Ratings and Reviews by JonathanCR
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A single idea, but a good one, November 16, 2009This is a very clever little game. It is one of those games that basically have a single puzzle. In this case there are a couple of things you have to do, but once you work out what’s going on, it’s not enormously difficult to do them. The tricky part is working out what’s going on. The best procedure if you are having difficulty with this is but don’t want to be told the answer outright is (Spoiler - click to show)to make a map, showing where you actually can and can’t go, and compare that to the map that is provided.
It is hard to say any more than that without spoiling the game.
The basic mechanic is very simple (if utterly confusing at first), and there is nothing really to the game other than this: no objects besides the couple involved in the puzzle, and not much else to look at along the way. The puzzle itself is short and the game does not take long to play at all once you twig. What content there is seems to be well implemented and I didn’t find any bugs.
Overall, then, this is a simple game that does little other than introduce an initially confusing but ultimately elegant mechanic and leave the player to work out what that mechanic is – but it does it very well indeed.
Good fun, some interesting ideas., November 16, 2009This is a fun if fairly short game. The setup is nothing too unfamiliar. You play a private eye, disgraced and penniless after a disastrous court case with an evil corporation. The evil corporation has now kidnapped your wife and is about to unleash a diabolical scheme of world domination. Naturally, only you can stop it.
The game is not enormously difficult, mainly because with each section completed, it is made fairly obvious where you need to go next and who you need to speak to. It’s mainly a matter of simply following the cues. One complication is that the game rather unexpectedly contains riddles! Which to my mind rather breaks the suspension of disbelief. I must also say that one of the riddles stumped me, and it seems that I wouldn’t ever have got it without using the hints as it required cultural knowledge that I lack (Spoiler - click to show)(when on earth is a hearse white? I’m going to guess Asia, but I used to live in Asia and I never saw a white hearse, so it can’t be that mainstream a reference).
However, the game also contains alternate routes to victory. Following the fairly clear cues as outlined above will take you through the “main” route. But you can also behave quite differently to find the “saboteur” route and, best of all, the “dancing man” route. I followed the walkthrough for the dancing man, but it would probably be possible to work it out without help – although a lot of experimentation, undoing, and restarting would probably be necessary. (At least this route doesn’t involve any riddles.) I found this way through the game to be very interesting. The “dancing man” route is so-called because it achieves victory without any deaths, leading to a happier victory – but as you go down the route, the game plays with what you’re doing. There has been much discussion of games where the player must do things that the player character would never do, or never have any reason to do, since the player has knowledge (perhaps derived from previous attempts at the game) which the PC should lack. This is certainly the case with the dancing man route through Resonance – but the game comments on it. As the game progresses and the PC does increasingly weird things the purpose of which is not immediately clear, other characters comment on it and wonder what is going on. The PC himself begins to act rather strangely, inexplicably literally dancing his way through the scenes and telling other characters he cannot be beaten.
I thought this very interesting, simply as a comment on how PCs behave when the player knows all the strange actions required for victory, and it added a lot to the game.
The game is well implemented and largely free of errors. There were one or two minor ones that I spotted. I got an error message when examining the cabinet. At one point I was told that I had dropped something, but in fact I had not. And there’s the occasional typo (e.g. “get his” instead of “get this”).
Overall: the game is fairly short and relatively easy. The main point of interest is that you can choose to follow the not-too-difficult route that is clearly cued, or strike off on your own and try to find one of the alternatives. Doing that leads to interestingly postmodern stuff along the way.
Baffling, capricious, but always entertaining., November 16, 2009This game is tremendous fun – at least, once you work out what’s going on. The game combines a ruthless logic with dazzling capriciousness. The best example comes in the introduction. The first part of the game introduces you to the game mechanics and explains what your task is going to be. As it turns out, however, you never perform that task at all. No sooner is the introduction over than the game takes a wildly different turn. You’ll still need the skills you learned in the introduction, but you won’t be doing what you thought you were going to be doing.
It quickly becomes apparent that the game revolves around word play of a kind very similar to that of the seminal “Nord and Bert”. Like that game, you change the world by changing the words that describe the world. Moreover, like that game, the action is extremely episodic. The tools you need to solve each scene are within that scene, and when you move to the next scene, you won’t take any with you.
