Reviews by MathBrush
more than 10 hours
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Unofficial sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, November 22, 2023I beta tested this game a couple of times, although I only did a part at a time and never completed it, while on the other hand the author did a lot of testing for me, so I definitely owe him a lot!
This game is wildly ambitious in its concept: take the work of Douglas Adams (one of the best humorists of all time) and the work of Infocom (one of the best group of IF writers of all time) and write a sequel to their works with a lot of original synthesis and do it all in ZIL (one of the less-known IF languages) and make it roughly comparable in scope to the original (within an order of magnitude).
Oh, and do it as your first game.
To produce anything in this scenario would be a feat. I think that the end result is much more than ‘anything’.
You start this game right where the old one leaves off, on the planet of Magrathea, with the other ship members from the Heart of Gold. Your end goal is…hmm, I’m not quite sure. Explore? In the end it involves a lot of exploring Milliways and trying to gain access to a fancy ship.
In the meantime, the game is centered on a hub-spoke structure, with a central ‘darkness’ room imitating the first game, where different senses lead to different areas.
The game is intentionally hard. In another thread, the author laid down the following rules:
*NPCs are hard to get right, include less of them but make them worth it.
*Story comes after puzzles. That’s how my cookie crumbles.
*DEFINITELY make the game cruel. It’s more interesting that way.
Randomisation? Obviously! Otherwise it becomes a follow-the-walkthrough-if-you-get-stuck kind of game with no brain involved. I usually end up becoming that kind of person.
This game features all of these things, although it actually has several NPCs. The game is quite cruel, and has many randomised codes and things that make a straightforward walkthrough impossible. Just about every area has some kind of randomization, from randomized exits in a small maze to a game of hide and seek with a randomized shapeshifter.
The most frequent way this shows up is the darkness thing. I never figured it out while beta testing, just flailing around until I got out of the darkness, and then with the walkthrough playing today I realized that you have to wait a bit first and then perform the appropriate action, but was frustrated when I kept getting sent to the same area over and over (due to randomization). I finally realized that you can just ‘wait’ until you get the area you want.
For me what shines the most are the settings and the big set-piece puzzles. The settings include Milliway’s itself, Dirk Gently’s office, and other areas from Adams’ writing. The game of hide and seek I mentioned earlier was a lot of fun, as were some of the interactions around disguising yourself and walking around Milliways.
There is some trouble; my game very frequently crashed, often after examining something, when using the Gargoyle interpreter. I took some notes at first but it was so frequent that I just started saving a lot. I’m sure it’s something ZIL related, as I have almost never had Inform games crash. It could be due to window size or something. Edit: No one else seems to be reporting this, so I believe it may be an interpreter issue.
Other than that, the main thing I would have liked more of was a guided conversation system that suggested things to talk about.
Overall, this is much better than it could have been. I remember someone entered a text port of one of the graphical Infocom adventures into IFcomp many years ago and it was a real slog to get through. Pretty much most of the unofficial sequels to Infocom games I’ve played have been bland, outside of some highlights like Scroll Thief. So to see a game that is vibrant with interesting puzzles and which follow in the first games footsteps in many ways is quite impressive. I don’t think it achieves the heights of the first game in terms of polish or writing, but that’s like saying that my work as a mathematician didn’t achieve the heights of Newton or Gauss. This game aimed high, and so I’m impressed where it landed. I look forward to any future work.
Gargantuan game about puzzles and a Prince's journey of maturation, November 22, 2023I’m pretty sure this is the largest TADS game ever made and one of the top 2 largest parser games (with Flexible Survival, the furry game, being larger). It has a map and puzzle list rivaling games like Cragne Manor, and actions frequently generate over a page of text, often multiple pages when dramatic events happen.
The story is that you have been assigned to make the young prince Quisborne into a man, basically, instead of the wishy-washy pampered prince he is. To do that, you need to explore the world, chase down dark secrets, and help out a great deal of people.
I tested this game, although I used a walkthrough for much of it. I also replayed part of it before this review, which I’ll come back to later.
I think a great deal of IF taste comes down to the first game you played that hooked you in. For me (and a few others, like Mike Spivey), our first big game was Curses. For people like Robin Johnson, those games were (I believe) Scott Adams. For people like Zarf, Infocom and Myst were big influences; for Garry Francis and others, type-in games and illustrated adventures were big.
