear -- introduction that is much longer than the average main Comp entry. Throughout, the game seems to do a good enough job of integrating and adapting your character choices into the story, but if this really does represent only the barest beginning of the epic envisioned by the author... well, the mind boggles. It's one heck of a task she's taking upon herself.

The writing is sold and vivid enough, and this entry already must represent many hours of effort. Some underclued puzzles and some parsing problems near the end, however, do detract a bit from a generally well-tested and polished entry. But my biggest concern is whether one person working on a hobbyist basis can ever really finish something so monumentally ambitious. Not that I wouldn't love to play it if she did...

Verdict for the Author:Even as an introduction this has one heck of a lot going for it. And yet, and while I admire your verve and ambition, I wonder if you wouldn't be better served to scale the character creation system at least back a bit. The combinatorial explosion factor is going to be huge, and I'm not sure how much all of these options will really add to the player's enjoyment. Neverwinter Night 2 and games like it are cool... but alas, you don't have a team of dozens working for you, and perhaps IF isn't the best medium for that sort of thing anyway.

This is the most problematic of all the entries in this year's IntroComp. It's a zombie story, a genre we've been oddly innundated with lately, and a thinly written, poorly implemented one at that. The game begins, in classic horror movie fashion, with you driving along a deserted road with the sun setting and an ominous looking storm on the horizon. The implementation problems start with these very first turns. I had no idea what the game wanted me to do here, or how much role it wanted me to take in actually, you know, driving:

>x me 
You glance at your reflection in the rear view mirror, but see nothing unexpected. Your eyes are brighter than you'd expected at this hour. You feel newly minted, ready for anything. 

>i 
You glance away from the road for a second, then decide you can worry about that later. 

>drive w 
The road continues on to the west, the way you've been headed for hours. You haven't seen any side roads, and there's no point heading back east. 

>drive 
What do you want to drive? 

>car 
(the rental car) 
You already are. 

>w 
You're already headed that way. 

>z 
You resign yourself to the drive. Within moments, however, you catch yourself falling into a trance again. You shake it off, determined to stay alert. 

>turn on radio 
You scan through the stations, but, except for the occasional garbled voice, it's all white noise out here. 

>z 
You're determined to stay focused, for safety's sake. 

>z 
You're determined to stay focused, for safety's sake. 

>z 
You're determined to stay focused, for safety's sake. 

>x clouds 
Even if you stopped the car, the clouds still would be surging toward you at an alarming rate. Maybe the storm will blow itself out before it gets to you, though you doubt it. 

Your eyes return to the road -- just in time. 

Another vehicle, a truck, sits motionless on the road, blocking both lanes. You are still traveling 70 miles per hour.

Anyway, what follows is a rather threadbare but gory tale of zombie horror that rather reminded me of The Lucubrator from this year's main Comp, although this entry actually fares better by virtue of being fairly solvable for those willing to overlook and/or work around its bugs and parsing problems.

Verdict for the Author: To be honest, this game isn't really to my taste, and probably wouldn't be even if you fixed its many problems and punched up your writing considerably. However, it seems that there are quite a few people who really like gory zombie horror, and to my knowledge no one has completed a good, polished game in this genre that seems to attract a lot of second-rate dabblers. So, if you're ready to get more serious about your craft, there's your opportunity.

The Bloody Guns has an unusual setting for IF: it takes place in Darwin, Australia, during World War II. The game appears to be very well researched; just this short segment does a great job of evoking the mood and feel of its times, in addition to getting the bare details of the military hardware right. You play an anti-aircraft gunner, and your goal for this introduction is (naturally enough) to shoot down a Japanese plane that is attacking your base. After accomplishing that, however, you are assigned to a commando raid of sorts to a nearby island -- and there, in true cliffhanger fashion, the story stops for now.

The game is written in an IF development system of Mr. Allen's own devising which he calls JACL. It acquited itself surprisingly well. I encountered no obvious parsing problems, and the whole thing, including some nicely done atmospheric sound effects and music, felt very polished and professional. The same compliment can be extended to the writing. My only real concern here is that this introduction is very, very railroaded. That's probably okay for the opening sequence of a game, but Mr. Allen will need to start allowing the player a lot more agency once the game begins in earnest. Otherwise, though, bravo for a neat concept set in a fascinating and underused (in IF) period of history.

Verdict for the Author: I'm concerned about the linearity. As long as you know that you cannot get away with railroading your whole game in the way you did this introduction, though, you could build something very special from this beginning.

Other Game Reviews

I've been striving (or at least actively pining) to learn German for the last five years or so with moderate but far from breathtaking success, language learning being something I decidedly lack any natural talent for. Being a technological sort of fellow, I've tried to use computerized tools of various sorts to aid me along the way. I must say, however, that I'm rather nonplussed by the quality of the software out there for this purpose. The heavily hyped Rosetta Stone programs are useful for building vocabulary, but fail to effectively teach grammar or the all-important art of understanding and forming sentences on the fly in a conversational setting. The less heavily hyped Tell Me More programs do make a stab at providing a more well-rounded language education, but are partially spoiled by too many cutsey animations and other multimedia bits that only slow down the process of actually learning, as well by as a clumsy, limited interface. I eventually found my best technological friends to be the Pimsleur series of language learning tapes, which at least got me comfortable pronouncing German and to some extent building sentences of my own on a real-time basis. For the rest, I've found no substitute for books and, of course, practice with a patient living human being -- a luxury I have unusual access to, since my wife is German. But still, and while it's hard to imagine books and live practive ever becoming truly unneccessary for the achievement of real fluency, I'm really quite surprised as I write this that better computerized tools have not been developed, given that the teaching of languages is a huge and profitable educational industry. It's a truism that the best way to learn a language is via immersion, the more complete the better. Given that, I think what is needed is a sort of conversational simulator, to replicate the experience of cultural immersion as completely as possible, albeit without the nerve-wracking discomfort of trying to interact with strangers in a language one grasps little or not at all.

