Waldo’s Pie by Michael Arnaud [Comp05]

IFDB page: Waldo’s Pie
Final placement: 18th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

I’ve played an awful lot of amateur IF, and that experience has changed me as a player. Where once I might have been easily swept up in a story, now I tend to be more robotic — methodically checking directions in case one wasn’t mentioned, examining every noun in every description, and often obdurately ignoring blatant story cues from the game, to make sure I don’t miss something crucial but under-clued. So it’s to the credit of Waldo’s Pie that I found myself emotionally involved very quickly, rushing along in character rather than acting like an automaton. The game casts the PC as a former clown, who is now just “concerned and loving parent, trying to fulfill a promise to your children.” That promise is to attend the circus, so when the circus suddenly shuts down, and the two boys disappear in an attempt to go to it anyway, well, I guess my own parental instincts kicked in, and I immediately dropped everything to set off after them.

I was pleased to find that the game handled this very smoothly, probably because that’s what it wanted me to do anyway. In those initial moves, Waldo’s Pie gave the impression of being able to handle whatever a frantic parent might do while searching for missing children. That is, up until I tried to ask an NPC about the boys, and got this:

I don’t know if you mean the boys, the any my two missing boys or the boys.

Whoa! There is so much wrong with this — apparently Alan surpassed the usual TADS disambiguation between identical items to throw in another grammatically mangled version of the topic, and on top of that randomly subtracted letters from the transcript it made of the response. (I added them back in for the quote above.) Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t actually refer to any of those things when rephrasing the question.

Well. Even setting aside bizarre responses that are probably caused by Alan rather than the author, the PC seems to have suffered some brain damage. He supposedly worked on a circus at the game’s main locale for many years, but has no memory of it. In fact, he encounters his own house, which he dimly remembers, but not so much that he doesn’t still have to solve puzzles to make anything work inside it. And once in the parlor, his perceptions get even stranger:

> S
In the Parlor
This is the parlor, a small and cozy room. There is a paisley easychair -- and someone sitting in it!

[…]

> X CHAIR
You focus your eyes on the person in the chair. There's something familiar about him... wait! You could never forget your best friend on Wheewhistle Island -- it's Boffo! And he is asleep in the chair, tossing and snoring rather fitfully.

What a strange way to perceive one’s experience, and as it turns out, there actually is a narrative reason for it. Finding that out bolstered my confidence in the game, but unfortunately it didn’t come to light until I’d run across several more problematic aspects. I ended up turning to the walkthrough about 45 minutes in, because I seemed to be out of options, only to discover that there was an object available whose description led me to believe it was attached to the landscape. Then I got a little further, and had to get myself unstuck again, this time based on a description that may have been culturally influenced — what the game calls a kitchen cabinet, I would have called something like a hutch, the difference being whether it’s freestanding or bolted to the wall.

Meanwhile, there are places where the game oddly short-circuits typical IF mechanics, likely out of a reluctance to implement them. This isn’t exactly a problem, per se, but it functioned as a barrier for me, given that it ran against the grain of my experience. Similarly, there’s quite a lot of realism in certain ways (for example, smooth management of a bulky inventory item) and absolutely none in other ways (you emerge from being covered head-to-toe in mud with no change in the PC’s description and no changes to carried items.) In addition, the game is kind of all over the place tonally — creepy moments of missing children superimposed on silly names like “Freeky Forest” or “Whoopdeville”.

When I finally got to the end, it all felt a little anticlimactic, especially since the rescue of the boys, which had motivated me so much at the beginning, ended up happening in the background, barely even mentioned in the ending text. As with the rest of Waldo’s Pie, it had definite strengths, and I wanted to like it a lot more than I did — both technical flaws and authorial choices got in the way.

Rating: 7.2

FutureGame ™ by Anonymous as The FutureGame Corporation [Comp05]

IFDB page: FutureGame
Final placement: 33rd place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

Here we have a little joke. Not a game, not really. There’s a setup, and then there’s a punch line, or if we’re being generous, a selection of punch lines. But really they’re pretty much the same punch line, with maybe some micro-jokes embedded in their differences.

With a game, I try to avoid spoilers. With a joke, anything beyond the premise is a spoiler. So here’s the premise: there’s this business, and it has taken an absurdly business-y approach to crafting a successful IF game. Think you can guess the punch line? You are probably right!

Was it funny, though? Mildly. There’s some wit in the initial paragraphs, and I said “Heh” the first time I saw the punch line. I kind of saw this experience coming when I noticed that the entire game is 11 KB.

It’s a bit hard to rate this, as it’s really a completely different thing than almost all the other stuff I’m rating on the same scale. Super short. Kinda clever. Briefly funny. Not a game. So, maybe let’s call it a…

Rating: 3.1

Sabotage on the Century Cauldron by Thomas de Graaff [Comp05]

IFDB page: Sabotage on the Century Cauldron
Final placement: 23rd place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

This game’s opening text suggests using the CREDITS command, and that command responds with a list that shouts out “My English teachers at VLEKHO”, which was apparently a Belgian university back in 2005. When somebody credits their English teachers, I start to worry that I’m going to be facing a game with broken English, but Sabotage is actually fine on this count. There are little typos and errors here and there, but I’ve seen plenty of games by native speakers whose English is much worse. There are some descriptions, turns of phrase, and explanations that struck me as a little odd, but those were at least mechanically correct, albeit baffling.

No, where this game really spins out is its tone. At the beginning, the PC wakes up in a spaceship sleeping cabin, naked and inexplicably “covered in dirty oil” (unless this is one of those turns of phrase, and the game just means to say something like “grimy” or “grungy”.) He’s yelled at by a comically inept character called “Captain Paddywhack”, who then immediately exits. There’s a bedside note that says “Note to self: sabotage the ship, return to earth, and get Spaika!!” Spaika is apparently the PC’s dog, and later on it turns out that the PC is some kind of mental patient, which I suppose would explain the otherwise bizarre behavior of writing an incriminating note to yourself and leaving it lying around.