There is a story, though, and there are even characters who appear in different scenes. (I especially liked the Earl himself.) Even having completed the game, however, I’m not entirely clear on the details of the story – but one gets the impression that it doesn’t really matter. Nothing in this game is to be taken seriously, even by the characters in it.
A very nice touch which brings this home is the “thought line”. This is displayed *after* the command prompt, and gives the PC’s thoughts on what has just happened – which are usually fairly sarcastic and pretty funny. I don’t think these thoughts are ever essential to the game, although they sometimes give vague hints. One slight annoyance is that the contents of the runebag are displayed in the thought line, which changes after you type the next command. That means that you might forget what those contents are after a couple of moves and have to check it again.
The puzzles are fairly logical – in a sort of a way – although tackling them can become fairly mechanical. When I couldn’t think what else to do, I found myself examining everything and then trying to manipulate pretty much every word I saw in a methodical way. Most of the time, however, it was easier to guess what to do, although it was not always clear why.
Negative points: there isn’t a great deal of freedom in this one. You can effect the transformations that are required to solve the puzzles, but no others. So the great promise of your world-altering abilities isn’t really met. You can’t take objects, only transform them. There is very much the sense that you are progressing through a set series of events rather than really controlling what’s going on. Similarly, you can TALK TO characters, but that’s it – you can’t specify subjects. In fact, this works well and keeps the story flowing – when the character stops being responsive you know it’s time to start changing objects. However, the game’s rails can sometimes work against it, especially when it is far from obvious even what you’re attempting, let alone how to do it. (Spoiler - click to show)Perhaps the worst example of this comes at the beginning, when you finish learning how to use the runebag, but Eaves won’t let you go into town until you’ve finished your training. What to do? In fact you’re supposed to turn the plants into pants, thereby driving Eaves mad and initiating the events that drive the actual adventure, but it’s not clear why you’d want to drive Eaves mad at all!
These negative points don’t really detract from the game. This is the kind of game it is, and it does it very well. All in all, a lot of fun and a genuinely funny game to boot.
Not for anyone lacking the patience of Job., November 16, 2009I don’t like giving negative reviews to things or being critical for the sake of it. But I thought it worth tackling this one fairly with the more constructive aim of giving some indications to the author about how to improve things.
If anyone else reading this is like me, they were captivated by Zork in their youth and made fumbling attempts to create their own games in imitation of it, but lacked the imagination or technical ability to produce anything remotely uncringeworthy. This game is those games, but in Inform rather than C64 BASIC. If you’re expecting a jolly, in-joke-filled nostalgia-fest, in the style of “Enlightenment” or “Janitor”, you can forget it. If you’re after a more serious retro-style cave crawl, in the style of “The adventurer’s museum”, you can forget that too. This one tries to recreate the world of Zork but without, it seems, either the imagination which made the early cave crawls such experiences or the wit to parody them amusingly. In fact it’s not merely completely humourless but lacks pretty much any kind of atmosphere or character whatsoever. And that is the first point I want to make: if you’re going to make a game, you need to have some kind of vaguely worthwhile story, or world, or experience to convey to the player.
We don’t get that here. The room descriptions are spartan to the point of meanness:
medium room
You are in a medium-sized room. Exits lead south and west.
A panel is on the wall.
Or:
big room
You are in a huge room. Souoth is a smaller room and hallways lead east and
west.
(That’s just one of the many spelling errors, which it would be tedious to list.)
The implementation is poor:
blue room
You are in a blue room. Exits lead east and south, and there's a glass wall to
the north.
A gray door blocks your way south.
A dial is on the wall.
>x glass wall
You can't see any such thing.
Or:
platform
You are on a small platform over spikes. The platform feels weak beneath you. A
bar leads out over the pit to the south and northwestt lies the maze.
A door leading southeast is here.
A rocky shelf is sticking from the wall.
The platform is collapsing!
>climb onto bar
You can't see any such thing.
>s
You realise that there's a hole blocking your way south.
The platform is collapsing!
You fall onto spikes!
You have died! You wake up in a random room!