Each of these influences leave a mark on us. For me, I like dry humor, exploration with a lot of varied experiences and consistent backstory, literary aspirations, etc. Robin Johnson took principles from Scott Adams games (and others) to make his successful parser hybrid games. Zarf made several amazing games that drew on Myst’s complex mechanical puzzles (especially So Far), and so on.
John Ziegler has cited the Unnkulia games as an inspiration. These were early TADS games, perhaps the biggest/most popular amateur text games that were released while Infocom was dying and before Inform came out. They feature games with lots of gags and names that were puns or jokes. They have a lot of background banter, and feature large outdoor areas with woods, taverns, etc. They have puzzles involving looking behind scenery things or repeating actions, lots of diagonal directions, etc. I replayed a bit of the first Unnkulia game before writing this review and these things stuck out to me.
I find a lot of similar elements in Prince Quisborne. We have an expansive world map that involves a lot of beautiful nature and sweeping expanses. We have puzzles that involve looking behind scenery things or trying actions multiple times. We have many names involving puns or jokes. We have maps with organic, diagonal directions. We have a plethora of taverns. We have the use of TADS. Some of these are stretches, of course, but I really feel like a lot of authors (including me) are perpetually chasing that feeling of the games that drew them into IF.
The craft is, in my opinion, much higher in this game than in Unnkulia. The poems are well-written, the puzzles can be exceptional, and so on.
When I first played, I got overwhelmed by the large amount of text. I ended up having to follow the walkthrough and couldn’t figure out how anyone could navigate the tons of text, many room exits, tons of open quests, etc.
I replayed today, and I got to 75 points in 4 hours, out of 300. I got 50 of those points without hints, which was nice, but I really got stuck on the chess puzzle, which I had never solved on my own before. I also needed hints crossing the ferry, and I got some ‘solve’ help with some logic puzzles because I had already played through them twice (but some I did anyway because I like them).
I found it so much easier this time. What I did was, the first time I played, I read all the text carefully. All the pages and pages of backstory, the little jokes and character building moments of the game.
But this time, I just ignored it all. I just went through and saw the puzzle structure. I spacebarred through all the text and looked twice at each room to get the shorter room description.
With this simpler version, the map coalesced. I realized how much of it was closed off, and the rest was strongly guided. I was able to do a lot more of the puzzles this way.
However, it only made sense to do this because I had read the text once before. Without the text, some puzzles won’t make sense.
Fortunately, I found the NUDGE system really helpful. It helped me know what to focus on, and cut down on the time I was lost so much. It didn’t even feel like cheating; honestly, playing the whole game doing NUDGE a lot may not be a bad idea.
The other reason it’s good to read all the text is because it provides its own experience, its own plot and storyline, much of which is wholly unconnected with gameplay. It tells a story of a young man who grows wiser and older. Many reviews have found parts of this offputting, and I did too at first, as the character seemed so wishywashy. But the later parts of the game really pay off with all of that intro character framing.
I spoke about tastes earlier. Some of the puzzle style isn’t to my taste in terms of difficulty. I have some habits in my own games I do specifically to avoid things I find frustrating in others. I lay out almost all of my rooms in rectangular grids and make sure to clearly label exits, because I don’t like hidden exits; I try to keep my text short and make it clear what matters in each room; I like to make it so that all important text occurs at the end of paragraphs; if a puzzle requires multiple items, I try to keep them together in physical proximity or provide clear markings showing they belong somewhere else (which is something I like about Curses, and something Cragne Manor does in a way); and so on. Quisborne violates almost all of my personal rules, and this makes it, in my opinion, even longer and more difficult than a game of its size would otherwise be.