The other document available at the game’s start says this:

‘You are one lucky shkhamooh! You have won a 98% FREE VIP evacuation flight to Huhubahubbalah! Since earth has become a truly miserable place, this is undoubtedly the happiest moment of your life.

…and so forth like that. Okay — “Paddywhack”, “skhamooh”, “Huhubahubbalah” — this game is going to be very silly. And it is, for quite a while, not to mention tiresomely juvenile. There are a LOT of bathrooms and toilets, including one wacky scenario where the PC actually becomes a toilet (in a dream). After you shower the dirty oil off yourself, there are no towels, but instead a button you press that makes big hands grab you and pull you into a compartment where you’re blow-dried, like some kind of nude Dr. Seuss or Jetsons scene.

But the aforementioned sabotage requires setting a bunch of bloodthirsty (and rather poorly described) monsters loose on the ship, and suddenly the game lurches into survival horror territory, with gory death scenes, bloody handprints, bodies scattered on the floor, and so forth. You have to fight for your life multiple times, decide whether to kill your closest ally in order to get back to Earth, and inject yourself with “disinfectant” to cure infection of your wounds. (I’m guessing this means antibiotics, since it was made before the days when our head of state thought maybe injecting bleach would be a good idea.)

These tones do not work well together, and neither one was done terribly effectively. Separately, they both feel like approaches that teenage boys might find fun, but I can’t believe even that audience would enjoy this weird melange. Of course, even if they did, they’d probably trip over the numerous implementation problems in this game. There’s a room with an exit to the west that’s described as an exit to the east. There’s an absolutely infuriating inventory limit, which at one point in the survival horror section made me choose between weapons, medicine, and light. There are lots of state-tracking failures, resulting in things like somebody who has gotten medicine continually asking for it, or a message after taking a dead guy’s walking stick that says, “He falls down.” (He was already lying on the floor.)

Then there’s the message that just made me stop playing. I was already at two hours, but I felt like I was pretty close to the ending, and by that point I was going straight from the walkthrough (which is more like suggestions for a walking tour), so I thought I’d power on to the end, until I found myself once again attacked by a monster, right next to the monster I’d already shot. The monster has a silly name, so I’m just going to substitute “[monster]” in the exchange that followed:

>shoot [monster]
(with the ZXQ-239 laser gun)
Which [monster] do you mean, the dead [monster], or the [monster]?

>[monster]
Let's try it again: Which [monster] do you mean, the [monster], or the dead [monster]?

Oh, TADS. It’s been years, and I didn’t miss that behavior one bit. Because I know this to be a notorious TADS error, I’m not inclined to blame the author for it, but at the same time, in combination with everything that had come before, it was more than enough to make me quit the game for good.

Rating: 5.2

Psyche’s Lament by John Sichi and Lara Sichi [Comp05]

IFDB page: Psyche’s Lament
Final placement: 21st place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

Psyche’s Lament bills itself as “An Interactive Geek Myth”, which in the world of comp entries could either be a very amusing typo or a clever turn of phrase. Having played through the game, I’m convinced it’s the latter, because language and concept are strong suits here. The premise is that you play Psyche, who famously marries Cupid but is never allowed to see him. When her curiosity overcomes her and she lights a lamp in their bedroom, he flees and she must fulfill a series of seemingly impossible tasks set by Cupid’s mother, Venus. (The game substitutes Aphrodite, but Psyche’s story comes from a Roman source, not a Greek one. Or a geek one.)

The way the game sets up this story shows more cleverness, as Aphrodite gives Psyche her first task, counting out every seed from a huge heap:

As you come back to your senses, you see your mother-in-law (Aphrodite herself!)towering over your prone figure, sneering and slashing open a huge sack with a flick of her perfect nails. Where are you? What is she saying? It seems you’ll never leave this place until you can carry out an easy task: tell her how many seeds she just sent flying. The words seep through your mind as she storms out, leaving you alone to repent at leisure.

The words “repent at leisure” are well-chosen here, as they call to mind the second half of a saying that begins, “Marry in haste…” I’m not sure how much haste was involved in Psyche’s marriage, but its conditions clearly weren’t sustainable.

All in all, it’s a promising beginning! Unfortunately, things start to fall apart once the “geek” side of the story begins to express itself. This game wants to substitute mechanical devices for the more classical solutions Psyche finds to her problems, and while this approach is seemingly very well-suited to IF, it falls prey to numerous implementation issues.

First, the mechanical objects are described just a little too vaguely, and responses to interacting with them don’t really get to the heart of the matter either. For instance, there’s an object that’s supposed to fit into a slot, but the game’s description of that object gives no indication of its size. The way it was described, I was envisioning something in the nature of a bathroom scale, and when I tried to connect parts of it to the small object with the slot, I kept getting messages along the lines of “It’s too hard to hold the [part] steady in its current position.”

In hindsight, this was clearly trying to get me to put tab A in slot B, but between the vagueness of the object description and the vagueness of the failure message, that didn’t even register with me as a possibility, so I kept trying to steady things on the ground, et cetera, before finally consulting the walkthrough and discovering that in fact what I thought was like a bathroom scale was more like a credit card.

Then, once I’d gotten past that hurdle, I did some fiddly circuit assembly and came up with a machine that could count the seeds. Which, when I pressed “go”, it did… printing out ten lines of output for every seed! This was insane, but bizarre in a different way was the fact that there were only like 5 dozen seeds. Psyche could have counted them by hand much, much more easily than all the rigmarole she went through, and she should not have been intimidated by such a small pile to begin with.

A similar mechanical puzzle is at work for the second trial, and this one went even more wrong for me. I wired up another circuit, set it going, and… put the game into an endless loop! It went through over 300 iterations before I decided that it was never going to stop. This was a surprising new way for a game to become unwinnable, and while it was funny, it did not win Psyche’s Lament any points from me.