Which brings me to IF. I've heard plenty of stories over the years of people from non-English speaking countries using text adventures as a route to English. (Granted, relying too heavily might lead to a somewhat odd way of comunicating -- asking people to EXAMINE lots of things, saying Z when one means WAIT, etc. -- but the general point holds I think.) Tradional IF doesn't offer all or even most of what I would like to see in my hypothetical conversation simulator, as it (usually) has no real-time or audio component, but it does force its player to read and understand text and to respond by formulating phrases of a sort -- albeit simplistic ones. I've thus mused on and off since beginning my little German odyssey about the potential for IF as a language learning tool.

And it seems that the folks at the Utah State University Creative Learning Labs have been thinking about the same thing, because last year they released an IF "game" designed for just that purpose. It's called Ausflug am Wochenende nach München, which translates to Weekend Outing to Munich, and it plays out in two stages.

The first part is a tutorial written largely in English, with the purpose of simutaneously introducing the medium of IF as a whole (no prior knowledge at all being assumed) and of teaching the basics of how to interact with the command line in German. There's a surprising amount of information that needs to be conveyed in this latter category, German having a much more complex and subtle grammar than English. Verb tense (first person singular), two part verbs (put the second part at the end of the phrase), and of course what to do about those pesky umlauts all must be explained. (For some reason the game does not understand umlauts even if your keyboard is capable of typing them. Whether this oddity is a limitation of this game only or the deutsche Inform-Library that powers it I don't know.) Then there is the issue of German articles, which convey vital information about a given noun's role in a sentence and thus cannot be so lightly discarded as can their English counterparts. But, in the interest of keeping this review from turning into a language lesson itself, suffice to say that all is succinctly and clearly explained, and then the actual game, which is written entirely in German, begins.

Said game is basically a simple and traditional but fairly well designed text adventure of the sort that most of you reading this have probably played by the score. You play an American college student studying abroad in Freiburg who has decided to take an outing this bright Saturday morning to Munich. The game takes place entirely in and around the Freiburg train station, where you must purchase a ticket and some provisions for the journey and find your way to the correct train. This being a text adventure, accomplishing all this naturally requires overcoming a few obstacles by solving some fairly typical adventure game puzzles. And that's about it. Were the game written in English it would be pleasant but altogether unmemorable, one of those unassuming little titles that appear in every year's Comp that I literally cannot remember ever playing or reviewing -- at least by glancing over their titles alone -- by the time the next Comp rolls around. Also in common with many middling Comp games, it falls down a bit in technical polish here and there, the most egregious problem being the plot events that are occasionally included in the room descriptions.

But it's not written in English, and that's the important thing here. As a route toward bettering my German, I found it surprisingly effective. The first thing to understand is that, perhaps surprisingly, this is not pitched at the absolute beginner. The game assumes a basic familiarity and comfort with the language that will make it much more useful to third or fourth semester German students than those in their first semester. That said, it offers considerable aid and comfort. Its vocabulary and diction stay relatively simple throughout, being at about an average (American) high school reading level, and it comes packaged with a very helpful vocabulary list explaining the more specific or esoteric words used in the text. As an extended but not always terrible disciplined student of the language, I found the difficulty just about perfect for own needs. I did have to turn to the vocabulary list on a fairly frequent basis, but could otherwise work through the text without too much difficulty. The most gratifying part of the experience came once I had been playing for a while, when I found myself ceasing to endlessly translate between German and English and vice versa but rather to actually think in German. This is of course the key point that every language student wants to get to, the one that defines true fluency in a language. It was thus gratifying to experience, if only for a little while through this game, and further reinforces my opinion that IF has real educational potential in this realm.

The biggest problem with Ausflug as a learning tool is that there simply isn't enough of it. Even for those who might have to struggle with its German even more than I did, there simply aren't more than two or three good hours of interaction in here. While that's certainly better than nothing, it nevertheless means that the game serves more as a proof of concept than a viable learning tool. On the other hand, Ausflug does provide a gentle way of coming to terms with the general mode of interaction with a work of German IF. While the German IF community is not exactly thriving, there do seem to be at least a few new games being written each year, games I for one should really look into. In the meantime, I don't know what if any future plans the Creative Learning Environments Lab might have for this project, but I'd certainly love to see more tools like this, as both an IF zealot always looking for new applications of the form and as a typical (almost) monolingual American who wants to broaden his own language horizons.

While I can stand to play a game that incorporates puzzles, I have been able to finish few true puzzlefests. The thrill of exploration and problem solving is not lost on me, but I usually cannot be motivated to stick with a game that makes no attempt to provide a plot line serving more of a purpose than to provide a weak excuse for the puzzles. Recluse is just that kind of game, though its well-designed puzzles gave me enough incentive to endure.

The game layout is quite good, and the way the puzzles in different areas are interrelated is intriguing. This is not to say that they are flawless. At one point, the game refused to allow the player to take an object that seemed to fulfill one of the PCs goals without giving any good reason as to why. The author hardly even attempted to explain the refusal with the humorous message produced; it is clear that there was no reason except that allowing the player to acquire said object at that point did not fit the design of the game or the scheme of the puzzles. However, in general I enjoyed the puzzles greatly. They are difficult but well-clued, and a good hint system is provided. Obviously, these puzzles are the crowning achievement of the game.

The mechanical aspects are mostly well-done as well. The author went out of his way to ensure that the game understands anything logical the player might try, even when that meant more than just adding a few synonyms. Aside from one point where the hints revealed that I was trying about the right thing, but the game was not responding, I was quite impressed. There is nothing innovative about the technique or presentation, but several complicated features relating to the puzzles struck me as well-coded and as things that must have been hard to program. I noticed one major glitch involving an object that did not show up in the inventory list when it should have.

Unfortunately, the puzzles and perhaps some solid coding are the only things the game has going for it. There is nothing wrong with the writing, save for a few typos, but neither is it particularly inspired. The change of atmosphere when the player enters the endgame is far worse. Throughout most of the game, the tone is very light, with a lot of joking and very little plot to speak of as the player works on the puzzles. After the player completes the PC's immediate goal given in the opening text, however, the gameplay becomes very narrow, with the player simply going along as an attempt at a story is given. Additionally, when the winning ending is finally reached, the closing text is inconclusive and fails to even wrap up what little plot the game has, leaving me feeling very unsatisfied and wondering what the point to going through all those puzzles was. The game would have been far better had the author just slapped on an ending when the PC completed his goals, but even then the game would be lacking, in my opinion, for its lack of even a simple but real plot to tie the puzzles together.