But I had fun replaying the first 4th of the game tonight, doing it in my weird way of having already read all the text and used a walkthrough and now stumbling through with occasional hints. I don’t think that’s how the game was intended to be played. But I like it a lot. There are a select few other big polished parser games out there and many of them have not gotten the attention of smaller games; I recently have been replaying all IFDB games with 100+ ratings, and the only real ‘mega’ game on there is Blue Lacuna, which is the easiest giant game. Curses is on there, which is pretty big. But the other games, like Mulldoon Legacy, Finding Martin, Inside Woman, Lydia’s Heart, Worlds Apart, Cragne Manor, etc. tend to get few but high ratings. So will Prince Quisborne become popular and well liked by many, or just become the treasured love a few? Even the Unnkulia games which inspired John sit at less than 10 ratings on IFDB each. But I am a fan of this game, love the craft that went into it, and believe it fulfilled the author’s goals of making some exquisite.
Epically long murder mystery adventure in Adrift, July 10, 2023Phew! This was a long game. I took a break from playing the other parsercomp games for 4 days to finish playing this one; and that was just by using the walkthrough, which spans 8 pages of 3-columned text.
The idea of this game is that you are at a party at a large mansion where a murder has been discovered. It is your job to stop that murder!
The presentation and the writing are of high quality, which some nice visual effects with regards to headings and fonts, and very incisive and biting wit. There are many characters that are generally well differentiated, although almost every character frequently expresses very strong sexual urges in non-explicit ways, so it can blend together when the 5th or 6th man talks about how hot the widow is.
I played for about an hour or two to get a feel for the game. I got maybe 23 out of the 250+ points, then decided to use the walkthrough.
It soon became apparent just why the walkthrough was so long. The map is large, especially a garden area which is a maze with several almost-identical areas. The vast bulk of the game, around 75%, consists of some character asking you to give something to or ask something of another character. So you have about 10 or 12 moves navigating the garden maze and going into the mansion and finding your target. That character then says they can only do that if you bring them something else. So you type 10 or 12 moves going there and doing that, and so on and so on till you reach the end of the chain. Then you report back to people in reverse order, with the same maze navigation between every chain.
Due to this the plot really kind of stopped taking off. At first I felt like I was really getting somewhere (finding the widow! searching the murder room!) but if you charted the plot intensity with regards to time it would look like a giant snake that had just eaten a string of 30 rats. Flat plot progression for a long time, with a little bump of action, followed by more flat plot progression, with a little bump of action.
The writing was constantly of high quality in the genre it had set out to follow, a kind of bawdy, everyone-is-rotten nobles vs commoners dark comedy.
Outside of the fetch quests, the game consisted of finding objects in random and unusual ways. The kind of thing where touch a glass pane and it reveals a trapdoor which takes you on a chute ride to find an oubliette where you overhear two thieves talking and one drops a potato crisp. (this example isn't necessarily in the game).
When I wasn't following the walkthrough I had a bit of trouble. An early quest needed me to find some cream buns. I saw food on a table and tried X FOOD. That didn't work so I went into the kitchen and tried X FOOD. I figured maybe they were there but not in the description so I tried TAKE FOOD and TAKE BUNS. It turns out I needed to X COUNTER instead to find them.
So given that the discovery of objects was often difficult with the parser, and that seemingly unrelated actions were necessary to find the objects, and that almost each step of each task required navigation of almost-identical maze rooms, and that the game was as long as Curses and other huge text adventures, I think it's no surprise I turned to the walkthrough. There are copious clues though for those who prefer more gentle hints.
A sprawling ADRIFT adventure about a 6 yr old boy exploring strange lands, July 1, 2023I've played several Larry Horsfield games, and I generally have the impression that they'll be extremely long ADRIFT games that require you to look in every nook and cranny and often put you in 'dead man walking' scenarios because you forgot something 400 moves ago.
So I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could solve the game. I started in a magician's room, and I tried looking behind an armchair, looking under a stool, etc. But there was nothing there, so I explored more and found some more reasonable puzzles: a light puzzle, grabbing a book, etc. Then I went to another area, grabbed a lot of stuff; the game even warned me that I hadn't grabbed everything! I explored a dungeon, and got really very far.
I thought to myself, 'Man, this game is awesome. It's a lot smaller than other Larry Horsfield games, and seems more focused on clever puzzles instead of hiding random stuff.'
At one point, the game said I needed a tinderbox, which I hadn't grabbed, so I peeked at the walkthrough, and found out that I had missed it at the beginning. Apparently instead of looking under the stool or the armchair I needed to stand on the stool and it would reveal some stuff to me.
Fortunately the earlier areas were still accessible so I went back to go grab it.