The last puzzle is the most bewildering of all, but it didn’t matter, because by this point I had fully lost trust in the game and was going straight from the walkthrough. I still appreciated getting to uncover little sparkles in the text, but on the whole I found it a disappointing experience, and wished that the game had stuck with a little more Greek (or Roman, even), a little less geek.

Rating: 4.1

Mortality by David Whyld [Comp05]

IFDB page: Mortality
Final placement: 12th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

At its outset, Mortality makes a really big deal of how it isn’t for kids, indicating perhaps what its author expects the default IF game and audience to be, even in 2005. We are fairly warned that there won’t be “singing elves, saving the world and maybe a treasure hunt or two”. The help text describes it instead as “essentially an adult game”, and “more adult than not”. This feels like a strange bit of equivocation, as if it’s not confident in just outright labeling itself a game for adults, but as I played through, I found that the hedging was appropriate. While Mortality certainly has more than its share of (in the game’s words) “violence, bad language and scenes of a ‘questionable’ nature”, it’s not exactly aimed at adults either.

Rather, I’d associate it with the attitudes of a stereotypical teen boy, and kind of a gross one at that. There’s the protagonist who drives a Corvette, who “has slept with women of all colours, all nationalities, all races, from one side of the globe to the other”, who’s great with his fists and isn’t afraid to kill. There’s the love interest, who is always described as “ravishing”, or “the most stunning creature”, or “a truly radiant creature”, and so on. There’s rampant racism, misogyny, and homophobia. Every major character is thoroughly unlikeable, and the story itself is basically “noir with magic”, but minus any subtlety to the themes or development of the characters. There are numerous moments which adults (or at least this adult) would find eyerolling or outright offensive.

On top of this, the game is barely IF. There are bunches of cutscenes, or scenes where the interaction boils down to “press a key” or “do the only action we’ll let you do.” In the parts that are interactive, the implementation can be kind of screwy. For instance, you’re startled by a noise in the night, and jump up from bed to investigate. “X me” in this scene results in, “I am Steven Rogers, forty years of age. Ex-policeman, ex-SAS, ex-army. I am dressed in my usual clothes.” First, yeah, the PC inexplicably has the same name as Captain America, which I found pretty distracting. But also, he apparently sleeps in his “usual clothes”? There is a moment where the PC switches bodies with someone else, but “X me” spits back that same exact description. Come on.

My favorite wacky implementation moment was when the PC was hidden in a corner, waiting to ambush somebody. I took inventory and experienced this:

I am carrying a accident item and a blib.

X ACCIDENT ITEM
I see nothing special about the accident item.

X BLIB
I see nothing special about the blib.

An accident item (sorry, “A accident item”) and a blib? The scene is brief, those items never come into play (that I could tell), and they’re never mentioned again. Perhaps they were some kind of internal tracking mechanism that the game didn’t mean to reveal, but for some reason put into the PC’s inventory? My thought was, “This game has gone round the bend.”

My least favorite wacky implementation moment? The fact that the PC kept finding himself in chairs or beds, but Adrift cannot understand the command “get up”. I kept needing to stand, and the game and I kept doing this dance:

GET UP
Take what?

Grrrrr.

Finally, there is the ending. My playthrough ended with me in a dark void, the game repeating over and over again, “All about me is the endless darkness of death. I have failed. I am undone.” Mind you, it still offers a prompt and pretends to be interactive at that point, but unless I was missing something clever, this was just “*** You have died ***”, but without the resolution. I hit this ending after a loooong non-interactive “dialogue” scene in which there kept being only one dialogue choice at each “branch”. How could I have avoided the “endless darkness” ending? I had no idea, so I turned to the walkthrough.

Except, the walkthrough is just a game transcript from a particular playthrough, not all that different from my own. (Really, the game is so minimally interactive that it couldn’t be all that different from my own.) What actions make the difference between one ending and another? It was a mystery. So I turned to the PDF which comes with the game. It suggests, “if you’re not adverse to some serious spoilers that might otherwise ruin the game for you, type the word cheat and see what happens.” I think you mean “averse”, not “adverse”, but okay!

CHEAT
Try something else. That command is not one needed for this adventure.

Hey, thanks for that spoiler warning. It really preserved the surprise of that response. Later on, the PDF explains that Stephanie (the love interest NPC) is the key, and that there’s a hidden variable that tracks her state — keep that variable high enough for the better endings. Also, by default this variable is hidden, “but typing in the reveal command will display its current value.” Interesting!

So I typed “reveal”. I was not given the value of the variable! Instead, the game spit out the entire walkthrough, which, you’ll remember, is a full playthrough transcript. Or rather, it tried to do that, but seemingly ran out of gas about 90% of the way through. Until it did that, I thought I might mess around with different conversational choices and such to see what they did to the Stephanie state, but after that “hint” also failed, I decided I was done.

Mortality has some redeeming qualities. It’s an attempt at very story-heavy IF, and in some moments finds the balance between keeping the story on track and allowing the feeling of interactivity. The idea of choosing an ending based on how well you’ve kept a character happy is kind of cool (if a bit reminiscent of Galatea). The writing is, as the game might aver, “more error-free than not”, and does a good job of involving the senses, although a “smell” or “listen” command might not line up with what a description has said.

But overall, this is an unpleasant story populated with despicable characters, not really interactive enough to be interesting as a game, and burdened with an implementation that is not only shaky throughout, but doesn’t even fulfill the basic promises of its documentation. My experience with it went from annoying to puzzling to very annoying, and I’m glad to have it behind me.

Rating: 3.7

Hello Sword by Andrea Rezzonico [Comp05]

IFDB page: Hello Sword
Final placement: 30th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

There are two separate Hello Sword games in the Comp05 download: hs_ita and hs_eng, which apparently signify the Italian and English versions of the game. Yet, when I fired up hs_eng, the first full screen of text was a quote box, all in Italian. I thought maybe I’d accidentally clicked the wrong file, but then the quote got translated into English… sort of. Here’s the “translated” version:

And me, I’m who live at this point on my counted days,
who have dull dreams, who have fear, also I…
And me, I’m who go away just with these hands
to dyke the limits between the truth and the unreality…

To “dyke the limits”? Uh-oh. Then we get some introductory text that’s all, “You hasn’t the will-power”, and “today is one of the most hottest day of the month”, and “Altough that”, and “The guilty of all?”, and “read the note that Julius leaved.” Yeah, it’s immediately apparent that this review will be getting the “broken english” tag.

