Here's where you'll find reviews of all the non-comp IF games of 2004. Yes, all. (Well, okay, with a few exceptions, concerning which see Footnote 1.) I'd like to thank my collaborators and others who helped me. I never could have done this project alone.
4-STAR
GAMES 3-STAR
GAMES 2-STAR
GAMES 1-STAR
GAMES
The ratings (1 to 4 stars) and rankings ("best" to "worst") were assigned by me, Greg Boettcher, after playing all the games. Take my ratings and rankings with a grain of salt. Better yet, ignore them if you want. They're just one man's opinion. While I'm at it, an additional disclaimer: this review collection makes inconsistent use of italics. I was ambivalent on whether to italicize game titles and other stuff, and was ultimately too pressed for time to aim for typographical perfection. That better be okay with you, because I'm not going to change it. :)
This collection took weeks to prepare. It occupied my whole month of December, so I hope some people appreciate it. I would like to do something similar for this next year (2005), but in a very different way. I will not be personally reviewing 20+ non-comp games again next year, nor do I even expect to play that many. I will put more information here about what my plans are, just as soon as I have time to write them down properly.
Future
Boy! by Kent Tessman I'm proud to be the first person in the newsgroups to write a review of Future Boy. It's quite a singular game, in more ways than one. Above all, it's the most impressive multimedia IF game in the last ten years, with cool comic-book-style illustrations, excellent animations, voice acting for all the NPCs, and high quality music and sound effects. In a way, Future Boy hearkens back to the early nineties, when Legend Entertainment produced the last great commercial IF games, which had graphics, music, and sometimes animation. Future Boy is also a commercial release. It costs $19.95 for the plain CD-ROM, or $24.95 for the jewel case edition. (Shipping is as low as $2.25.) The CD is also packed with a few extras, including a 25-page booklet, "The Art of Future Boy," on the making of the game's graphics. As you'd expect with a commercial release, the game comes with an easy installation program. And since it's a Hugo game, there's impressive multi-platform support. There's an attractive opening menu (although it behaves oddly in one or two instances). And there's a host of command-line options, allowing you to, for instance, turn various multimedia features on or off. Naturally, the game also has a demo available, downloadable for free. It is 36 megs and gives you a taste of the game. The demo is quite short, showing only about three segments of the game, but I think I can see why Kent Tessman didn't make it any longer: 36 megs is already quite a hefty package for those with dial-up modems. Anyway, the demo certainly is long enough to give you a taste of the game. (By the way, if you get the full game, you can type "skip intro" to skip most of the demo segment.) With regard to the multimedia stuff, there are pictures of each room, and the cool thing is that many of them change when the room changes (to reflect, for instance, the opening of a door). Some of them, too, are animated pictures. And there pictures of all the NPCs (often several pictures of each) as well as illustrations of most of the important objects. These were largely the work of artist Derek Lo, as I understand, who worked with Kent Tessman on the project. The game is also interspersed with animations here and there, which are very well done and add to the fun. The game has some good music, which, according to Baf's Guide, was composed by Nate Laguzza, Dan Langan, and Kent Tessman. Actually, you'll spend more time listening to atmospheric sound effects, like birds chirping in the park. But the game's best sound asset is its voice acting, which I thought was very well done. Every word spoken by an NPC is also heard as voice acting. It must have been hard to get good actors together like that on a low budget. Also, a couple of the voices were digitally modified, with good results (and very funny, in one case). The game begins with a short opening segment where "you're Future Boy... and you're FALLING..." This is not a particularly interactive segment, and I think Kent Tessman took a risk by beginning the game with it. If you have problems, don't give up without remembering that you can type "hint." For most of the rest of the game, you are not Future Boy, but an ordinary guy who works as a laundry deliveryman. (Actually, change that to "ordinary woman... delivery woman" as appropriate; the game is careful to not define your gender, as far as I can tell.) You live in Rocket City, which is unfortunately the stomping grounds of supervillain Clayton Eno. Fortunately the city has a superhero as well -- Future Boy. Early in the game -- during the demo -- you meet Future Boy and learn his real-life identity. He's not what you'd expect. When Future Boy isn't a superhero, he's something of an antihero, and the subject of a few jokes. Later in the game, Future Boy is incapacitated, and it is up to you to rescue the city from the villainous hands of Clayton Eno. It's not exactly a fresh idea for a game. There have been plenty of superhero IF games before. There have even been superhero-as-antihero games before. What makes this different is the extensive size of the game and the appropriate comic-book-style illustrations. There's a lot of enthusiasm put into this game, and that makes it a lot of fun. The puzzles are easy to moderate in difficulty, which made for an enjoyable experience for me. On the other hand, there are a couple of good challenging moments, including an interesting segment with the supervillain's computer. The only time I was annoyed by illogical puzzles was at the end of the game. As far as I could tell, it's not possible to lock yourself out of victory, although it is possible to miss the best moment for doing something, making victory more difficult. The majority of the game involves exploring Rocket City, which is navigable by subway. Most of the time, it's not hard to know what to do next, although in a couple of cases I found myself scratching my head. In addition to the Rocket City section, there's also a series of Hitchhiker's-esque segments where you get to change characters and be somebody else for a little while, which was fun. If you get stuck, the game's hints are quite good, and are adaptive based on the state of the game. They're not quite flawless; in one case I got stuck and had to get a hint from a message board. I wish I could recommend this game without qualifications, but no. There are flaws here, some of them a lot bigger than I would have expected for a commercial release. Although this game was tested, I don't think it was tested well enough. As I look through my list of bugs and other possible flaws, none of them are particularly devastating, but taken together, they add up. Perhaps this is the worst one:
This is the worst bug because it's the most frequent. It happened to me several times, not just with the blanket. In fact, I'd expect every player to encounter this bug. In one case, the game contained a puzzle whose most obvious solution was to simply escape the room by the obvious exit. But if you try to walk in that direction, you get "There's nothing in that direction," which is false and infurating. The game is not very good at cluing you in on puzzles. In one case there's an object that's not obviously important, but is necessary to win the game, and if you examine the collection of items to which it belongs, you get no hint of its existence. As far as I can tell, the only way to find out about it is from the room description. This is downright buggy, and it made me mad. Unfortunately, the game is a little fussy about syntax. In one case, this turns a moderately easy puzzle into an unpleasant guess-the-syntax moment. This is truly sub-par for a commercial release. Fortunately, this only happened once or so. The conversation system is generally good, but there are some problems. Laudably, it allows you to talk to people either via menus or via the traditional ask/tell system. (Type "conversations on" or "conversations off.") The problem with the menus is, they are not as good as I would have liked. When you meet a character and "TALK TO" that character, you initially get a respectable list of menu options, but these quickly disappear until you're left with a contentless menu, or simply the refusal to speak. This is okay in the opening part of the game, where the game is split into bite-sized chunks, but in the latter part of the game, long stretches go by in which NPCs' conversation menus are totally useless. My idea would be to leave a few menu options continually available, allowing you to continue to use the menu to ask about topics that are remain relevant to that character at any given time, perhaps being reminded of vital information that the characters had previously stated. The game makes up for this in a big way by allowing characters to use "ask/tell" in addition to the conversation menus. More importantly, the conversation menus are themselves optional; I understand that the game is entirely winnable without using them at all (although I didn't try this). But there's a problem here, too. With the "ask/tell" system, the NPCs don't respond to a very wide range of topics. On the one hand, this is substandard for a commercial game, but on the other hand, you can see why it happened: when you've decided to do voice-acting for every word uttered by every NPC, there's a natural tendency not to include more NPC-spoken text than necessary. The high quality of the acting will probably make some people not care about this so much. All in all, I found the conversation system to be adequate, but not exceptional -- except for the voice acting, which was really cool. Future Boy is flawed, yes. Actually, for a commercial release, it's way too flawed. But its strengths are greater than its flaws. For an author who I'm sure was doing this in his spare time on a limited budget, this game is truly impressive indeed. Is it worth buying? Hell yes! I paid my $25 for Future Boy, and I don't regret it. (Well, actually, I regret getting the jewel case edition; I recommend the other edition instead.) I had a lot of fun with this game. Definitely, the Future Boy demo is a must-play. The demo gives you a very good idea of what the game is like, both its strengths and its weaknesses. And don't let the shortness of the demo mislead you; the full game is, for me at least, satisfyingly large. If, after playing the demo, you decide to buy the game, I'm sure you won't be disappointed. The
Dreamhold by Andrew Plotkin Overall: Wow. Much has been said about this game, I understand, but I haven't seen any of it so bear with me if I repeat what more thorough reviewers have already covered. The Dreamhold was designed "for people who have never played IF before," but it is by no means easy. The game comes equipped with a Tutorial Voice to explain basic commands and give help on puzzles when it senses that the player is stuck. You can turn off the Voice if you want; in addition, there is an Expert mode which makes the game harder. These three play options go a long way toward satisfying very diverse segments of the game-playing community. One of the author's stated goals is just that: to reward many different types of players, from newcomers to experts and from story-lovers to puzzle-solvers. This is a very thick game. There is a main storyline, in which you are collecting a set of objects after waking up with amnesia (perhaps a familiar premise, but it is very nicely implemented here). There are also additional puzzles to solve, objects and scenes which add flavor and depth to the setting, and a sort of backstory to piece together and, to some extent, understand. Obligatory Comparison to the Author's Other Games: The Dreamhold is much more like Plotkin's So Far than it is like Spider and Web (though much, much more forgiving), but to be honest it reminds me more of a longer, more fleshed-out version of Moonlit Tower than any of Plotkin's other works. I started the game with the Tutorial Voice on, to see what it would do for me. At the very beginning of the game it explained several things I already knew, which wasn't surprising. I was expecting it to pop back in with suggestions and comments later as I began exploring and encountering puzzles, but I didn't. I found out later that if the game recognizes you are stuck, it will offer something in certain locations, but I never saw those hints on my own. I guess I never tried the right actions to let the game know I was stuck. Even with the Voice's hints, I had quite a bit of trouble figuring things out. This game is not, perhaps, one to file under "devious," but it is challenging. Still, I don't expect that to be much of a deterrent even for newcomers, since the game world is so attractive and immersive, and the puzzles so enticing, that even I with possibly the shortest puzzle-attention-span in the community today, found myself enthralled. I want to know even more about this PC, about the past, the present, the future. I want to read novels set in this world. I want to know what really happened to Juinua (I do not think this is much of a spoiler -- she is not a character in the game). Anyway. The Dreamhold is well written and expertly crafted. Any real criticism I can muster is either problems with the help/hint/tutorial not working like I thought it might, or the fact that the game is not quite thorough enough in implementation, specifically for things a newcomer to IF might try. For example: a burning bush? Of course I tried to talk to it, but the game doesn't recognize "talk" as a verb and it gives no suggestion of how to converse instead. There are also a few places where secondary nouns aren't implemented: in the Crowded Study, for example:
These things are small points, I know, but the Tutorial Voice specifically suggested I look around and use "examine" on anything that caught my eye. I can imagine how The Dreamhold would be a very appealing introduction to the world of interactive fiction, though anyone who plays it first might be disappointed by most of the other available games. More importantly, though, The Dreamhold is a challenging and very rewarding game to play even for veteran IF-ers. Highly recommended, two thumbs up, etc etc; in a word, play this game now so that you can vote properly for the 2004 XYZZY awards. Necrotic
Drift
by Robb Sherwin Overall: While not without its problems, Necrotic Drift is fun to play, with challenging puzzles and excellent story-telling. And, hey, battling undead. First, the set up. You play Jarret Duffy, a 27-year-old gaming geek in a dead end mall job in the year 2014. One night as you're working, something strange happens and the mall is taken over by an evil spirit that creates undead monsters to kill you and your friends. There's a bit more to the game, mostly about your loser roommates and the troubles with your girlfriend Audrey, but that's the basic gist of it. Armed with nothing more than what you can find laying around the mall and your extensive knowledge of Dungeons & Dragons type monsters, you have to find a way out of the mall, hopefully saving your friends (and your relationship with Audrey) at the same time. The writing is good, but perhaps the best thing about the writing is the characterization we get of the player character (PC). Since the story is told in a first-person perspective, from the view of Jarret Duffy, every colorful phrase and unusual choice of words tells us something about him. In addition, at times he will give us something extra about an object that does more than describe it:
See? All kinds of bonus information on that last description. Jarret doesn't often stumble through a phrase, nor is he ever tongue-tied for a lack of words. It's good stuff, and while not everything that happens in the story is pleasant (come to think of it, is there anything that *is* pleasant? Oh yes, a few things), the writing is at least very true to the character. I must admit, I'm something of a gaming geek myself, and I was glad to hear that the undead in Necrotic Drift follow the actual rules from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (there is an in-game reason for this -- something about reading the PC's mind). I was going to complain vociferously about the fact that the game uses AD&D in the year 2014 -- shouldn't it either be the most current edition or something new that is created in the next decade? -- but I decided not to. It's not hard to construct something reasonable that explains it. I just wish the author had included such an explanation instead of making me come up with my own. The conversation is completely done with menus: choose from the listed things to say or say nothing at all. At times (like with Trott in the security room), it seemed like the order I asked questions really impacted the overall coherence of the conversation. Also, I found it far too restrictive at times, like when I wanted to tell Gibs that I wasn't going to come to his radio show later, but the only menu option was to ask what the show was going to be about. I also found myself using the old "ask about" and "tell about" at points. Sometimes when I did that I got the message about how to talk to people, but sometimes the response was downright misleading:
Ri-ight, but she doesn't need to be here for me to tell another person about her. There are lots of little programming inconveniences throughout the game, all of which I feel bad even mentioning when it's obvious so much work went into this game. Basically they fall into one of two categories: unimplemented items and plain unpolished bits. In the first category are all of the missing scenery items, and there are many, but I can mostly forgive this. More frustrating are the problems in the second category: the hallway/corridor door ambiguation, not being able to leave a store (with only one exit) with the command OUT, throwing Criswell up against the wall while still being seated on the tattered couch, messages popping up in the wrong place, little things like that. These kinds of bugs make the game feel a bit rough. Am I playing the most up-to-date version of the game? Er, no. I see that the author has released version 1.02 since I started playing the game, but all it says is "a couple odd situations now corrected." So with any luck, most of my complaints in this area are already taken care of. In any case, I don't really like talking about the bad parts of a game, so let's move on to the puzzles. Most of the puzzles in Necrotic Drift involve getting past the various undead creatures and not dying, which makes perfect sense in the context of the story. I found several of them too challenging for my impatient attention span, but a few nudges from some folks on rec.games.int-fiction and we were on our way. In the end it was an entertaining game, though I had some frustrations with bugs and a few of the puzzles. I enjoyed the pictures that came with the game (to address the multimedia aspects for a moment) but I stopped listening to the music after an hour or so. The music intruded; the pictures enhanced (though it was always frustrating to see things in the scenery pictures that weren't implemented in the game itself). Necrotic Drift is easy to recommend to anyone who liked Robb Sherwin's other games, but also to D&D fans, puzzle lovers, horror enthusiasts, and especially admirers of good writing. Return
to Ditch Day by Michael J. Roberts Day 1 -- Introduction -- (played: 1 hour 30 minutes) In this sequel to "Ditch Day Drifter," about ten years have passed since Doug Mittling graduated from Caltech University. Now in a middle-management position for a technology developer, you (as Doug) have tinkered with your company's new super-computer for six weeks in a generic south-Asian hell-hole. For the sake of a successful demo, and with a potential sale riding on it, your immediate goal is to fix the machine. This leads to a follow-the-leader bit, full of even more detail. A focused player could heed the prompts and finish the intro without delay. Still, I wanted to look around, experiment, and see as much of the extra content as possible. Even a quick trip across an unsafe suspended bridge was full of optional detail. On a whim, I asked my guide about the bridge, as we went along. The responses were well-considered and fitting -- but something I might have missed entirely if I had rushed to the finish. Even more striking than the detail in the introduction to "Return to Ditch Day" is the action-oriented nature of the text. After the slow start, the pace quickens. Although more puzzles are yet to come, the action keeps moving. It feels like an adventure -- not just a series of text descriptions -- because the writing succeeds so well. The introduction ends in an encounter with a representative from a rival company; an encounter that certainly begs for eventual vindication. Day 2 -- Exploring Caltech (played: 2 hours) Flash forward to Doug's next assignment. You arrive at Caltech, your Alma Mater, to recruit a brilliant engineering student. As it happens, the appointment is set on the yearly "ditch day" -- a time when many seniors skip their classes and guard their dorm room doors with creative puzzles (called "stacks") as a challenge for the underclassmen. To complicate things, the same egotistical, condescending rep from a rival company arrives in an attempt to recruit the same senior. Knowing this, the student has left a note for you both: he will accept a job with either company, based upon whichever of you can solve his ditch day stack. For two hours, I did little but explore. An in-game map provides a location-to-location look-up feature. It continues to prompt toward the right route along the way. This is slick, but it felt more like a TADS-3 showcase feature than a useful tool. Where it's needed most -- the alleys to student residences and maybe the underground tunnels -- the map isn't available. With a large area to explore -- almost all of it accessible after accepting the challenge -- the game began to feel overwhelming. Instead of directing myself to the goal at hand, I roamed the campus aimlessly. After referring to hints at least twice in the introduction, I was determined to solve the remainder of the game without them. In two hours, I didn't accomplish much. I ended the session with a working sketch of the game's map, and a general idea of the game's complexity. Day 3 -- Solving the Stack (played: 4 hours 30 minutes) The game isn't as hard as it seems. I didn't know that until making extensive use of the hints (yeah, yeah, so much for a no-hints win). Only Stamer's stack is important. The conspiracy sub-plot is optional (although I completed some of it -- I ended the game with a score of 125 from a possible 150). Several times, I had to read the scrollback text for information I missed. With so much detail, it wasn't easy to pick out the important parts. The detail, though, is where "Return to Ditch Day" succeeds the most. Rushing through the game would have been a mistake. I found a few small bugs, but for a game with so much to do and see, the level of polish is amazing. It's a fun romp with clever puzzles and an entertaining story. The puzzles support the story, and vice-versa. It all blends together very well. It was easier to think of this as a full-sized effort than a TADS-3 demo game. For the past five years, I took a long break from Interactive Fiction. In October, I played thirty-seven IF-Comp games, followed by six even shorter C32-Comp games. This slant towards shorter games could be responsible for the difficulty I had in solving this one. In the end, I'm glad I played. It's fun, well-written, and well worth the time. The