But then I ended up solving what I thought was the final area of the game. It actually ended up sending me to a nexus of areas. The SCORE command revealed that I only had 90 out of 500 points. And the door locked behind me. I thought, 'well, I'll still try on my own'. But getting in a boat told me I should be wearing my war belt. With the door shut, there was no way to get back. So I loaded an earlier save. Unfortunately, there was a bug where going back to get the warbelt meant I couldn't leave for some reason.
I restarted completely, deciding to just blindly follow the walkthrough. But it's missing a command early on and I ended up with a bug situation where there were two 'thin books' in the same room that I couldn't disambiguate between.
So I restarted again, fixed that problem, and just rode the walkthrough the rest of the time. I found out there was tons of stuff I had missed earlier because I hadn't looked under a desk or behind a door, etc.
There were fun things to see on the way, like various foods and desserts. There was also some depictions of East Asian culture that were a bit suspect. There were some words I didn't recognize which wikipedia said are considered offensive (like a name for a kind of Chinese hat). The people are a blend of Asian motifs and generic europeans (they speak the same language as the protagonist and are offended by burping, which isn't very common in east asian cultures). At one point they're singing a sing with the lyrics 'ying tong ting tong' or something, which seemed wildly inappropriate to me, but apparently it's an old song by a group called the goons which has nothing to do with Asian culture. But then why is it featured in this area? Kind of weird.
Overall, if this game had been just the first area up to the dungeon, I might have given it 5 stars; I like the puzzle direction and the writing. But after that point it just becomes so easy to get into 'walking dead' situations.
I'd usually say beta testing could help with these kind of things, but Larry Horsfield has been writing games for fourty years and has been requesting testers recently, which haven't been found. I think the issue is that the core game design itself makes testing difficult; there are so many places to check, so many places to look, so many possible combinations of items. The game is huge but it also includes mechanics designed to make short games longer, like forcing replaying due to missing items or having tightly controlled sequences that are easy to fail. These combined, it makes playing the game without a walkthrough take days or weeks, including for testers. And the games are produced at such a rate (there were three entered in this same Parser Comp competition, although one was withdrawn) that there's wouldn't be enough time to test one thoroughly before the next came out.
The author is aware of these issues; on intfiction.org, there are posts going back to 2014 discussing how this author has trouble getting beta testers and why.
A giant, obtuse, puzzle- and pun-filled time travel adventure, January 21, 2023I started going through my wishlist on IFDB, and this game has been on their longer than any other, because it was so intimidating I put it off. I ended up playing the ifarchive version, which uses local browser storage for saves.
I played for a while, using in-game hints and getting < 20 points out of 365, then used a walkthrough and maps from several different sites, including CASA. Even then, it was difficult to follow and required solving some puzzles independently.
If you had to play just one IF game for a very long time and didn't have access to any other, but could talk to other people, this would be a great game, because it's designed for long-term group play.
Many factors make it large. First, it has a giant map with many diagonal connections and cycles in the graph structure, and doesn't list exits automatically (unless I missed a command to turn that on; I just used the EXITS command), and this giant map exists in multiple time periods at once.
Second, many of the puzzles rely on pun-based commands, requiring a leap of intuition that can't be solved with just brute force.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, many actions have long-delayed consequences, and many items are used in scenarios quite different from the ones they're found in.
None of these are bad game-design wise, but they mean that you will spend a great deal of time on this game in order to experience its content, while many current IF games are designed to be completed in one or two sessions with little 'friction', due to the multitude of competing games and other reasons.
The plotline is buried at first but becomes stronger and stronger, especially once time travel is allowed. If the author created the first areas first, it would explain why the game starts with a mishmash of silly things (including a tortoise and a hare on a Moebius strip a suspension bridge that suspends you). Later areas have strong thematic consistency, especially the future world. There are a few other threads of plot that weave through the game consistently, like the use of opiates to expand the mind and a meteorite that makes several appearances.
The game isn't mean; it increases difficulty in generally fair ways. Hints are provided in most rooms, and a helpful friend gives you more and more commands over time that help out in a meta way (I loved FIND [ITEM] because it moves you to that room, enabling fast travel).
This would be a great game for a let's play or other group-based activity, since finding the right phrasing is good.