The English is so broken, in fact, that I quickly began thinking that maybe I could approach the game like For A Change — something whose language is so barely comprehensible that it melts your brain a little bit, but whose askew diction can be fun in itself. And there are moments where that is true! There’s a room description that includes the sentence, “A little square from that branch off four roads, which conduct to the four cardinal ways.” That feels a little bit like the “mobiles” of For A Change. Or how about this one?

Independence Street
In this street there are a lot of buildings, that – though impede the transit of the wind – almost guarantee a little shade. In this road, in addiction to the great number of houses, there are also a pub when you often spend your evenings and a stationer’s shop where you bought pens and pencils in times of low school.

“The transit of the wind” and “times of low school” are almost poetic in their brokenness. On the other hand, “in addiction to the great number” could work wonderfully if the substitution actually added anything, but alas, it remains only comical and sad. And that’s where my sympathetic strategy breaks down. See, Dan Schmidt knew exactly what he was doing when he broke the English of For A Change, and the linguistic changes worked towards the game’s overall artistic goals. Not so here. Instead, the author pleads innocence in the INFO text, similar to Chronicle Play Torn:

I’m absolutely acquainted with the great number of errors and incomprehensible expressions that crowded this adventure (by the way, I ask you to signal them to me), but I hope you at least appreciate the huge effort I made for you.

Sorry, but: NOPE! I sure don’t, because that effort did not result in anything good. As I said in the CPT review, I want to read good stories, not understandable excuses. And here’s the other problem: even setting aside the many, many, many language problems (the “signaling” of which would comprise hours and hours of work), this is not just a game in broken English. It’s a broken game in broken English.

There are guess-the-verb situations, pretty much impossible to pass without a walkthrough. (A better-written game might have laden the prose with clues that would trigger the correct verb, but this is not that game.) There are far-fetched solutions that the game itself keeps trying to discourage until they work. There’s the old Hitchhiker’s Guide trick of descriptions lying to you until you interrogate them repeatedly.

And finally — well, not finally, more like halfway through, but it works like a finale — the walkthrough itself fails. Even typing in commands literally from the walkthrough, even correcting those walkthrough commands that the game itself can’t parse (like “south-west”), I came upon a situation where the PC got thrown in jail and my game ended no matter what. And when that happened, dear reader, I was done.

Rating: 2.9

Glass by Emily Short [misc]

[This review appeared in issue #45 of SPAG. The issue was published on July 17, 2006.]

I’ve barely begun to explore the capabilities of Inform 7 (I7), partly because its appearance has rekindled my interest in actually playing IF. In that vein, I continue to explore the games that were released with I7 as “Worked Examples”. Having made my way through Bronze, Emily Short’s adaptation of Beauty And The Beast, I came next to Glass, in which she similarly adapts Cinderella. Actually, perhaps “similarly” isn’t the right word here — where Bronze was all about landscape and puzzles, Glass resides on the other side of the spectrum, focusing entirely on character and conversation.

There are other differences, too. Although both works are meant primarily as example I7 code, Bronze feels like a full-fledged game, while Glass plays much more like a demo, or perhaps an experimental comp entry. That isn’t to say that there aren’t interesting ideas embedded in Glass — there are, and I plan to discuss them — but the experience of playing it feels altogether more slight than solving Bronze. Not only is it simply a smaller game, it also demands less interaction from the player; “Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z” is a valid walkthrough, though perhaps not to the best ending.

Those endings are important. Like some other short replay-cycle games, Glass layers on story elements by making less-than-optimal endings the most easily reachable. There aren’t a terribly large number of endings (another factor making the game feel a bit thin), but it’s unlikely that most players will reach the best ending first. Along the way, they’ll learn more about the motivations of each character, and in fact more about some hidden details of the game’s main scene.

This information in turn adds meaning to the rest of the paths to be found in the game. It’s a variation on the “accretive PC” model of knowledge I discussed in my review of Lock & Key on IF-Review. The difference is that the news gained through these sub-optimal endings doesn’t so much help the player better direct the PC or better solve the game, but it does lend additional drama to the other branches of the story. I suppose this game gives us accretive NPCs more than an accretive PC.

However, there are some tricks at work with PC knowledge, too. The player/PC knowledge divide is one of the thornier fundamental problems of IF — a player new to the game will almost inevitably know less about the character and game-world than the PC does, and both the game and the player often start out by scrambling to narrow the gap. There are some workarounds for this, amnesia being the more traditional and popular, while accretive PCs are a more recent innovation.

Glass has found another: base your game on a story with which the vast majority of your audience is already familiar. Bronze was an imaginative variation on Beauty and The Beast, but it neither shed a great deal of light on the original tale nor did it require much information about that tale from the player. Our familiarity with the base story helps us get up to speed on who the PC is, but it isn’t otherwise exploited. However, in Glass, the player must bring to bear knowledge from outside the game in order to reach the best ending. For anyone familiar with most any version the fairy tale, this gambit should work well, though perhaps not right away. Still, it’s an ingenious way of bridging the information gap between player and PC — I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of this strategy before. I suppose there are only a limited number of stories with which authors can assume widespread audience familiarity, and an even smaller number of those that aren’t still under copyright.

With this bridge in place, then, Glass is free to disconcert us a bit as well. For one thing, the player character has some rather surprising qualities (and that’s all I’ll say…), which are left for players to discover rather than being announced upfront. Not only that, the game’s take on the Cinderella tale is less than traditional. In keeping with many modern treatments of fairy tales, its approach to the story’s villains is a little more sympathetic, and its portrayal of the heroes is a little more ambivalent. I would have expected Emily Short to bring some subversive ideas to any fairy tale she touched, and she doesn’t disappoint here.