Recluse is hardly a bad game by any means, but my impression is that it is very unbalanced. Perhaps I am missing the point, as the game was clearly intended as nothing more and nothing less than a puzzlefest, but I think even a puzzlefest could benefit from some kind of a coherent story line. Despite being unsatisfied with the ending, I think that I am ultimately not sorry that I played this game. It is up to each individual player to decide whether it is worth it to spend a lot of time playing a puzzle game that does not seem to take itself entirely seriously.

Welcome to review 3.0. I wanted so very much to write an objective, passionless critique of What Happens in Vagueness that, after vast effort and exquisite attention to detail. . . I wrote an objective, passionless critique. Observe the fail: score 96% for utility, and zero for interest. What happened was after filtering out every last bit of my characteristic verve and snarkiness, there was nothing left but a chasm of apathy, like a vacuum in my figurative heart where the anticipation and expectations built by the first few scenes are systematically freeze-dried and pounded into microscopic, miserable dust. See, it's even forced me to mildly anthropomorphize the shards of hope.

To be fair, collaborative works of any sort are notoriously difficult: especially Interactive Fiction, wherein an already built-in tendency toward linearity is only exacerbated by the serial nature of Vagueness, as it is composed of successive scenes written by ten different authors. Much like in college group projects, you are only as strong as the weakest member you can sideline and convince not to participate; this work suffers from approximately six such individuals.

The best thing which can be said about it is that it starts well. The long stretches of empty road, your dead-on-arrival junker, the near-mandatory unsavory canine companion and American frontier-inspired wasteland all provide an instantly recognizable setting.

While your initial goal is to obtain transportation to your Aunt's Mabel's 100^th birthday celebration, that quest is quickly overcome by events and eventually lost entirely as the progressively less related vignettes unfold. The second and third authors are actually done a bit of a personal disservice, since they thoroughly succeed in matching the first author's well-worn, post-apocalyptic tone, disguising the changes of scene.

Unfortunately, therein lies the beginning of the end, like 4^th century Rome. The first five scenes are largely related, while the final five bear almost no relation to each other, the foregoing scenes, or even a remote sense of plausibility. A significant problem throughout, but especially in the latter scenes (with one remarkable exception –you know who you are, Jacqueline A. Lott), is a jarring lack of descriptive depth. Rooms routinely feature descriptions of significant items which aren't even implemented as scenery.

Tables and chairs, a curiously ruined ceiling, and even intriguing machinery mentioned in room descriptions are not found on closer examination. While accepted and forgiven in the Infocom heyday, this has long been considered an unacceptable faux pas in genteel IF society. One scene revolves around interaction with an unending supply of alcohol which, regardless of how much one consumes, never has the slightest effect on one's perceptions or the room's description. Having been in the military for a significant portion of my life, I am prepared to take a stand against this unforgivable violation of verisimilitude.

At one point you find yourself in a gambling pit, and this occurs:

>x pit 

You can't see any such thing. 

>x gambling pit 

I only understood you as far as wanting to examine the gambling tokens.

And thus it turns out you have gambling tokens, which is news. Shortly afterward, there is an inevitable discovery that the verb "insert" has not been implemented in a casino, of all places. If you choose to play the slots in Vagueness, you may as well direct commands to your cat, for all it will accomplish. (Do not construe this as advice to purchase a cat, unless you are hardy of ego or possessed of an innate desire for victimology.)

While there are countless such examples throughout Vagueness, that one hit at a particular emotional low point in the play through . . . by which I mean, any time after the Rusty Bolt Fiasco (see the below paragraph). The only redeeming element of the casino scene is that it was immediately followed by an even more sparsely implemented scene: the most egregious case of descriptive laziness (let's say "ever") in Scene 7, of which the only notes taken during play were, "The point at which I lost all interest. Horribly unimplemented. I'm playing a shell."

In one of Vagueness' few points of consistency, the puzzles are just as clumsily patched together. Hitting a rusty bolt (I told you we'd come back to it) with a gun barrel somehow bruises your knuckles, but attacking the bolt with your knife successfully breaks it . . . Elsewhere, an object is stuck in a chandelier, but climbing on a nearby shelf and standing on a counter are refused as "not much is to be achieved" by such an action, and nothing may be thrown at the chandelier or object. Climbing an open staircase in the same room renders the chandelier completely inaccessible. There is a nearly limitless supply of logical solutions to every puzzle to which the authors decline to give even a passing review.

In Scene 9 you are required to use a verb which at every point up to this in the game appeared entirely unutilized. Later, you can decode a message informing you that you've followed a red herring to the wrong location; this clue gives you your true destination, but when you try to leave you are told, "This is the place to be. You don't have any other clues yet about where to be." Yes, that sound you just heard in your imagination was in fact my psychic death scream. You may even choose to hear it voiced by Leonard Nimoy in the original Star Trek episode "Devil in the Dark." PAAAIIIINN! Thanks, Leonard.

However, there are a few bright points. As indicated earlier, Jacqueline A. Lott's Scene 8, "Heaven is a Heart-Shaped Box," while brief, was mercifully colorful, vivid in description, and well implemented in scenery. It bears no stylistic or narrative relation to the rest of the game, but neither do any of the final five scenes. Ms. Lott would do well to explore her creative talents on her own.

Carl Muckenhoupt, in his Scene 5, "Invisiclues," deserves credit for creating one of the most logical, albeit unlikely, puzzles, which hinges on a genuine point of physics. This was the final point in the game which held any verisimilitude, although, ironically, the same one which lets you drink guiltless (and profitless) gallons of alchohol.

It is difficult to give one rating to a work created by ten individuals, but given the illogical and inconsistent nature of the puzzles, the shoddy implementation, lack of descriptive depth, and incoherency of narrative and style, perhaps one star out of five. After all, you can complete the game by reading the source code. For the love of any other game you could be playing . . . please don't.

SPAG Specifics

The following are not a conventional reviews, but rather in-depth discussions of design. As such, they contains spoilers, and are recommended reading for after you have completed the games in question.