I don't think I'll play it again, because I just struggle with its style of expansiveness, but I enjoyed my time with it and think many others would as well.
A complex and rich puzzle game in a mall with very large map, October 8, 2022This game is a sequel to Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina, a game a couple decades old. When I first played IF in 2010, I downloaded the Frotz app and played all the main games that come with it. After I found how fun big puzzle games like Curses! are, I searched for other games that were like it and found Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina. I ended up really enjoying the game a lot.
This sequel so far lives up to the original. Per IFComp rules, I've only played 2 hours, getting 20 out of 250 points and unlocking much of the map.
You play as a parent (I think a mother?) that is trying to get a prom dress for your daughter. There is a large mall that is mostly abandoned due to a parade. It's a 3-story mall, with many stores per floor and other areas outside.
It's a puzzle-based game, with a variety of puzzles, including conversation, codes, machines, animals, etc.
Like the original game, it has a huge map and is (eventually) very nonlinear. Unlike the original, it contains extensive in-game help systems and suggestions that smooth out the player experience. In particular, the (very mild early spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)texts from your daughter help point you to the next available puzzle. I turned to the hints once, when I felt like I had a reasonable solution to something but it just wasn't working; it turned out I had just thought of it differently than the author, and the progressive hints gave me just the hint I needed.
The first two hours have been fun, and I look forward to the rest. I was just going to power through with the walkthru, but I think this is fun enough I'd like to take it slow later.
A graphical exploration and archaeology game , June 16, 2022This game is by Inkle, a studio that has made numerous interactive fiction games. While this game has many non-textual elements, the text is a very important part of the gameplay and the core mechanic is a large textual language puzzle. It took me 16 hours for one playthrough, according to Steam.
The main idea is that you, in an fictional futuristic setting, are an archaeologist exploring an ancient, highly-advanced civilization. They settled a nebula with 'moons' connected by jets of water that are navigable by boat. The main thread throughout the civilizations' history is the use of a language: ancient. This is presented as a series of sigils, usually ran together, that you at first guess and then eventually become certain of (through a mechanic where the game tells you if you got it right after you use it a few times in a row). No spaces are used in most words, making finding where words start and stop the hardest part later on.
I'd like to split up this review a bit into different categories, starting with what was, for me, the weakest part:
3d Navigation and pacing
I bounced off this game at first because of this. One thing that a lot of commercial IF games lean into, especially ones by authors transitioning from indie to AAA-adjacent, is to bulk up the play time, is splitting up stories with long sections of travel. This is done in 80 Days, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Sunless Sea, Sunless Skies, and here, too. This leads to a lot of very dull moments. 80 days helped make up for it with quick transit animations and making the movement part of the overall puzzle, while in most of these other games it's just dead air.
This game splits up content in two different ways. Large chunks each take place on different worlds, split up by ship travel, which has no hazards and no decision making outside of binary choice points and occasional random treasure. The smaller chunks on each world are split up by 3d motion. This uses invisible hitboxes that don't always line up with what you can see; this is especially apparent in 'open worlds' that look easily navigable but are secretly linear. I found myself frequently running into walls and getting stuck. Amusingly, I realized that the space part and the 3d part were very similar to Kingdom Hearts 1, just without the enemies.
Conversations happen in real-time. Speed is adjustable in the menu, but there is no scroll-back and pausing is difficult. I generally like text games because they can be picked up and put down, minimized, multitasked, and easily played around others without being intrusive. For this game, I had to give complete attention at pretty much all times, and even then I missed quite a bit of dialog looking away to itch a scratch or to answer my kids' questions.
Continuing on my scale of not liking to liking are things that I liked a lot but don't really factor into my rating:
Graphics and audio
I think they did a great job here. Voiceover is really lovely, the music is heartrending and sci-fi feeling. The art looks a lot better than most 3d games, and loads well on my potato laptop. The artists and sound designers really did well.
Character and Plot
This is generally very good, with some slight caveats. Characters are very distinctive and mostly memorable. The protagonist has a rich past interconnected with many corners of the Nebula. The plot contains multiple independent strands circling the big mystery: where did these civilizations come from, why is everyone here, and what's going to happen to them?