It was that last one that finally exhausted my patience. (Spoiler - click to show)I did have a look at the walkthrough at this point, which revealed that what I should have typed was GET ON LEDGE (“climb onto ledge” or “up” or any other alternative wouldn’t have worked). Incidentally, that last room doesn’t really have a door leading southeast – that is actually the door leading northwest, but it seems to have the same description in both of the rooms it’s in. (You can’t go back through it though, for no apparent reason.) There are many other examples of this sort of sloppy implementation. As for the design of the game itself, I could also mention the maze (the rooms of which don’t have any descriptions at all, and which has no original features apart from its thankful shortness); the Room Of Pointless Death (my name), where pressing any button other than the right one will kill you; or the locked door puzzle where you must simply turn the dial next to the door until you hit the right number. There is one part where the game appears to be completely broken (Spoiler - click to show) where you are told that there’s an exit east, but you can’t go east.
The game gets some points for being competent and coherent marginally more often than not, but not many. In short, it feels like a practice game, written as a programming exercise. Its biggest flaw, though, is just a complete lack of imagination.
To the author: as I said at the start, I don’t want to be negative for the sake of it. The criticisms I’ve made are meant to point to questions about why one makes a game and puts it online for others to play. The game has to make sense and be reasonably playable by other people, and that means making sure that objects are properly implemented, that things mentioned in the descriptions can be appropriately manipulated, and that there aren’t points where only one particular form of words is accepted despite the existence of many other equally plausible ones for the same action. That’s just fundamental. Equally important, though, is having something worthwhile for people to play. The Zork games were great games because they took the player to an interesting world that was well described. If you use the Zork name, that’s what people expect. Even if you don’t, people will expect something that’s worth their time. A “big room” and a “medium room” with nothing of interest going on in them isn’t. If you try writing something more original or simply more imaginative in general, and testing it properly, you might well produce something worth playing, but I’m afraid this isn’t it.
A great opening., October 1, 2009I loved this. The main gimmick of the game is its dual setting: you are telling a story to your small son. A nice touch is that the prompt is "The prince then " - inviting you to finish the sentence (in either the past tense, to match the prompt, as if you are really speaking your move to your son, or the present tense, in standard text game format).
Now at first I thought that this was a cute gimmick but nothing more. But in fact the story-telling setting is neatly woven into the whole game. After typing a move, for example, the game may describe what happens in the standard way (in "your" voice - this is what you're saying to your son), and then add the boy's comments. Often the boy decides what happens next, even overriding "your" description of the action. There are points where he takes control of the story quite drastically. The effect of this is that very unpredictable things happen in the story, but while this highlights the unrealistic nature of the story *that you're telling* (about the prince), it actually helps to make the story *that you're in* (about the father and son) much more immersive and believable. When you play this game, you don't believe in the prince and his adventures, but you do believe in the father and son making up the story about the prince. And you care about the prince, despite his obvious unreality, because the father and son care about him, and the telling of his story is an important part of their bonding.
In short, then, what might be a cutesy gimmick is actually a clever and charming technique that draws you into a story in a way that often eludes games that make far more effort for "believability". It is funny, but the humour is not just about jokes, but serves the deeper purpose of fleshing out the characters of the father and son (and the mother) and their relationships. The game as it stands has basically a single, not-too-hard puzzle before its disappointingly premature ending. I give it only a 3 because it is only an introduction, but it is a spectacular introduction and I would absolutely love to play a full-length version of this. I can easily see how more serious aspects of the family relationships hinted at in the introduction could emerge in a longer story, making this potentially quite a thoughtful and moving piece as well as a very entertaining one.
More thoughtful than it at first appears, September 21, 2009This is one of the stranger ideas I've ever seen for a game, but it's a lot of fun. A nice twist here is that most of the pleasure of this game comes from *not* completing it. Winning is dead easy, but it's more interesting to have a look around first. The NPC is enjoyably unpleasant and both the PC and the absent artist are given a lot of character - or at least, a lot is hinted at.
A couple of striking points about this game, which I'll hide not because they're really spoilers but because working these things out is part of the enjoyment: (Spoiler - click to show)The game appears to be set in the distant future, at least given that Britney seems to have been visiting the moon and the PC is apparently purple. I thought this interesting given that there is nothing overtly SF about the setting at all - apart from the talking fish, of course, which I initially assumed was a sort of whimsical fantasy element rather than a SF one. Perhaps it is and the SF elements have got absolutely nothing to do with it. (Spoiler - click to show)I think this is the first game I've played where the PC is gay and this makes no difference to the plot. That's also very refreshing.
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