It is now almost exactly a decade ago that Photopia was released, and in that decade it may well have been discussed more often than any other post-Infocom interactive fiction (with the possible exception of Galatea). All this discussion notwithstanding, the game has been consistently misunderstood; a theme, message and purpose have been attributed to it that it simply does not have, while its true theme, message and purpose (which are in many respects the opposite of those of the received reading) have gone unnoticed. This tenth anniversary of Photopia seems as good an occasion as any to attempt to change this situation.

The received reading of Photopia can be split in two parts that reinforce and complement each other, and which we can call the surface reading and the depth reading. We will discuss the surface reading first.

On this surface reading of Photopia, the piece is primarily the tragic story of a girl who is killed in a car accident. What it sets out to achieve, and what it achieves in some readers but not in others, is a strong emotional response to Alley's death. It is thus primarily a sentimental piece, and its effectiveness is proportional to the strength of the emotional response it manages to evoke. In this vein, Duncan Stevens writes that "Photopia stands or falls on the player's reaction to the story." [1]

Critical responses to Photopia often move entirely within the space of this surface reading. Here is Emily Short:

Some people consider it the most moving piece of IF they've ever tried. I personally found it wavered between effective and manipulative, with the main character too saintly to be true. [2]

Similar sentiments have been expressed by Jimmy Maher:

That story is a pretty good one, but doesn't move me to the extent it does some others. From a purely literary perspective, it's a bit heavy-handed and emotionally manipulative. Alley, the teenage girl at its emotional core, is more of a sentimentalized geek wish-fulfillment fantasy ("She's beautiful and charming and she likes science!") than a believable character.

Short and Maher are almost right. If Photopia had been primarily intended as a sentimental tale that must move us to tears in order to succeed, then it falls far short of perfection. There is very little bonding with the main character, partly because we see very little of her, and partly because what we see are not the kinds of scene that might make us care about her. We don't hear about her thoughts, her wishes, her dreams, about all the things that make up her unique personality and that would turn her death into an emotionally gripping event. Duncan Stevens writes:

The message of this game and of Photopia, for me at least: if you want us to care about characters, make us spend significant amounts of time with them. [3]

and that seems solid advice. But this ought not lead to the conclusion that Photopia fails because Adam Cadre failed to have us spend enough quality time with Alley; rather, it should make us question the received surface reading of the game. Is it really the case that Photopia is primarily a sentimental piece? Or can Cadre's design decision be better understood on a different reading of the piece?

One argument in favour of the received surface reading is that the game in fact appeals to most of its readers on a direct emotional level, and that this would be a mystery if it hadn't been designed to do so. This argument does not convince me. That people react in such an emotional way to Photopia may well result from the fact that the bleakness of its frame story is totally unexpected, unexpected, that is, by people who did not believe that computer games could be so bleak, and who did not sit down to play this game with the emotional barriers in place that they would certainly have put up if they had gone to see a movie or had sat down to read a book. If this is the case, the emotional responses to the piece may be no more than a side effect of writing a computer game in which the protagonist (necessarily but undeservedly) dies.

I would like to stress that taking away the sentimental aspect of Photopia in no way diminishes the artistic quality of the piece. Consider Emily Short's point about games that make us cry:

In addition, I think the metric of how a game makes us feel needs to be treated with caution. While I like and admire good comedy, I've also laughed at movies that I thought were complete trash. Likewise, the ability to evoke tears may be valued by audiences, but it isn't, in itself, a guarantee of either depth or literary quality. I've felt tears well up over news reports; over schlock children's movies; even, occasionally, over well-constructed ads. [4]

Indeed, taking away the sentimental aspect of Photopia will help us see its true artistic quality. Instead of a manipulative piece that doesn't work for its more sophisticated readers (and that includes almost everyone who reads it for a second time), we will be able to see that it is in fact a carefully constructed and highly effective meditation on death, hope and influence. But before we can see this, we must first do away with the received depth reading.

The received depth reading of Photopia is that its theme is the distinction between determinism and free will; and that its message is that freedom is an illusion, that the world will go its pre-determined course no matter what we try. The main technique that it uses to drive these messages home is the linearity of its plot, that is, the player's inability to change the outcome.

There is ample evidence that sophisticated readers have tended to view the piece this way. It is almost impossible to read a discussion of Photopia without coming across statements to the effect that the piece is extraordinarily linear and non-interactive. Emily Short writes that the game makes "a point of the player's inability to change the plot" [5]. Krish Raghav says:

The core of its emotional impact is its ability to turn this expectation of interaction in a traditional video-game narrative on its head, and use the LACK of interaction as a narrative form in itself. Events in Photopia hurtle towards their inescapable fate, and the jigsaw puzzle timeline provides occasional flashes of what that conclusion might be, and that sense of foreboding, created by glimpses of understanding as the plot slowly unravels, only intensifies as the game progresses. In a sense, the very lack of interactivity becomes the reason Photopia works [...] Suffice it to say that the inability to influence the fate that awaits Photopia's characters, and the claustrophobia that the game's limited interactivity creates within that universe works fantastically. [6]

These sentiments are widely shared. Melfi writes "Photopia presents these facts of life as unavoidable...as a reader, player, participant, and mortal human being, we ultimately have no control over our lives." [7] Even Wikipedia tells us that "Photopia has few puzzles and a linear structure, allowing the player no way to alter the eventual conclusion but maintaining the illusion of non-linearity. This gives weight to some of the story's motifs -- questions of free will and determinism." [8]

The main evidence put forward for the received depth reading is the linearity of the plot. The fact that you cannot change the way the game progresses, that it always follows its predetermined course, is felt by many people to be the most obvious feature of the game, and it is supposed that since it is the most obvious feature of the game, it must be there for a thematic reason, and must in fact be the central theme itself.

First question: how much of the interactive fiction that precedes Photopia allows the player to change the outcome of the story? (And indeed, how much of the interactive fiction that came after Photopia allows it?)

The answer is, of course, "almost none". It is a nearly universal tradition in interactive fiction, only seriously challenged in the past decade, that there is a single story line with a single outcome. You could get stuck; perhaps you could even die. But those were not real narrative strands of the piece. In all this interactive fiction, the plot was pre-planned for you. Does anyone think it is a central design feature of Spider and Web that you cannot help but escape, and does anyone draw from that the conclusion that Spider and Web is about free will and determinism? Certainly not. Does anyone believe that Shade is about free will and determinism? No. Still, like Photopia, it only allows you to move towards a single bad ending. It is every bit as linear.