Isle of the Cult by Rune Berg From the first few moves in, I was a fan. The writing was short but effective, describing a feudal-fantasy setting that might have been appropriate as the basis for a D&D scenario. As a new member of a thieving guild, you have been set to the task of retrieving a certain item from a certain island. This is, of course, contrived as a wrapper for what turns out to be a lengthy puzzle-fest. Overall, the puzzles are logical, varied, and fun. I was stuck after two hours at sixteen points (out of one hundred), but a plea to "rec.games.int-fiction" elicited the proper nudge. The two suggestions were surprising. In essence, I had already solved both of them, but my phrasing wasn't right. This is probably okay, except that the resulting messages were more to the effect that "you can't do that" rather than a nudge toward the right action. I remember at least one other instance where the same kind of thing stuck me again. This is my biggest gripe with the game. As much as I enjoyed romping across the island, discovering all manner of secret rooms and hidden figurines, this was a real problem for me. Difficult puzzles are fine; but it's disheartening to find that I had the solution right, just not the expression of it. To be fair about it, these things are only improved with player feedback. It probably didn't occur to Rune that someone might try going about it the way I did. In all but these few instances, though, the detail was outstanding. Proper responses to listening and touching and standing were frequently met with a "Wow! That worked!" from me. The author put extra effort into subtle but fair cluing throughout. Aside from those few sticking points with command phrasing, very little in the game might be considered as too obscure to have been solved without hints. It's difficult, but with close attention to detail and a habit for looking at everything, it's probably not impossible. Unfortunately for me, I'm an intermediate-level player. After my first two hours, and at several places thereafter, I needed more hints. "The Isle of the Cult" has no built-in hint system. As a puzzle-based game, I can agree somewhat with the decision. With an author-provided walkthrough in hand, I was more apt to peek at it again after I had done so once. In-game hints would probably have turned what was a six-hour adventure for me into a couple hours of hint-spoiled rushing. On the other hand, a game like this is where hints are needed most. The writing, as I said to start, is short but effective. To expand on that, it's brief enough to lend itself to frequent re-reading, but descriptive enough to paint a very vivid picture of the Isle. It's a style that's perfectly suited to this kind of game; that's about as clearly as I can put it. Maybe because there is an island and a monkey, I kept thinking of Monkey Island. In turn, this brought about an interesting thought. How well would this game work as a graphic point-and-click adventure, where the would-be thief roams the island, climbing and jumping and acting out the various commands? It's exactly that kind of game, but with text. Yeah, text adventures spawned graphical ones, not the other way around. Still, the game is vivid enough that this is how it played out for me. The island and various temples, caves, beaches, and jungle paths provide a large enough map (at something around seventy-five rooms). The locations are, for lack of a real word, very "adventurey" -- it would be a fun place to explore visually. I was a little disappointed that I encountered no natives; no villagers or active cultists or bloodthirsty headhunters. Although this does simplify the game, focusing it on solitary adventuring, it just felt a little lifeless. Aside from the boatman (who leaves at the very beginning), a monkey, and the Guild Master (at the end), I was free to plunder the island unobserved. Evidently, the island was inhabited shortly before I arrived. Where they all went, I don't know. Exactly what happened as we sailed back toward the mainland remains a mystery to me, as well. Maybe I shouldn't have joined the guild. All in all, this is
a well-written puzzle-fest. For a difficult and challenging adventure,
this is the one. The
Cabal by Stephen Bond [The following is an excerpt from my own review review previously published at IF-Review. Read the full-length version at IF-Review. Reprinted with permission.] The game opens in Miami Beach, where you have been investigating the Bermuda Triangle, when suddenly a bum comes up to you. He turns out to be Mike Berlyn, author of Infidel and Suspended, now homeless and penniless, and all because of the Cabal. After a few minutes of talking to him, you resolve to investigate. From there you fly off on a journey that takes you to three different continents, getting into trouble and meeting some of the world's greatest IF authors along the way. This is a silly comic idea, and a lesser writer wouldn't have been able to pull it off. But Stephen Bond does the job with great panache. Some of the jokes made me laugh; others made me smile; but there were none that made me groan or roll my eyes. I had great fun playing this. The Cabal is very well written. Nowhere in the game did I find myself thinking, "I could have written this better." The dialogue, in particular, is handled with extraordinary deftness. For instance, in the following passage, the characters respond to each other in just the right way:
There are also some interesting surprises, even Easter eggs, believe it or not, in this highly linear game. Try replaying the scene where you slip and fall on an object at the restaurant; it's different each time. Also, ask about copyright. It's not required, but it's funny. Was the interactive aspect of The Cabal successful? This is debatable. First of all, some people might say, what interactive aspect? Indeed, there are times in this game when there are unusual restrictions on what you can do. You begin seated at a table, but the game won't let you stand up. A man offers you a cigar, but you're not allowed to accept it. Furthermore, there are times when the game forces the plot along, regardless of whether you cooperate. (It's not like Bond's previous game Rameses, where you literally cannot fail to win, but still.) Finally, there are conversation menus. You'll spend a lot of time in conversation menus, so if you don't like that, you're out of luck. So odd restrictions, compulsory plot advancement, conversation menus. This all adds up to a low level of interactivity. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so. Actually, the game has a lot in common with Being Andrew Plotkin by J. Robinson Wheeler, another successful game of IF in-jokes. Both games used conversation menus, and both games were largely puzzleless. (I should also mention Adam Thornton's Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country, although it's not quite so puzzleless.) All these games used this strategy for the same reason. When you have a nearly puzzleless plot and effortless NPC interaction, it's easier to get the comedic timing just right. The game becomes less of a chess game and more of an amusement park ride, which is a lot of fun. But even if satisfying puzzles and a strong feeling of freedom were things I always looked for in IF games, I still wouldn't advise changing this aspect of The Cabal. The low-level interactivity is bound up with the game as a whole, or that's how it feels to me. If you tried to change it, the whole tapestry would unravel. Just about the only flaws in the game are the repetitious elevator segment and the unnecessarily male chauvinist segment that goes with it. I also found a very few typos, which I have sent to the author in case he decides to release a Version 3. Anyway, in short, play this game! What are you waiting for? It only takes an hour or so to play, not much longer than reading this wordy review. The