One more note: in the article I wrote for the long-awaited IF Theory book, I mentioned that it was hard for me to imagine how the basic component of landscape could be extracted from interactive fiction, since as soon as the first room description appears, the game introduces a concept of geographical location. Well, Glass is the game that breaks that model — it has no room descriptions whatsoever. That doesn’t mean it’s without a landscape, though. It’s just that instead of presenting a landscape of Place, Glass instead gives us a landscape of Concept. The NPCs traverse a conversational terrain with particular goals in mind, and at every prompt the PC can try to steer that travel to influence its destination. It’s a compact territory, but well worth exploring.

Finding Martin by G.K. Wennstrom [misc]

[This review appeared in issue #45 of SPAG. The issue was published on July 17, 2006.]

In an era of bite-sized IF, Finding Martin is a 12-course meal. Actually, it’s more like one of those progressive dinners, where you go from one house to the next, a different course at each house, for a total of 12 courses in the evening. Except it’s more like going to one of those every night for two weeks.

Seriously, this game is HUGE. This is the kind of game where you might find an item with ten different modes, many of which can be used to adjust the item to one of its 720 different settings (and some of which do other things entirely), settings which are split into twelve different themed sections, many of which give hints, some of which give red herrings, and some of which perform game functions. I am not exaggerating. And that’s just one item out of dozens and dozens you’ll find in this game way way way before you get anywhere near finding Martin himself.

If you love yourself a big, juicy puzzlefest, Finding Martin is cause for celebration. It’s several times larger and more complex than anything Infocom ever attempted, and it’s generally quite well-implemented. I encountered a number of glitches in my journey through the game, but they were all minor — typos, missing synonyms, and underimplemented parsing mostly. There are a few logic errors here and there, but nothing game-crashing, and in fact very little that even caused me any trouble with a puzzle. Moreover, these problem areas are a very small percentage of the game itself, and this is a game that implements some highly complex behavior. A few errors here and there are quite forgivable in a game this ambitious in scope.

As for the puzzles themselves, the news is again mostly good. Most of the challenges are logical, and some are quite clever indeed. In particular, there’s a puzzle (or maybe it would be more accurate to call it a suite of puzzles) toward the end of the game that is astoundingly intricate and deeply satisfying, the kind of a puzzle that would make up the entirety of another game.

It’s a time-travel scenario that takes the groundwork laid by Sorcerer and expands it by an order of magnitude, asking you to consider the relations between a number of different time-slices as well as to coordinate the actions of multiple past selves with the actions of your current self in order to bypass certain barriers. However, well before you reach that puzzle you’ll have made your way through a large number of obstacles that should scratch any inveterate puzzler’s itch.

Not only that, the puzzles frequently build on each other, and most of the goals require several components to achieve. Finding Martin‘s world can feel astonishingly layered and convoluted. I frequently found that the discovery of a new item or command would add new dimensions to the pieces of the game I’d already uncovered, and that their interactions would open up new avenues for exploration.

Of course, the flip side to this is that such a discovery would often compel me to explore the game’s giant world yet again, trying the new key to see if it would unlock any heretofore unseen doors. At time, the gameworld feels like an obsessive-compulsive’s paradise, but at least most of the interactions seem logical once they’ve been found.

Unfortunately, not all the puzzles manage to meet the same high standards. There are a number of read-the-author’s-mind stumpers spread throughout the game. Some of these just require induction stretched absurdly far, but for several others I still have no idea how I was supposed to come up with the solution.

There’s another category, too: puzzles whose solution required some kind of cultural referent which I lacked, a la Zork II‘s baseball puzzle. Finding Martin‘s pedigree consists mostly of geek lore like Monty Python and Douglas Adams, and that stuff I’ve got covered, but a couple of puzzles require knowledge of Asian customs that I only learned from the walkthrough.

On the flip side of read-the-author’s-mind are “puzzles” whose solution is entirely arbitrary but so heavily clued that the game pretty much just tells you what it is. Imagine a dark room with a description along these lines: “It’s impossible to see anything in this room — this must be what a cinnamon roll feels like when it’s in the oven!” And lo and behold, you just happen to find a cinnamon roll later in the game, so when you bring it into the dark room and eat it, the cinnamon-oriented olfactory sensors in the walls detect it and turn on the lights, just as they’ve been programmed to do by the house’s exceedingly eccentric and patient owner. That example isn’t from the game, but there are several puzzles in there that are cut from the same cloth.

The substandard puzzles are a minority, and they certainly aren’t enough to ruin the game, but my advice is: don’t be afraid to bust out the walkthrough. Yes, sometimes you may find that a perfectly logical solution was staring you in the face, but other times you’ll be relieved to just take the rather farfetched solution and move on with your life. Happily, the author is kind enough to provide a walkthrough on her web page that is broken up into 5-point clusters so as not to give away too much at once.

However, if I may offer one more piece of advice: download the full walkthrough from that page and tuck it away somewhere on your hard drive. Otherwise, you may find yourself, as I did, stuck two-thirds of the way through the game and panicking because the author’s site has gone down. Luckily for me, the page came back up the next day and I found some cached bits on Yahoo in the meantime, but I could have saved a good deal of time and stress if I’d just had the full walkthrough to fall back on.

Finally, take heed of the author’s advice in the intro text: save your game a LOT. There were quite a number of times I found myself returning to an earlier savegame because I was trapped without a necessary item, or I wanted to undo something I’d done a bit improperly a few hundred moves earlier. Actually, that brings me to one of my chief gripes about Finding Martin: it sets a few arbitrary limits, ostensibly in the name of realism but functionally just to irritate the player. Chief among these is an inventory limit. Let’s face it: this is not a game that holds realism particularly dear. Many of its puzzles consist of caprice and whimsy, and its entire plot is metaphysical to say the least. However, for some reason it decided that the player should only be able to carry a limited number of objects, and it failed to provide any kind of bottomless sack-type object to circumvent this limit.