So what makes Photopia a game that people believe to be about determinism? Certainly none of its structural features, since these are (in this respect) absolutely unremarkable and shared with 99% percent of the current IF corpus. Rather, I think it is the fact that Photopia's ending is an ending that people actively wish to avoid; and when they find out that this is impossible, they are so upset by this that they believe the unavoidability to be the central message of the game.

But once we stop believing that games are "naturally" mechanisms of wish fulfillment, power fantasies where we can always get what we want, then a game with an inevitable undesirable ending seems no more remarkable than a game with an inevitable desirable ending. There is no reason to believe that either is about the inevitability of Fate, unless the content of the game supports this notion.

Second question: does the content of Photopia suggest or reinforce the idea that it is about free will and determinism, and specifically, the lack of the former?

Absolutely not. Just consider the scenes that make up Photopia. Going to Mars to find a seed; crashing in the ocean; walking along a golden beach where you find dirt; casting off your space suit to fly away; feeding a wolf in a forest by planting the seed; telling your daughter about astrophysics, the dinosaurs, and how she is more than just a collection of atoms; saving your daughter from death by drowning; telling a child bed-time stories -- none of those scenes touch on the theme of determinism

This is a real problem for the received depth reading of Photopia. If the illusion of free will is indeed the core theme of the game, then how can we explain that this theme comes up almost nowhere in the work? It would have made sense if Cadre had at the very least reinforced his message through the tale-within-the-tale, but the coloured sequence is about saving a life and bringing new hope to a dead world, hardly the kind of fatalist message one would expect if the received depth readin were true. If the interpretation of a work can make sense of only one of its elements (Alley's unavoidable death) but remains barren when confronted by all the rest, it is a strong indication that better interpretations are possible.

Third question: if Adam Cadre had wanted us to feel our powerlessness in the face of Fate, would he have ordered the scenes in the way he actually has ordered them?

Again, no. If that had been his aim, he could have made the piece much more effective by a simple transposition of scenes. In Photopia, the player is never really in a position where he (a) knows what is going to happen, (b) could plausibly prevent it from happening, but (c) isn't allowed to do so. One might argue that the scene where Wendy's father drives Alley through town does put us in this position, but this is a bit of a stretch: since Wendy's father cannot possibly know that something bad is about to happen, he could not plausibly prevent it from happening; and if he fails to prevent it from happening, this is hardly proof of his powerlessness, but rather proof of his ignorance.

No, the only scene in which the protagonist knows that something bad is going to happen, and in which he and we really want to stop it, is the very first scene, where you play the boy who wakes up in a car driven by his drunken friend. If Adam Cadre had wanted us to feel powerless, he would have put this scene at the very end, after we understand what is going to happen. Then, our frantic but futile attempts to stop our friend before he goes through the red light would drive home the cynical message that the received depth reading attributes to Photopia. But Cadre has not put it at the end but at the beginning, the exact opposite, where it functions as the given, as that about which we cannot even have the illusion that we might change it.

Until now I have stressed that we cannot find the theme of determinism in Photopia, and that the fact that the course of the story is inevitable is not remarkable and does not call for a special explanation. But of course, I can hardly deny that there are differences in terms of interaction between Photopia and most other pieces of interactive fiction. There is a sense in which the game does give you less freedom than other games do. Let us explore that a bit, to see whether it supports the received depth reading of the piece.

In most interactive fiction, you are at total liberty to explore the fictional world in which you reside. Photopia limits this liberty in four ways. First, it chains its locations in an almost totally linear fashion, so that you cannot choose what to do first and what to do later. Second, in two scenes it even manipulates the geography of the game world in order to ensure that you see one thing first and another thing later. Third, a couple of scenes have timers such that after only a few moves, they end in a predetermined way. Fourth, there is a scene where the game goes as far as to make the player character do something if the player does not make her do it first (running down the steps in order to save the drowning Alley).

Can we best explain these limitations by interpreting them as comments on determinism? I think not, and for three reasons.

First, as a comment on determinism, these scenes and tricks are utterly lame. They do not convince us. Surely it was possible for Alley's mother to remain in her office. If the red planet had been a real place, it would have been possible to visit the seed pod before the power plant. If these sequences must convince us that there is no such thing as free will, Cadre has done a particularly bad job.

Second, there is a plausible alternative out-of-game explanation for the lack of freedom in these scenes: pacing. All four limitations of freedom listed above have the effect that Cadre controls the pace at which the narrative unfolds, and that he controls what events come before what others, so that we see that the exit to the castle is closed off before we find out how to open it, and that we see the destroyed colony before we find what we are looking for. These are reasonable design goals for Cadre to have, and these goals explain the relative lack of freedom in Photopia at least as well as the received depth reading does.

Third, there are plausible in-game explanations for the lack of freedom in these scenes. In the coloured scenes, Alley is acting as a kind of "game master", and she naturally introduces new events and places as she sees fit for the story. In the black-and-white scenes, we are reliving memories people have of Alley, and the laws of logic dictate that these must remain consistent with the present. (Alley cannot have drowned in the pool, because then she couldn't be babysitting Wendy; and so on.)

Faced with the choice of attributing to Cadre an unsuccessful attempt at speaking about determinism or a successful attempt at introducing pacing into his game and respecting the inner logic of the fictional world, we should choose the latter. The interpretation that Photopia wishes to convince us that freedom is an illusion does not do justice to the work. This will become only more clear when we take a look at the real themes that the work exhibits.

Let us first focus on the tale-within-a-tale that Alley tells to Wendy. It starts on Mars (or perhaps some other red planet), where among the debris of a failed attempt at colonisation, we find a single seed pod left undamaged. Through a series of adventures that take us to the bottom of the sea, a beach made of gold, and a crystal maze, we finally arrive in a dead and petrified forest. Here, we plant the seed in order to save the life of a wolf.

In summary: the tale that Alley tells to Wendy is the tale of a seed taken from ruins, which then gives life to a dead world.