Act of Misdirection by Cal Harrison [The following review was previously published on rec.games.int-fiction, and also accompanies the game itself in the archive. Reprinted with permission.] The Act Of Misdirection is not a competition game, and in today's IF community, that alone is enough to make it remarkable. For a first-time author to release a comp-sized game (or maybe even *any* game) outside the competition is an even gutsier move, since she risks the product of all her hard work sinking without a trace. So when Callico Harrison asked me if I'd like to write a review that she could release simultaneously with her first game, I loved the idea. Imagine my pleasure when I started playing and discovered that this a very strong game indeed. It's intriguing, skillfully crafted, and if it were entered in the competition it would surely place in the top ten, perhaps even the top three. Not only is it written with flair and diligently coded, it also makes some impressive inroads into one of my favorite areas of modern IF development: player-friendly design. Many areas of the game are constructed to allow the player to discover the story for himself, but also to notice if the player seems to be struggling, and to offer gentle nudges in the right direction without recourse to some kind of external hint system. Nowhere is this excellent design more evident than in the game's first scene. The setting is the brightly lit boards of London's Carthaginian Stage in 1896. The house is packed with "the city's gents and ladies" who wait breathlessly "in anticipation of something magical." The protagonist is a magician, equipped with nothing but a bare baize table, a handkerchief, and a debonair top hat. The game places you in this nerve-wracking situation, and lets you take it from there; what follows is one of the most charming interactive fiction scenes I've ever played. There's nothing quite so gratifying in IF as attempting a non-standard action or phrasing that makes sense in context and finding that the game anticipates and handles it. To find that this action is the *exact* right choice is an unparalleled pleasure, and it's a pleasure that the game's magic act offers over and over. Whether Misdirection craftily led me into the right actions or simply anticipated a wide range of options I don't know, and in the moment of playing I didn't care -- all I knew was that as the act unfolded, I felt myself both the magician and the audience, both directing the action and dazzled by the exciting spectacle before me. The experience isn't perfect, mind. There were plenty of times when I tried something that wasn't implemented, and there was even the occasional novice glitch, like the following:
Still, the game achieves a much higher percentage of implemented actions than usual, and it's enough to make the magician's routine very memorable. Just as important, when I couldn't think of the right thing to do, I never felt stuck, because eventually the game would step in and give me a gentle push in the right direction. Parser responses are written with delightful cleverness, usually pointing subtly towards a more productive action if the player has guessed wrong. For this first scene alone, The Act Of Misdirection would be well worth playing, but the game goes on from there, its story expanding and its mystery deepening. One of the story's main themes is surprise, and this manifests itself both in plot and in design, so it wouldn't do to give away any more secrets. I'll just settle for saying that although the game's helpful design philosophy continues throughout, it becomes more and more puzzling as it reveals itself, winding up in a great enigma. I hope that the mysterious nature of the plot prompts a great deal of discussion, because, ironically enough, the game's willingness to help players through its puzzles removes one of the most prominent spurs to public discussion that past games like The Mulldoon Legacy and my own LASH have used to prompt public posting. Without hint requests to drive up the number of posts on rec.games.int-fiction, The Act Of Misdirection must rely on community support and enthusiasm. For that reason and for the others I've just detailed, I urge you to play this game, and to post your reaction on the newsgroups. If this game gets the attention it deserves, it'll be a lock for several 2004 XYZZY nominations. I've tried to do my part to get it that attention -- the rest is up to you. [Editor's note: I wanted to include an all-new review of this game, but in the end I was too swamped to write my own, which I regret very much. The good news is, this game is ripe for an IF-Review, and could also use another review at SPAG (since the only SPAG review of the game so far was Emily Short's SPAG Specifics review, which is spoiler-laden and thus does not appear in the SPAG game index). The chance for glory is all yours. Write a review of this game and send it to SPAG or IF-Review!] The
Magic Show by Jason Mac Innes My opinion of this game changed a lot as I played through it. When I first started playing, I was quite impressed. The Magic Show (TMS) is a lot more polished than your average ADRIFT game. After that, however, I gradually became aware that there was a big similarity between this and The Act of Misdirection (TAOM). And considering that TMS came out about eight months after TAOM, my opinion of TMS dropped substantially. I was prepared to call TMS little more than a rip-off game. And yet, as I played further, my attitude changed once again. I discovered that although TMS starts off with the same opening premise as TAOM, it takes the premise in a totally different direction. What's more, that direction is quite interesting and fruitful, giving the game strengths all its own. TMS isn't the equal of TAOM, but still I'm pleased to give it a thumbs-up. As I said, TMS's opening segment is quite similar to that of TAOM: you perform magic on stage. This segment in TMS is okay, although not as powerful as the one in TAOM, and frankly, not as original either. But that doesn't matter, because unlike TAOM, in which the middle and end are less memorable than the beginning, The Magic Show gets better and better as it goes on. As soon as you're done with your magic performance, you learn that your assistant has been kidnapped, and the kidnappers demand that you break into a museum to steal a precious artifact. To do this, you need the magic skills that you learned while performing onstage. So the middle and end of TMS build on the beginning. This is where TMS shows its originality. While I was doing the on-stage performance, I noticed something odd about the magic tricks. Some of them are based on illusion or sleight of hand, but some of them really do seem to be magical. This became more and more obvious as the game went on, until at one point I stared in astonishment as I discovered that I no longer viewed my character as an illusionist at all, but as something more. If you want to know what I mean, you'll have to play the game. The game is generally well written, with a few amusing moments thrown in. The rabbit provided me with a few laughs. Better yet, the programming is pretty good. Room descriptions change depending on whether doors are open or closed. The description of yourself can change as well. This is better than I'm used to for ADRIFT, where I've sometimes noticed a tendency to avoid any kind of programming, including IF-THEN statements, exactly the sort of statements that are necessary in order to achieve the kinds of things that Jason Mac Innes does in The Magic Show. Even more praiseworthy is the fact that TMS did a good job of beefing up the standard ADRIFT parser to accept a respectably wide range of commands. This made the game a lot more playable and enjoyable. There were a few typos, and a few bugs. One bug -- which is reportedly due to the ADRIFT interpreter -- involved occasionally getting two different responses to a command:
The one major design flaw involves the hint menu. The hints in it are adequate for the first part of the game, but after that they become so vague as to be worse than no hints at all. I think the author is aware of this problem and intends to fix it in the future. Anyway, on the whole, The Magic Show is certainly worth a play. If I'm right about it being inspired by The Act of Misdirection, then I wish the author would have given credit accordingly. But, that aside, there is a lot to enjoy in this game. It's the best ADRIFT game I personally have played. The