Not only that, there’s a puzzle component that steals items when they’re dropped on the ground. Even more confoundingly, commands like PUT ALL ON TABLE are met with the response, “One thing at a time, please.” And of course, there are many many journeys to pocket worlds whose obstacles require that the player has brought a particular item. Frequent were the times I cursed at this game for the way it forced me into numbingly dull inventory management tasks when I wanted to be having fun instead. Also, there are several instances of the game being pointlessly obtuse, along these lines:

>READ BIG BOOK
First you'd need to open it.

Come on. This is 2006 — we know by now that READ implies OPEN. Such obstructionist world-modeling benefits nobody.

I’m not sure if responses like this one and the response to PUT ALL are TADS default behavior. I do know that I sometimes wished this game had been written in Inform, so that I could get certain pieces of the Inform default functionality. Besides the lack of a sack_object, I was jonesing hard for an OBJECTS verb that would let me see all the items in the game I’d found up to that point. Similarly, a FULLSCORE command that told me all the puzzles I’d solved so far would have been most welcome, especially given how many times I had to restore back to an earlier saved game. Finally, having just played Bronze, I really missed conveniences like GO TO that allow me to traverse the game world without rattling off memorized directions to the parser.

Okay, I’ve been complaining for a while, which makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy the game. That’s not true — overall I had plenty of fun. It’s just a similar feeling to what I had when playing Once And Future, another enormous old-school puzzlefest. Like OAF, Finding Martin provides lots of opportunities to feel that satisfying click as logical components snap together, but forces a little too much tedium on the player after that click has happened.

It’s the figuring-out that’s the fun part of a puzzle, not the follow-through of putting twenty pieces in just the right place once you know where they’re supposed to go. Several of this game’s puzzles would have been much more fun if they’d provided some way of automating that follow-through once the player has demonstrated understanding of the basic concept.

Enough about the puzzles anyway. What about the story? Well, actually, the story is pretty much MIA for the first third or so of the game. We begin with a reasonably compelling premise: your brilliant but peculiar friend Martin has disappeared, and his family has asked you to explore his house in hopes of finding him. Why you and not, say, the police? Well, it seems that you may just be close enough to Martin’s highly bizarre mindset to understand how to find him when the police wouldn’t even be able to get in the door. Strong echoes of Hollywood Hijinx abound as you poke through rooms laden with fascinating devices and hidden exits, but there’s not much more story to be had for a while.

Finally, the game begins doling out plot in awkward lumps, but about two-thirds of the way through, these lumps smooth out and the story begins to tie together as more and more interconnections between Martin’s family and friends, as well as his past, present, and future, reveal themselves. By the time I was rolling toward the endgame, I had felt genuinely moved several times. In fact, a couple of times Finding Martin hits a real IF sweet spot, where the solution to a puzzle not only advances the story but carries strong emotional content about the PC’s role in the other characters’ lives. I recall one moment in particular that gave me goosebumps, as I figured out how something I had done in a past time-travel scenario had affected the future, and how someone in that past had sent a message forward in time to me.

Remember how I mentioned the game’s geeky pedigree? There are a number of references woven throughout the story that are pulled straight from the geek handbook: Star Trek meets Hitchhiker’s meets Tolkien. Some of these made me smile, and some made me squirm. At times I felt like saying, “Yes, yes, I get it. You like Monty Python.” Also, the writing around these references can sometimes feel a bit flat and ingratiating, as when the PC encounters a used paperback:

>x novel
It's a book by Douglas Adams, entitled "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish". Apparently this is the fourth book in the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" trilogy. It occurs to you that publishing the fourth book of a trilogy must be the toungue-in-cheek behavior of someone with a fantastic imagination and an audacious taste for the bizarre.

Ho ho ho. Nothing like belaboring that “fourth book in the trilogy” joke. I get it — you like Douglas Adams. Also, “tongue”.

Aside from that, though, the writing worked well. Most of the time it was transparent, but there were some clever twists and turns throughout, as well as a few good jokes. Having finished this game at last, and finally found Martin, I have to express my admiration. It must have been an unbelievable amount of work to put together a game of this size and scope, and for the most part it’s done really well. If you’re hungry for puzzles, Finding Martin should keep you fed for several weeks. Even if you’re not a puzzler, grab a walkthrough and explore this game — there are pleasures here for many tastes.

Damnatio Memoriae by Emily Short [misc]

[This review appeared in issue #47 of SPAG, in the “SPAG Specifics” sections. Note: that means there are SPOILERS AHEAD. The issue was published on January 16, 2007.]

Damnatio Memoriae is a tiny game, but it’s got plenty of quality. There are a few multiple-solution puzzles and the skeleton of a story built around an “accretive PC” model, where a winning playthrough only comes from the lessons taught by a few losing iterations. The writing is reasonably good, as one might expect from Emily Short, and the setting puts her considerable knowledge of ancient Rome to use. It takes hardly any time to play, and repays exploration with a surprising depth of implementation.

All that said, I think I made two mistakes in approaching DM. One was assuming that because it shares a universe with Savoir-Faire, the details of its magic system would be identical to that game. The other mistake was forgetting that this game’s raison d’etre is to be example code for Inform 7, not necessarily to be a complete and satisfying game in itself. Consequently, I found myself feeling disappointed by finding only anticlimactic, abrupt endings, and so turned to the walkthrough after winning but still feeling unsatisfied. From there, I became confused and frustrated by the way this game’s magic differed from that of S-F. These factors combined to make my playing experience less than fun.

It didn’t help that the first winning ending I reached was, I think, buggily incomplete. There was a “time’s up” message and a “You have won” message, but no connective material between them, which of course felt bare and anticlimactic. I’m assuming this was a bug, but there were a number of places in the game where logical connections felt missing. For instance, in a branch where I had killed Clemens, left him in the study, and ducked outside, I thought I’d hide under a pile of hay. Here’s what happened:

>hide
What do you want to hide under?

>hay
Without some decoy, they'll certainly look hard enough to find you.