Our main character is kind of a jerk. I know subconsciously it can be easy to perceive strong female characters as aggressive when compared to similar male protagonists, but I believe our character has attributes would be jerky for men as well, especially in regards to her interaction with the robot Six. It was actually refreshing in a lot of ways, but I think 'jerk with a heart of gold' interests me more than 'jerk with a heart of jerk'. The strong personality does lend to some fun role-playing through.
The plot threads were very intriguing, including the mysterious workings of your home city, the cryptic machinations of you employer, some kids trying to find their place in the world, etc, as well as your progressive discovery of the ancient world.
I felt like the ending in my playthrough came at a time where I had a lot of loose ends, and not a lot of choice to go back and work on them. And the final reveal, while visually stunning, left quite a bit unresolved as well, especially given how much build up there was. I know that it can be hard to simultaneously give people choice as well as a satisfying plot structure (which is one reason, I speculate, that a lot of Choice of Games with award-winning stories often don't sell as well as those with straightforward power fantasies), but I've seen a few people do a great job of this, such as the 'Truth' ambition in Sunless Skies. That game separates your quests into different categories and has clear victory conditions, so you know if you're going to leave threads unfinished. It also provides a very weighty, powerful, and conclusive finish to the final story. I feel like Sorcery! 4 also had a very satisfying ending. This game, Heaven's Vault, was not bad at all with its ending, better than average for sure, but could have been amazing.
Puzzle mechanics
I really enjoy languages. I've studied French, German, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Greek, Latin, Japanese and a little Hebrew, some more than others. So I was definitely up for a challenge here.
As someone who has struggled with many languages, I have to say that the experience in this game is much less like learning an actual language and much more like learning a code alphabet for English. Emily Short, in her review, said "a great deal of Ancient is English in a chiffon-sheer disguise", and I have to agree.
However, this isn't necessarily a negative. Language take forever to learn. I've been studying written Japanese for 3-4 months now and still struggle with basic pronunciation. For the average English-speaking player, learning an actual non-English language would be far too difficult.
So the game simplifies it. 'Ancient' has none of those bizarre ultra-common connector words that can mean so many things (like 'zwar' in German or '就' in Mandarin). Most sentences, especially early ones, follow simple noun-verb-object patterns, with some light prepositions added in later.
Most words are ones that can be easily identified with pictographs. Themes of light, travel, people, fire, water, air, earth, plant and metal dominate the vocabulary. In another distinction between in-game and real-life pictographic languages, there is not a significant 'drift', where everyday words have bizarre derivations based on non-written considerations (like the fact that 'mother' in chinese is woman-horse due to homonyms). Interestingly, the pictograph for 'man' is the same in 'Ancient' and Chinese, although I don't know if that's a coincidence.
Some features are distinctly English, such as the way that past and future tense are conjugated and the use of helper verbs. The game uses symbols that directly derive from modern earth culture, like (Spoiler - click to show)question marks and x's
These features make word-solving easier. Even then, it would be impossible to just begin with a blank slate, make guesses, and hope you're right later. It'd be the worlds' hardest cryptogram and sudoku, a big pile of guesses waiting to collapse. Instead, the game gives you a huge leg up over real-life translators by giving you four options to guess from, 1 of which is always correct. Which every one you pick is indicated by a ? in future uses. Once it's used 3 or 4 times, the game confirms your translation or denies it through your robot or your own intuition. This is probably the main feature that makes the game far easier than learning a real-life language, and it is, in my opinion, what makes it actually fun.
By the end, individual pictographs are all easily identifiable, so the trick is giving you longer sentences with no spaces, so you have to identify words by their structure. The language is very systematic, and I was thrilled to puzzle out some pieces, although some I struggle with, especially (Spoiler - click to show)the difference between a period . and a colon :. It can become very difficult to find the border between words, and you can't figure out new words unless you surround them on both sides with established words. I often had to save longer texts to come back to after I learned more words.
I adored the translation. For me the highlight of the game was finding a huge (Spoiler - click to show)book that never seemed to end. I translated over 20 lines, took a break, delivered it somewhere, and translated more until it made me stop.
As mentioned earlier, the game ended kind of abruptly for me and I had some unresolved translation, but by then I felt like I was going to have to compromise anyway on what I had hoped to achieve in the game. I didn't feel compelled to do another playthrough, but I may try again some day.