A recurring motif in the tale-within-the-tale is the difference between the organic, which is good an useful, and the inorganic, which is barren and uninteresting. Among all the ruined machinery on the dead rocks of Mars, the one thing we must retrieve is also the one thing that is alive and therefore full of potential: a seed pod. Among the golden treasured amassed on the beach, the one thing that is worth having is again organic: the wooden box filled with soil. Even the technological artefacts that seem useful to us at the start of the tale--the spaceship and the spacesuit--end up imprisoning us and keeping us from reaching our full potential. At the start of the underwater scene, we must first escape the spaceship, lest it become our tomb. Among the crystal walls and towers of the maze, we have to shed the spacesuit and learn to rely on something organic: our own wings, which are made of feathers. Then, finally, we witness the ultimate triumph of the organic over the ino rganic: among the petrified trees, the potentiality of the seed pod and the soil is revealed as we use them to bring life to the forest and the wolf. Although all the worlds we traversed were dead and static, the last word is spoken by life and change as a bush laden with infinite fruits springs up.

Several of the real-life scenes show us where Alley got the ideas for her story. There is, first, the scene where Alley almost drowns, which gives her the idea for the underwater castle. There is, second, the scene where Alley talks to her father, which gives her the idea for the golden beach, but perhaps also for Mars and indeed for the message of the tale she tells Wendy. There is, finally, the scene with the Photopia, which shows how even her earliest memories shape and influence the story she tells.

The analogy between the real-life scenes and the coloured scenes from Alley's tale is clear: both are about seeds that are planted and then come to fruition, literally in the fantasy story, metaphorically in the real-life scenes. Alley's father's words are seeds planted in her mind, that grow into bushes and then continue to bear fruit; one of those fruits is Alley's tale to Wendy.

The scene where Alley talks to her father is the beating heart of Photopia. It shows clearer than any other scene the metaphorical seeding in action: her father's words have obviously made a big impression on Alley, and still excite her imagination years later. At the same time, it clearly and explicitly makes the point that Alley also tries to make, namely, that the organic is infinitely more valuable than the inorganic. Let us reread her father's final paragraph:

"You're not made of a whole lot that's particularly exotic -- the only stuff heavier than iron, the only things you'd need a supernova for, are trace elements: a little iodine to keep the goiter away, that kind of thing. You're made mainly of the most common star stuff: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen. But you can't just trade yourself in for a sack of carbon and oxygen and hydrogen the way you can trade gold for gold. What makes you you is the way that star stuff is arranged, and that's totally unique. Which makes you more valuable than all the gold from all the stars in the sky."

This is exactly the same message that Alley, a little more awkwardly, wishes to convey to Wendy in the scene on the beach. Thus, is this single scene, most of the message of Photopia is concentrated. The only major element of the game that is not repeated here is that of Alley's death. So let us address the questions: Why does Alley have to die in the piece? How does that fit in with my proposed reading? The answers are easy.

Photopia's message is this: "Do not despair at death, for from the tiniest seeds we have sown, new and abundant life can come forth."

It is clear that this is the message of the tale-within-the-tale. But it also the message of the real-life story. It is demonstrated to us that telling someone a tale of wonder can influence them and make them creative years later. Then, we witness Alley's die--but only after she has told a tale to Wendy, thus sowing seeds of her own in that young mind. Can we doubt that these too will come to fruition? Alley is dead. It really is the case (as Brendan Barnwell says) that

The story can now be seen as a transition from the happy baby Alley, full of potential, to the teenage Alley, dead, her potential destroyed. [9]

It also really the case (as Adam Cadre himself writes) that:

The colony on the red planet (not necessarily Mars, you'll note) had so much potential, but something went wrong early on and snuffed it out before it had a chance - just like Alley. This is a theme that I've had something of a personal stake in since my sister's death. [10]

But although Alley's potential is destroyed, she had already sown her seeds. Her potential lives on vicariously, in the minds of those who knew her; especially in Wendy, but certainly also in that of the boy who asks her for a dance, and perhaps in those of others as well. There it will continue to bear fruit. Far from giving us a message of despair, as the received reading claims, Adam Cadre gives us a message of hope.

In fact, all of Photopia can be seen as a seed pod. Alley dies in the very first scene of the work--the word "Red" flashing onto our screen is her death. Everything that follows are memories of those who knew her; each one of them a seed, planted and watered, that may in time bear fruit.

As far as I have been able to find out, only one reader has read Photopia the way I have read it: Lucian Smith. He wrote, back in 1998:

"No!" I cried, "You can't end yet! I need closure! I need to know that some good came out of this! I need to know that that poor boy worked up the courage to ask someone out again!" But it wasn't there. I replayed the entire game, hoping to find some way out, but there was none, and absolving myself of some complicity by dropping myself off in the first scene was small comfort.

But there is hope here, I think. The planted seed that feeds the wolf in the midst of death is rich with metaphor, and one explanation would be that the seed is the seed of creativity and wonder planted in the mind of Wendy. [11]

Our reading of Photopia as a tale of influence, of how we plant seeds in the minds of others, receives powerful support from some autobiographical details that Adam Cadre reveals in the Photopia FAQ. He there discusses how he got the ideas for the coloured scenes, and when he gets to the golden scene he writes:

The beach of gold was an idea I'd had ever since I was six, when I read in Carl Sagan's COSMOS that gold was formed in supernovae. That book and TV series also sparked my interest in Mars - hell, it sparked my interest in everything. Virtually the entirety of any sense of wonder I may have is derived pretty much solely from that book. I also believe that Carl Sagan is responsible for any eloquence I may have developed over the years: his work was what taught me the power of a well-wrought sentence, a perfect paragraph. Around the time of his death in December 1996, I read many testimonials from people who said that Carl Sagan's work had been what prompted them to go into science. I didn't go into science. But Carl Sagan's work is what prompted me to become a writer. Without COSMOS, I don't think I'd be a tenth as creative as I am. I'd be living a life straight out of Human Resources Stories. [10]

Psychologically, then, we can see Photopia as Adam Cadre's tribute to Carl Sagan and his creative influence, a tribute that takes the form of a celebration of influence and an affirmation that creativity is stronger even than death.

This concludes my analysis of the game's main theme and message. There is, however, a secondary theme that is also worth dwelling upon briefly: this theme is the potential of interactive fiction as an artistic medium, and the things that are keeping it back from turning potential into actual success.