What, the corpse of my doppelganger up in the study isn’t enough of a decoy?

I chalk these lacunae up to the fact that the point here is not to create a perfect, polished game but rather to demonstrate Inform 7 rules within the context of a nominally game-like structure. Also, despite the fact that this game is tiny, the number of possible interactions between objects makes for a plethora of implementation details, so it’s natural that without extensive beta-testing (as a full-fledged game would have received), some would be missed. As I said, I mistakenly entered the game with the wrong expectation about that, and in any case, I feel like I’m beginning to cross over into the uncouth practice of airing bugs in a review rather than privately to the author, so let me move on to a different topic: the functional differences between this game’s magic system and that of Savoir-Faire.

I had never played S-F to completion, so I prefaced my approach to this game by playing through its larger cousin. Savoir-Faire is a marvelous game, with an internally consistent magic system of linking and reverse linking that enables both its puzzles and its story. However, the logic of linking in Damnatio Memoriae parts ways with S-F in several areas, so I found it a disadvantage to have S-F so fresh in my memory as I played DM.

For one thing, Savoir-Faire disallows linking anything to the PC, saying, “Linking yourself is generally considered a very bad idea.” In DM, however, linking the PC is an important tool. This hurdle is easily cleared, but it leaves the player to figure out how linkages between people operate, and their operations are in fact rather counterintuitive. On top of this, DM also adds a new kind of linkage: slave linkage. The differences between the three types of links can be subtle indeed. Consider these three messages:

>link clemens to me
(first unlinking Clemens)
You build a mutually-effective link between Clemens and yourself.

>reverse link clemens to me
You reverse link Clemens to yourself (son of Julia and Agrippa, who died before you were born). While one of you lives, so does the other.

>slave link clemens to me
You build the link, enslaving Clemens to yourself. It is an expedient Augustus has been using for years: now any attempt upon your life will instead kill your slave.

On the face of it, these messages would seem to indicate that the regular link allows you to control Clemens, the reverse link causes harm to both when anything is inflicted on either, while the slave link transfers that harm from you to Clemens. However, a simple link doesn’t allow you to control Clemens. Instead, a regular link behaves in the way I expected a reverse link to act, and vice versa.

The other significant difference between S-F‘s linking and that in DM is that DM is much less consistent about disallowing linkages. In Savoir-Faire, you could depend on the fact that unless two objects had some sort of common quality, they could not be linked. Damnatio Memoriae is a little more capricious:

>link window to pitcher
The window is insufficiently similar to the painted glass pitcher of water for the two to be linked.

>link letter to pitcher
You build a mutually-effective link between the old letter and the painted glass pitcher of water.

I was able to understand the first result a bit more when I realized belatedly that there’s probably no glass in the window, but that still doesn’t explain how I can link the pitcher to a letter. Similarly:

>link pitcher to clemens
This would work better if the painted glass pitcher of water were a person.

>link vase to clemens
You build a mutually-effective link between the vase and Clemens.

I’m not sure how much these inconsistencies would have bothered me if I hadn’t just played Savoir-Faire, but that game sets a standard that Damnatio Memoriae fails to meet. Consequently, I felt a lot of annoyance at seeing solutions in the walkthrough that never would have occurred to me, since I was expecting DM‘s magic system to be more like that of S-F.

This is a whole lot of kvetching over a sample game, and in a way, it’s a nice problem to have: Emily’s work, even other samples like Bronze, is of such impeccable quality that I’ve begun to hold even her slightest output to what may be a ridiculously high standard. When a game like Damnatio Memoriae fails to meet that standard, I’m more disappointed than I would be in another author’s work, and linking (sorry) this game to one of her real masterpieces only aggravated the problem.

I guess all this is to say that I’d love to see other games set in the various historical periods of the Lavori d’Aracne universe, but I hope they’re created as games rather than as samples. That way, the focus can be on story and craft, rather than on teaching the features of a system. That’s my selfish desire as a player, mind you — no doubt when I’m working on learning Inform 7 I’ll wish just the opposite.

Coloratura by Lynnea Glasser [XYZZY]

[I was invited to review the games nominated for Best Individual PC in the 2013 XYZZY Awards. As it turned out, there was only one game nominated.]

Lynnea Glasser’s Coloratura has made XYZZY Award history. It is the first nominee ever to win its category before the second round of voting, by being the sole nominee in its category, Best Individual PC. Mind you, it isn’t the sole 2013 game that qualified for the category — obviously, the other games had player characters. It’s just that Coloratura‘s PC is so good that no other game from the year could muster more than a single vote to compete with it. It was the overwhelming choice, and for good reason. It’s great.

So what’s so great about it? Well, for one thing, the Aqueosity has an unusual point of view, as you might guess from its name. It is essentially an alien life form, and the game does a wonderful job of making it clear just how alien indeed. Now, non-human PCs are nothing new in IF. The trick goes back at least to Miron Schmidt’s 1996 game Ralph (in which the PC is a dog), and probably earlier than that. You can find a whole list of such games at IFDB.

What’s special about the Aqueosity is that not only is it non-human, it is wholly original to this game. In games where you play something like a dog, or a vampire, or an elf, sure the POV is inhuman, but it is still familiar — we’ve got a pre-existing rubric within which to understand it. The Aqueosity is a monster (though of course it doesn’t see itself as such), but it’s like no monster we’ve ever seen before — its closest archetype I can think of is The Blob, and even that isn’t very close at all. So from the first moment of the game, we must struggle to understand just what it is we’re dealing with on a fundamental level. That’s a time-honored tradition in written SF, but it’s used to particularly powerful effect here in the interactive context, where we must not only learn to understand the Aqueosity, we must learn to be the Aqueosity.

This process involves figuring out just what the creature can do, and here we come to another of Coloratura‘s strengths: the expanded capabilities of its PC. It’s always fun to play a character who can influence the world in unusual ways, whether by magic or gizmos or superpowers or whatever, and even more fun when those abilities unlock gradually over the course of the game. Coloratura does a masterful job of uniting character discovery with power discovery, so that learning more about the Aqueosity’s skills and traits lets us comprehend the character better, and vice versa.