Enterprise Incidents by Brendan Desilets As an eighth-grader named Doug DeGrace, you are part of the "Enterprise" project -- a school program for underachievers. To earn a little extra money through simple work, your Valentine's Day assignment is to deliver candygrams to a few other students. Helping you with this are Judy (you have a crush on her), and Queenie (a new girl, recovering from an auto accident). The goal is clearly explained, and this keeps the game moving steadily forward. "The Enterprise Incidents" would have made an aptly-sized IF-Comp entry. It's neither too difficult nor needlessly long. In fact, without hints or the walkthrough, I finished with a full twenty points in just under two hours. Some of the puzzles seemed, at first glance, to be impossibly obscure. Somehow, with just a little more thought (the end-of-poem puzzle, the poem-title puzzle, and the math-cake puzzle in particular), none of them were as elusive as I thought. The play area is even small enough to be easily manageable. A few quirks came up during the game -- a discrepancy between "no" and "not" on a poster, for instance. The biggest issue, though, would probably have left me stuck, if not for a prior save. The game allowed me to give all remaining candygrams to Alicia. Some of the other problems were a little odd, and I have forwarded those notes to the author, for a future version. Overall, the game was well-written and technically sound. The story is interesting, but not particularly complicated. Much of what I perceived as foreshadowing may just have been added detail. The "Lion King" poster and the "Prejudice" poem, as examples, seemed to hint at a larger mystery. Early on, something kept bringing "Photopia" (a game I haven't played in years) to mind. I wasn't sure why, until the game explained the connection for me. The title, too, made me think of an episode of Star Trek (I can remember the phrase in its singular form, but not the details of the episode). A well-placed poster gets that bit out of the way close to the beginning, indirectly citing the source, while at the same time making it clear that it's not the point of the game. Even though the story didn't end in a surprise twist (I was somehow expecting this), it did end in a satisfying manner. The revelation serves to explain why Brendan uses descriptive names for most of the characters. The point of the game becomes clearer. It's a connection I could have made earlier, but didn't. At times, the writing seemed a little off to me. I don't mean that it was extravagant or unnaturally verbose, and I'm not even referring to the frequent text dumps (I really enjoyed those read-only bits). What I mean is, certain single sentences might have flowed better as two. It's a nit-pick, really; my own writing tends to lean toward the overuse of compound sentences. I also found that the eighth-grader's vocabulary outclasses mine. Granted, there may be nothing unrealistic about that, given my frequent reliance upon dictionary.com. Still, the use of "jocose" and "paramour" (for the latter, I'm not even sure the adult-oriented definition found at dictionary.com is really fitting) seemed a stretch. Again, that's really just a nit-pick. NPC conversations are presented in a list of numbered choices. I'm undecided as to whether this was a positive or a negative for the game. On the plus side, it opened easy and full access to NPC interactions. Without having to guess at appropriate topics, I wasted no time in faulty "ask-about" phrasings. No implemented phrasings went untried as a result -- also a positive. With this technique, though, I (as Doug) was willing ask important questions before I (as the player) even realized what was happening. I also found that some questions could be repeated, with a replay of the prior results. These instances didn't seem to pose a problem, except in consistency. After all, how many times can someone hand me the thing I already have? Given one or the other, it's a positive. The conversation system works well enough, and does aid the experience. I found "The
Enterprise Incidents" to be well-written, well-clued, and short enough
to play in one sitting. Although nothing stands out as unexpectedly innovative,
it's a fun and worthwhile adventure. I recommend it, especially to anyone
looking to find shorter games (of roughly IF-Comp size) outside the competition. IF
Quake by Jason Bergman This game was announced on April 1, 2004 as a joke, facetiously billed as "a port of id Software's Quake 1 engine to the Inform programming language." It received front-page attention on Slashdot.org, which, amusingly, invited Quake fans to check out IF Quake's "riveting in-game screenshots." Although this game doesn't use Quake's engine, it is a faithful text adaptation of Quake, which makes it among the more absurd IF projects of all time, like the games in the IF-Arcade collection. But this is no slapdash gag; it's a surprisingly well polished game that's actually worth playing to completion, if the initial premise strikes you as funny. If you're unfamiliar with Quake, here's a page about it at MobyGames. It's a 3D shooter game where your goal is to get through the levels by killing everybody in sight. I've never played it, although many years ago I did play its predecessors, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. But you don't have to be familiar with any of these games to get a kick out of IF Quake. Among the game's Quake-like features are its three difficulty levels, four scenarios, two weapons, and a fair number of surprises. After you finish the game once, I highly recommend consulting the author's FAQ page for information about hidden goodies, strategy tips, and several Easter eggs. (Concerning the difficulty levels, I have to say one thing confused me: "hard" didn't seem any harder than "easy," at least not in the scenario where I tested this.) Perhaps the best part of this game is the writing, particularly the way it makes fun of 3D shooter games:
If you're unenthusiastic about the prospect of typing "shoot grunt with shotgun" over and over again, that is understandable. I also typed "undo" a lot. But take heart; the game is quite short, and it lets you know when you're nearing the end. Thankfully, too, the four scenarios are either/or; you don't have to play them all to win the game. And the end of the game made me glad I finished. Bugs? Well, I did find a few bugs, such as this one:
Come to think of it, why is "Grunt" capitalized? And, oh yeah, there are a few spacing problems, too. And one more thing: the word "gun" doesn't work as it should. And, come to think of it, somebody needs to tell this author about Inform's "font off" statement, so he can fix his copy of the ASCII logo for id Software. So there were a few rough edges. But the game's great design makes up for it, leading you easily through an unfamiliar type of IF world. If you're looking for a game with any kind of story, then this is certainly not the game for you. But if the initial idea strikes you as funny, this game is worth a play. Reefer
Island by Steve Barrera If you're interested in trying out the latest old-school puzzlefest, this is the game for you. One warning, though. Like many another old-school game, Reefer Island is quite frustrating and hard. After spending about ten hours on it, my progress slowed to a crawl, and I still wasn't close to the end of the game. You can adjust that for the fact that I'm a below-average puzzle-solver (and I spent a ridiculous amount of time mapping the game), but still, if you want to win this game, be prepared to put in days of effort and probably contact the author for hints. If this game had hints, I could recommend it much more highly. The prologue sets the tone: you're on a cruise with a group of hemp activists, when suddenly, during the night, the ship hits a reef. Somehow you find a lifeboat, get separated from everyone else, and drift to an island: Reefer Island. In most scenarios like this, the challenge would be to find a boat and get back home. But no, forget that -- all you want is your next bong hit. That's one of the strengths of the game -- its humor. As another example, I got a kick out of the game's "you have died" message:
In Emily Short's "Non-review of Reefer Island," she said, "The puzzles themselves are very old-fashioned in character." I'd have to agree, which makes them a mixed bag. Most of the puzzles I solved were fairly logical and supported by at least one clue, but I have to wonder about the ones I didn't solve. Eventually I got frustrated enough to resort to brute-force methods, such as walking around with every item I could carry and typing "GIVE ALL TO" every person I met. In one case I solved a puzzle that way, and it was a puzzle I never would have solved otherwise. I admit I had seen one clue for that puzzle, but the clue was so obscure, I never would have figured it out. Now for the worst part of the game. Remember how I said this is an old-school game? Well, I meant it. Reefer Island has a hunger timer, a sleep timer, even a small maze. All of these are irritating, but the hunger timer is the worst, making it totally impossible to win on your first playthrough. From what I can tell, you have to play the game a dozen or more times just to gather knowledge, hoping that eventually you'll know enough to squeeze in a winning set of moves during the time before you starve. I did find one source of food, but it didn't prevent starvation; it only delayed it, and not by all that much. On the other hand, perhaps there is a better source of food that I didn't find. The other bad part of the game is its non-interactive characters. Most characters don't respond to even the most obvious topics of conversation. Some characters can't be spoken to at all. That irritated me. If Reefer Island had come out in 1985, it would have been hailed as a great game. Now it has to settle for being of interest only to the minority of the IF community. But if you're interested in playing the latest big old-school puzzlefest, then by all means do try this game. Just be prepared to spend many days on it, and you should probably be prepared to email the author for hints, too. I made a map of this game and uploaded it to the archive. My map is fairly non-spoilerish, showing only the initially available locations in the game. The only puzzle it spoils is the maze. You can get it from here. (It's meant to be printed, not viewed on-screen, so save it to your computer, then use a graphics program to print it.) Back
to Life... Unfortunately
by David Whyld This game has an interesting premise: you, the king, have recently died, but your subjects have resurrected you. The kingdom is in danger, and they're convinced that only you can help. The problem is, you were just getting to enjoy being dead. Now that you're alive, what do you plan to do now? It'd be nice to help your kingdom a little bit, but heck, you already helped them when you were alive the first time, right? No, your main goal is to die. Is this an original premise? It seemed so to me. When I asked a knowledgeable friend about this, she told me that there have been at least two or three other games whose goal is to die, but she said that it would be a spoiler to say what they were. I'm going to take this to mean that this game is fairly original. Even if there have been games with a roughly similar goal, they obviously handled it in a different way, since in this game it is not a spoiler to tell you that death is the object of the game. Technically it's not hard to kill yourself in this game. The problem is, when you're dead, you're not exactly in a position to keep your subjects from resurrecting you. To complete the game, you have to die, shall we say, in a more permanent way. That is far from easy, and even if you succeed, it is possible that you will still not get the best ending, depending on how you deal with a few non-suicide-related things. This makes for a challenging experience, with a lot of potential for replayability. There are some funny moments here, as in most of David Whyld's games. I found it amusing that the game's "score" consists of how many times you've killed yourself. From the very first move, your "successful suicide attempts" are given in the game's status bar. The writing is generally good, and the puzzles are well designed. I admit I resorted to a walkthrough, but that's because I was under time pressure because of this review collection. The crucial puzzles were logical enough that I probably could have solved them without the walkthrough. (The game also has hints, but these are not as helpful as the walkthrough; they are basically just static suggestions based on what room you're in.) The main problem has to do with a few guess-the-syntax puzzles. There are at least three cases where unusual syntax is required. I'm not sure if veteran ADRIFT players are likely to be able to guess the syntax here, but I wasn't. This, and a few other little things, added up to the general impression that the author wasn't trying as hard as he could to improve the game's interactive aspect. This is the characteristic weakness I've seen in all the David Whyld games I've looked at so far. His games are well written, but sparsely implemented; he's not aiming for perfection in the interactive realm. Overall, I found this game entertaining, yet flawed. I can't give it my highest praise, but I recommend it to anybody who's interested in it after reading this review. The
Legend of Zelda: Legacy of a Princess by Hiyazuki Sakamora This is one of the longer games of the year, and a lot of effort obviously went into it. Unfortunately, there are enough flaws with the game that I didn't find myself getting involved with it. If you are familiar with The Legend of Zelda, and you like a hard game, then you might want to try this game. If you're not familiar with the Zelda universe, then you may be not all that interested in it, since it's basically fanfic IF. Even if you are interested, you might run into the same problems I did. I found the game halfway interesting at first, but the more I played it, the more I became aware of its flaws. Some puzzles seemed nearly impossible to me, due to both guess-the-verb problems and puzzles that are difficult without knowledge of the Zelda universe. I finished the game, but only by resorting to a walkthrough. The game opens rather well. You are Link (the hero of the Zelda games), and you start out in the cave of Impa (the old woman from the Zelda games). Impa has just finished writing the tale of your last adventure, when suddenly there is a message from Princess Zelda. It turns out her father, the king, was kidnapped. Now you and Zelda must rescue him. Some of these things rang a faint bell. Many years ago, I did play the original Legend of Zelda game, the one that came out for Nintendo in 1986. I also vaguely recognized such references as Ganon and Like-Like the Shield-Eater. From what I could tell, this appears to be an authentic depiction of the Zelda universe, one that is well conceived, but not always very well executed. I'm going to run quickly through some of the weaknesses of this game:
And now for the game's strengths:
So if you're interested in Zelda fanfic-type IF, this game might interest you. Also, if you'd like to try out a rather long and difficult puzzle game written for ADRIFT, feel free to try this out. If you need a walkthrough, and you very well might, you can find one at David Whyld's web site. Solitary