The potential of interactive fiction is deftly established by Cadre through the purple scene, Alley's dream of death. Although the entire game has been linear, and we thus might believe that our interacting with the work has been totally inconsequential, the purple scene proves that this is not the case. In this scene, control is taken away from us for the first time; the commands at the prompt are filled in automatically, and we can only see the story unfold without having any influence on it at all. And the interesting thing is: it feels totally different than all the other scenes. Through one simple trick, Cadre shows us that interactivity fundamentally changes the act of reading, and he manages to associate non-interactive reading with the non-potential of death. Thus, Photopia is certainly a declaration of love to interactive fiction.

But it is also critical of the present state of the medium. This criticism would have already been felt if Cadre had just, in a total break with the tradition, refused to put any puzzles in the piece. It would have been strengthened by the anti-technological bias of the game, where machinery--the favoured material of puzzle builders--is totally inert and devoid of meaning to the human individual. But in what has to be described as a stroke of genius, Cadre did put in a single puzzle, to wit, a puzzle that utterly undermines the idea of puzzles and that points to a freedom beyond puzzles.

I am, of course, referring to the famous maze-puzzle, where the player must take off her spacesuit and type "fly". The symbolism cannot be missed. We are faced with the most archetypal of IF puzzles, and to solve it, we must refuse to solve it. We must, in a literal as well as a figurative sense, rise above it. This gives us an instantaneous freedom that interactive fiction until now has explicitly denied us.

Photopia, then, presents itself as the seed from which a new and better kind of interactive fiction can grow. And indeed, it is growing--already, we see the puzzle losing its grip on our medium. The process is slow. It has to be slow, since we have no weather salesmen that can give us a little rain when we need it. But the bush is growing and fruits are ripening on it, and this is in no small measure thanks to Photopia.

The piece thus demonstrates the truth of its message in practice as well as in theory.

Rendition, a political art game by nespresso, has already seen a fair share of discussion. It has no less than seven reviews on the IFDB, it has been featured on Play This Thing!, and it even has its own Wikipedia page--all that in spite of the fact that it cannot have taken the author more than a handful of hours to code it up. Rendition consists of a single, very sparse room, and its game play is incredibly repetitive. So what is all the fuss about? Why are reactions to Rendition so diverse that it gathers as many 1-star rating as 5-star ratings? And what does this game really achieve? If we want to answer those questions, we need to add some more discussion to the already substantial pile.

Rendition can be summarised in a few sentences, with little of its content left untold. You are an anonymous, "as good-looking as ever", and presumably American torturer, who has been given the task of kicking the shit out of a failed suicide terrorist called Abdul. In order to win the game, you must abuse a variety of Abdul's body parts in a variety of ways; possible commands are "kick left buttock", "scratch right ear", "urinate on head" and "tweak left testicle". Once Abdul has been hurt enough, he will start answering your questions--never revealing any useful information, and most of the time speaking Arabic (which the reader will probably not understand).

That is all. We do not find out why Abdul wanted to become a suicide bomber. In fact, we don't find out anything about him. We don't find out anything about ourselves either, except that we have a counsellor whom we need to visit in order to talk about the odd thoughts we have been having lately. (This latter fact is revealed in response to such actions as "kick me".) The game makes no attempt to give us a reason to torture Abdul; it is only stated that we have to torture him. The game makes no attempt to have us understand any of the parties involved. It is nothing but the monotonous repetition of violence, only that, nothing else.

This is not by itself a reason to love or to hate it.

What does Rendition want to achieve? The game calls itself a "political art experiment". This raises a question: in what sense the game could be called political. (It also raises the question of what kind of experiment it is supposed to be; who are the test subjects, and what data is sought in order to decide on what hypotheses?) In order to understand why this question is not trivial, we must reflect for a moment on the nature of the political.

The act of torture, like any other act, is not in itself a political act; but, like any other act, it becomes political only by being put into the right context. What kind of context? A context where the act is justified by appeals to what are recognisably political values and where this justification is accepted as potentially (though perhaps not actually) valid by those asked to judge the action. I torturing Abdul is in itself no more political than I drinking a cup of tea; it becomes a political act only when I attempt to justify it by appealing to values such as "protecting the safety of our state", "punishing disobedience to international law", or "following the commands of high politicians", and when this justification is accepted by my interlocutors as a potentially valid defense of my action.

Interestingly, this dimension of justification is mostly absent from Rendition. A few times the protagonist attempts to justify himself, but he never ventures beyond remarks like "let that be the lesson to anyone who dares to fuck with the chosen people"--remarks that do not come together to form even the semblance of a coherent political stance or ideology that might justify his actions. There is thus nothing political about the torture in Rendition; it is simply torture.

Of course, Rendition could be a political game even if the acts that the protagonist takes are not recognisably political acts. There are hints--such as the subtitle "an interactive war on terror"--that the game is meant as a comment on torture as it is currently used by the United States. The piece's cover art also points in this direction, since it is based on one the Abu Ghraib photographs. But if Rendition is a comment on a current practice, what is it trying to say? That torture is bad? That torture is revolting? That torture is unheroic? We were already convinced of that, and the piece does nothing to convince us further, nor does it seem to try very hard.

The piece could potentially have made a more subtle point about what is going on in contemporary politics by exploring either the political or the psychological dimensions of torture; but such an exploration does not take place in Rendition. The only thing the game explores is the player's ability to keep playing; and even here it is not very effective, since the mechanics of the game are so transparent that the only perseverance that is needed is perseverance at a mechanical task. Perhaps this is the point of the game, that torture quickly becomes a mechanical and unemotional task for the torturer. Perhaps; but Rendition does not convince us of that point, nor does it give us any insight into the psychological mechanisms that would make this happen, nor (again) does it seem to try very hard.

If Rendition wants to make a political point, it does not succeed. Many reviewers agree with this judgment, and they have essentially the same reasons as I do. They cite the fact that the game doesn't really pose a dilemma; that it does not explore the psychology of its characters; that it becomes mechanical far too quickly; that it does not allow us to see the actors as human beings before subjecting them to the process of dehumanisation. Perhaps we can summarise these wide-felt complaints as follows: in Rendition, torture is portrayed as shallow and inconsequential, and not even this shallowness and inconsequentiality are sufficiently thematised.