The fact that the game curtails some very standard IF tropes (“INVENTORY” gets the response, “This body cannot carry things.”) forces players almost immediately to begin trying to explore more unfamiliar concepts for affecting the environment. Doing so starts uncovering some capacities we’re not used to having in IF, the first of which is probably the most shocking: the PC can kill with a thought. (If in fact “thought” is the right word for whatever goes on when the Aqueosity severs a human’s ties with “the physical.”) As Glasser points out in her author’s notes, having this mass murder occur at the beginning of the game, as a necessary component of progressing, highlights not only the PC’s inhuman capabilities but also its utter remove from human concepts of morality.

The gelatinous PC can also travel through very small spaces, which opens up travel capabilities beyond those of the humans inhabiting the ship. It seems to be highly acidic as well, at least in reaction with some substances… including human flesh. I could never quite suss out what things it would melt and what things it wouldn’t, but in any case its Aqueous acidity is crucial not only to certain puzzle solutions but also to the sense of horror in the story, as the Aqueosity physically disfigures objects and people.

The creep factor increases further when we find that the PC is capable not just of physical influence, but mental influence as well. The game does a lovely job of introducing the “COLOR” verb at an opportune time, and in doing so unfolds the PC in a whole new dimension. At the same time, the power is so perfectly in tune with the game’s theme and milieu (not to mention its title, which gave a very satisfying click at this disclosure) that it feels completely natural and inevitable. Of course the Aqueosity can not only hear the colors of emotion, it can sing them too, and of course that singing would influence the beings nearby. Glasser wisely (and unavoidably) prevents this power from working in most instances, but seeing the list of colors made me feel possibilities gleefully expanding, and I loved solving the puzzles that hinge on this ability.

I can’t speak of puzzles without mentioning the meat monster, which won another of Coloratura‘s bouquet of awards, for Best Individual Puzzle. This is a beautiful puzzle in lots of ways, but I’ll try to confine myself to those relating to my category. First, the cueing is just fantastic, introducing the PC’s penultimate superpower ever so smoothly:

Colder Room
The madness in this room is soul-wrenching. How the Blind Ones could live with this atrocity is unfathomable. Fleshy chunks of the formerly-alive sit in frozen stacks, trapped in disunity. Your own situation is frustrating, but this is a true, horrific travesty. You need to help this, heal this, fix this: you can't idle while such suffering exists.

>COLOR CHUNKS WHITE
The meat is too disjointed to color. It needs to be combined first.

>COMBINE CHUNKS
You smooth your body over the meat packages, physically and metaphysically conducting unity and understanding and cohesion. As you weave together the previously disparate notes, the black gives way to confusion, then curiosity, and then slowly to joy and happiness at its newfound Song. The Newsong greenly bubbles into gleeful thankfulness.

This is a textbook example of how to introduce new verbs without putting the player through a single moment of guess-the-verb frustration. I’d gotten here by exploiting a power I knew — crawling through small spaces — and when I then tried to use another power, the game gave me a stepladder to try something new, and rewarded me generously when I did so.

Even better, when I did struggle, the game was there to catch me. The meat monster puzzle introduces the PC’s final power, that of controlling other beings. This power is crucial for the final act of the game, and the logic that invokes it here is flawless. However, although the game tried to give me a similar cue (“…it only continues to beg you for help. It striates insitence [sic] that you take control, that you fix everything.”), I failed to catch on. Rather than letting me flounder for too long, the game finally just taught me what it wanted me to do:

In a desperate act of submission, the Newsong binds its aura to yours, giving you complete control of its mind and body. You surprise at the bond: your bodies remain divorced, but your minds move in perfect synch. You tug curiously at its simplistic flesh-structures, feeling the creature’s immense weight. You can make it do whatever you want.

As it had done many times before, Coloratura gave me a thrill by opening yet another capability of the PC, and it did so without a trace of contrivance, as the act of a newborn fighting for its life.

A newborn. The Aqueosity’s utter horror and revulsion at the concept of a freezer full of meat, and the way it experiences that environment (“Fleshy chunks of the formerly-alive sit in frozen stacks, trapped in disunity”) brilliantly puts our sympathies on its side, and against our own kind. The joy and gratitude it hears in the Newsong’s voice put the monstrous PC into the role of loving mother, and yet we can also understand perfectly, superimposed upon this picture, the utter shock and horror of the humans aboard the ship, as an inexplicably animate mass of meat suddenly bursts out of the freezer and into the kitchen.

Coloratura makes that kind of move over and over, to enormous effect. It’s my favorite aspect of the game, and it couldn’t be done without the finely crafted PC. See, there are some things IF is great at conveying — special perspectives and special powers are among those. You know what IF is not very good at conveying, though? Dramatic irony. When the audience controls the character, it’s very difficult to pull off an effect where the character knows less than the audience. When we watch Hamlet stab the arras behind which Polonius is hiding, we too feel the stab of tragedy at his unwitting accident. But if Hamlet were an IF PC, how would the author achieve this effect? She could hide the knowledge of Polonius’ location from the PC, but doing so would drain Hamlet’s action of dramatic irony. She could allow the stabbing not to occur, but that would derail the entire plot. Or she could eliminate interactivity around that moment, in which case we’re pretty much back to watching a play.

I’ve never seen a game solve this puzzle, but Coloratura takes an ingenious route to get there. By creating a character which is both horrifying and sympathetic, and making that character our viewpoint onto an otherwise stock and familiar human environment, the game manages to give us more knowledge than the PC, so that we can understand its actions, necessary for its own survival, in the context of the deaths, maimings, and mind control it inflicts on the human crew. That crew is shown to be scientists, not villains of any kind, and so they have our sympathy too, not to mention the built-in sympathy they get by sharing our DNA. Thus we can feel the full tragedy of unwitting destruction as the story unfolds. That is the most impressive artistry of all in this very, very impressive game.