by Kahlan Solitary is a one-room character study of an 18-year-old female freshman in college who is having problems with her boyfriend (or ex-boyfriend?), James. While the game has flaws, it's a decent first effort for a new author, and might interest some people. The gameplay consists of examining and interacting with the items around you, thinking about things (THINK ABOUT [topic], WHO IS [person]), and ultimately performing the necessary actions to win the game. In the course of all this, you get a fair number of details about your character and the important people in her life. The game's biggest flaw is that it includes an unpleasant (and totally unnecessary) guess-the-verb moment. On the other hand, the game partly makes up for this by including a hint system. It's a hint system with an unusual format, but I thought it worked pretty well. Is there enough detail in this game to make you care about the characters? I don't know. I'm giving the game a thumbs-up, but it's not an enthusiastic thumbs-up. I'd like to see more from the author next time. Maybe the no-NPCs format just isn't well-suited to a purely character-oriented piece like this. Maybe for me to get involved with such a character-oriented piece, I need to see the characters in action, as in Rameses. I don't know. Still, if my description of this game interests you at all, I'd encourage you to give it a try. ETO
by Ian Waddell [ETO is actually a comp game: it was entered into Home of the Underdogs' Game-Making Competition. However, it received no more feedback from the IF community than many a non-comp game, so I'm making an exception and reviewing it here anyway.] ETO has a few things in common with Blink, Ian Waddell's entry in IF Comp 2004. Both games have a war theme, both are nearly puzzleless, and both are rather short. Nevertheless, ETO is an entirely different game, and takes its war theme in a totally different direction. You start out in the ball turret of a B-17 during the middle of a World War II battle. Soon your plane is hit and crashes down in Nazi-occupied France (I think), where you go through some surreal experiences before the plot takes a major twist and eventually the game reaches its conclusion. I did find the occasional typo and spacing error, but generally the writing was well done. In many ways the design was good, too. For instance, you can ask Tom (one of the NPCs) about a fairly wide range of things, and he gives good answers. On the bad side, there are flaws. As S said in his newsgroup message to the author, the opening segment "was too long, and/or there was not enough to do." In the same segment, it's irritating that you can't talk to the people you hear over the radio. I also found one major bug. "SHOOT [anything]" always yields "You can't help but be pleased by the power you wield." That's true without exception, even if you don't have a gun, and even if you type "shoot me." Usually I like games where the author seems to be succeeding competently at what he's trying to do. I guess that's why I liked Blink as much as I did. But in the post-comp discussion, the more I read other people's comments about Blink, the more I understood and accepted their criticisms: they said the game was too short to be involving, and it didn't give you any meaningful choices. I'd like to say that ETO is better in this regard, but it's about the same. There is a situation in ETO where you seem to have the opportunity to make a significant moral choice, but one of the two alternatives is flatly prohibited. This is all the more unfortunate, since it would have been easy to allow that alternative; the consequences would have been simple to code. I have to admit, the conclusion of the game wasn't very satisfying to me. And yet, as I said before, ETO is a game that more or less succeeds at what it tries to do. It's not the best game of the year, but it's worth a play. I wish the author well with his next project, especially if he uses the feedback he's received to boost his coming games to the next level. Dunwich
by Marijn Haverbeke A quest for the elixir of life: not a very original premise, although this game does some new things with it. It is set not in the middle ages or in some fantasy world, but in the year 1869, and the town's alchemists are dwindling due to the rise of science. Those who remain seem to view alchemy less as a chemical pursuit and more as a philosophy. And yet the setting didn't really work for me. A quest for the elixir of life seems pretty incongruous in a a rustic village with a textile factory and a lumbermill, but no apparent center for learning. This is a DOS game, and unfortunately it suffers from the usual failings. It's never heard of verbs like "wait," "show," or "tell." Also, "exit" means "quit." That said, the parser is better than I expected, for a DOS program. Abbreviations like "l," "x," and "i" work just fine. More importantly, I was able to play the game without any real "guess the verb" moments. As far as programming goes, the worst part is that when you win the game, you don't get to see the final text, unless you launched dunwich.exe from within the command prompt; otherwise the DOS window closes immediately before you can read the final text. The characters here aren't well-defined, but at least I was able ask them about a decent range of topics. On the other hand, commands like "ask police officer about dunwich" should have worked, just as the verbs "tell" and "show" also should have worked. Getting to the main point: puzzles. This is where the game actually does a good job. The puzzles were fun for me -- satisfying, but not too difficult. There was only one occasion when I got stuck and had to consult the game's source code in order to finish. And since I'm not the world's best puzzle solver, that isn't necessarily a criticism. Dunwich has an okay story, good puzzles, and a parser that's imperfect but not too bad for a DOS game. If you're interested in trying out some DOS-based IF, Dunwich is worth a try. T.I.M.E.
by Christopher Coonce-Ewing [I'd like to apologize for having published this review, since when I wrote it I didn't realize the game was still in beta-testing. I wouldn't have written the review if I'd realized this. Incidentally, as long as I'm admitting to mistakes... I, Greg Boettcher, wrote this review, not Mike Snyder, who was erroneously credited with it before. For now, I guess I'll keep this review up until such time as the author asks me to take it down.] This game is set in the future, and you are an agent for T.I.M.E. (Temporal Investigation of Modifications and Exceptions). Recently there have been more historical disturbances than usual; it seems someone is trying to undermine American history, and your job is to stop them. To that end, you jump back to 1776, where the "time bandits," so to speak, are trying to stop General George Washington from crossing the Delaware River. If you fail, history will be altered to such an extent that the world as you know it will no longer exist. As it turns out, time travel is a biologically draining business. As soon as you arrive, you become hungry and need food soon. No problem, right? You took some currency with you -- let's go to the local inn. But it's not that simple. If you "ask bartender about food," it doesn't work. It doesn't work to ask him about anything else, either The game has a certain justification for this; you have been instructed not to interact with people much at all, so as not to disturb history. But this excuse doesn't really work, not when the game does indeed allow you to ask questions of NPCs, but the NPCs just keep responding with the same stock answers. It's especially frustrating when your life is at stake and you can't even bribe a bartender to give you some food. So this hunger puzzle is the first challenge in the game, and it's not all that easy. In fact, I have to say, it is not all that logical either. There is only one solution to it, whereas I thought of five other plausible food-getting scenarios (one of them extremely plausible). I had to email the author the author for hints on this one. I am in the process of preparing a list of suggestions for how to improve this game, which I will send to the author shortly. So perhaps the flaws I've mentioned may be |