Rendition also got some very positive reviews, though. On IFDB, "Hermes" gives the game five stars and writes:

It's an incredibly shallow approach to simulating a highly disturbing scenario, likely to be dismissed as "sick" by the easily offended. But look deeper to reveal the pro-humanist agenda [...] disguised underneath is a bleakly funny role-playing game that asks the question: "How far are you willing to go?". And by extension, how far are you willing to let those in positions of authority, the ones that represent you, go? Does your meek head-in-the-sand acquiescence not vindicate and legitimise their warlike aggression?

Yes, the results are both disgusting and offensive... yet it somehow brings you closer to the truth than any number of "balanced" news reports could ever do. [1]

It seems to me that Hermes is projecting far too much of his own ideas into the game. There cannot be, for instance, a discernible pro-humanist agenda in Rendition, because it never brings into play the political, moral or ideological concepts that would be needed to formulate a pro-humanist agenda--regardless of whether the game wanted to express its agenda directly or through criticism of its opponents. Nor does the game ask us the question "How far are you willing to go?", because it never gives us a reason to torture--unless it asks us to measure our resistance to torture against our wish to progress in the game, but in that case the discrepancy between goals and means is so vast that we cannot take the set-up seriously. No, if Rendition contains any agenda, if it makes a point, if it allows us to see a truth, this must be an agenda, a point, a truth that we ourselves project into it.

And perhaps that is why Rendition can be called a "political art experiment". The experiment is this: we let someone play the game and we watch that person's reaction. Since anything that the test subjects reads in the work is a projection (possibly inverted) of her own ideas, this is an ideal way to find out what his or her moral-political stance is. In such an experiment, the absolute contentlessness of Rendition is a great virtue; and sushabye is right when (s)he writes:

I realized that the game is intended as a kind of mirror for those who play it. It is very opaque, and doesnt spell out its intentions at all, so any judgement about its worth, or offence at its subject matter, says more about the person playing it than the game itself. [1]

We can postulate that the goal of the experiment called Rendition is to measure which political ideologies prevail in the interactive fiction community. An interesting goal, but one which Rendition doubtlessly fails to reach. It turns out that many reviewers don't care enough about the game to take it seriously as something with content, and are thus not tempted to project any political meaning into it at all. For the experiment to succeed, a more detailed, longer game would have been needed, a game that seduces us to step into it, care for it, and then suddenly presents us with a void that we will then inevitably and almost unconsciously fill up with whatever political view we happen to have.

Even as an experiment, then, Rendition must be judged a failure. Does that mean it is worthless? Not quite. There is one aspect of the game I have not yet commented on, its most interesting aspect, the one thing about this game that is truly worth remembering. If you have not seen it in action, I will inevitably spoil it for you (as Adam Thornton spoiled half of it, but only half of it, for me). On the other hand, it is so easy to miss that not reading my comments will very likely deprive you of the experience as well.

We have seen that within the game, it is impossible to learn anything about either of the two main characters. Abdul is just Abdul; the player character is just as good-looking as ever. But in fact this is true only if two conditions are met: that we ourselves are not aware of Arab culture, and that we are not willing to step beyond the bounds of the game in order to learn about this culture from independent sources. But if we are willing to make the effort needed to understand Abdul, using the little clues that the game gives us (but which it fails to interpret for us), then some surprising facts about both Abdul and the player character are revealed.

Thus, Adam Thornton writes:

[W]hen you DIAGNOSE Abdul, one of his body parts is a foreskin. He's not even Muslim, not that the protagonist is smart enough to realize it. That was a brilliant touch. [2]

Thornton's interpretation need not be right: as far as I have been able to ascertain, circumcision may not be obligatory for males who convert to Islam later in life. But whether the foreskin is a sign of Abdul being a convert or of him not being a Muslim at all doesn't matter: what matters is that there is something personal we can learn about Abdul, something that the game allows us to glimpse, but only if we are willing to make more of an effort to understand Abdul's culture than the game itself is willing to do.

A similar, even more interesting revelation, can be had by those who are willing to actually translate the Arab sentences that Abdul speaks. Generally, they mean things like "I need a doctor" and "I don't understand". A significant number of his expressions are lines from a popular song called "Sawah", and translate to such things as "A long journey, and I'm wounded from it".

But the most interesting thing is that several of the sentences that Abdul speaks have, in Arabic, both a masculine and a feminine version, and that Abdul uses the feminine form. Thus, he says "Takalam bebot' men fadleki?", which means "Can you speak slowly?". It is the feminine form of this sentence; the masculine would be "Takalam bebot' men fadlek?". Now I know next to nothing about grammar of Arabic, so my interpretation may well be wrong; but what Abdul's choice of words seems to imply is that the person to whom Abdul is speaking, the player character, is in fact a woman. You, the torturer, the one cast in the typical male role in the typical male scenario, you are a woman.

This is indeed a brilliant touch. Only by not being satisfied with the information supplied to you by the game, only by stepping outside of its boundaries and trying to find the truth yourself, are you able to discover something about Abdul and the character you are playing. This, at last, is a real point that the game is making, a point not only about our relation to the media and how they function in political situations, but a point also about our relation as readers to works of literature. Through this simple but devious move (and of course it might not have been a conscious move on the part of the author, but that is irrelevant for reasons that appear at the end of this sentence) Rendition makes us question the idea that works of interactive fiction are self-enclosed spaces of meaning that are completely under the control of the author. When they are related to the world--and how could they not be?--works of literature are open to interpretations that make use of knowledge that is not contained within the work itself. The paucity of meaning within Rendition turns out to be at least partly a result of the paucity of our attempts to understand it.

I think this is an interesting lesson for any author of interactive fiction. The applications to a "think for yourself!"-school of political art experiments is obvious; but even those who favour old-school games can profit greatly. We suddenly realise that it would be great to have puzzle-fests where finding the solutions involves real-life investigation (for instance on the Internet). What could be more fun than a game that has me explore fake Facebook-profiles (set up by the author of the game), search for clues in Hamlet and use Google Earth as a map? A world of possibilities is opened.

This is the lesson that we should take away from Rendition: a game can afford to be only one half of the medallion. The other half already exists; it is the world we live in.

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