Overall
Overall, it was worth the money. I got it on sale. It provided me 16 hours of content and could easily go up to 30 or more, with a large chunk of that being just reading/translating. That's much more than most free/indie interactive fiction. I didn't really like the 3d movement aspects at all, and I feel the ending could have had more narrative weight, especially (Spoiler - click to show)talking more about loops, and the repetition aspect. But the plot still pulled me forward the whole game, and for a language puzzle, it was the best I've seen out there, and the dialog, art, and sound were outstanding to me.
For my star rating system, it was polished, descriptive, had good interactivity, I felt emotionally invested, and I will likely play again some day. Just not today.
A F2P-mobile app-style fantasy card game with a variety of quests , October 3, 2021One of the games I've put the most hours to in the last few years is a lesser-known Hearthstone clone called Plants vs Zombies Heroes. It's the only card game app I've played, but it has a lot of features in common (I've heard) with the other big ones like Hearthstone.
So that's my basis of comparison.
This is an Online unity game. The download is a webpage with a redirect to the online play. Starting play has a lot of download bars as various things load. It has an opening movie cinematic with voice acting. After that, there is something of a tutorial, and then it opens up.
The main idea is that you open packs that contain cards or gold or other things, then you assemble a deck. You then play different levels or (eventually, but not now, I think) PvP. During gameplay, you have three keepers that generate points to buy cards with or attack (but not both). Keepers that get to 0 hp are taken out of play, same as for enemies.
Overall, this game is, to me, a mismatch for the comp. The spirit of the competition has generally been that you provide a complete gaming experience which can be archived and stay free forever, with possibly a better version released later for money (like Scarlet Sails). The two hour rule is there to encourage games to be substantially completable in two hours.
Neither rule is hard or fast; there have been games in the past which could not be archived (like Paradise, a text MMO game that was like a reinvented MUD) and the winners each year tend to take over two hours. But it's a bit odd to see a game like this which has different quests which can only be played once every 28 days (!) and has a cash shop with items up to $10.99 (none of which seem to be needed for progression).
I played the first two levels of the main game, but it seemed like GUI-based combat is the main thrust of the game with little text. Compared to Jared Jackson's Tragic from last year, it has much less of a strong storyline).
I don't generally include UI in reviewing, but it's an important part of this game. This UI could use a lot of tweaking; it popped up for me far too large for the screen. I think it told me to use CTRL+'-' and CTRL+'+' to adjust it, but I couldn't tell because I couldn't see. When I did get it to fit, it was usually too small to see, in a small rectangle with a blank white border around it. When opening packs, you had to slide a key from left to right. The interaction felt off; I think it was missing some kind of subtle highlighting when hovering over the key or inertia when sliding it. And you had to repeat it 30+ times in a row, making it kind of slow. The tutorial explains stats, but in-combat it's hard to remember; having hovering tool tips would be better.
Overall, this feels like an open beta for a commercial F2P/IAP game, which is why I provided the feedback above.
For my IF ratings:
-Polish: The game could use some tinkering with, as described above. I saw a couple typos, too, in the main story text, but I can't remember where.
-Descriptiveness: Most of the 'flavor' is communicated through images rather than text.
-Interactivity: It was difficult to figure out combat; all the mechanics were thrown at once instead of introduced one at a time, and complex opening and deck-creating had to be done before fighting. I prefer the tutorial of PVZ heroes, which has ultra-simplified combat happening first with a pre-made deck, then slightly more complex battle, then adding just a few cards to your pre-made deck.
-Emotional impact: I was too lost to get deeply involved in the story.
-Would I play again? Not without significant changes.
The scale I use doesn't really apply to this game; as a card game I'd probably give it 3/5. But I'll use my IF scale on this website for consistency.
Note that this was just my personal experience; others may have wildly different reactions to the game!
A gigantic Victorian fantasy text game with a dark atmosphere, September 13, 2021I've been playing Fallen London for at least 5 years now, with a few different characters. I never wanted to review it before because I was worried it would be transitory, and that once the company went under no one would ever be able to play the game I had written about.
But it has been doing better than ever, and has in the last few years added a ton of new content which has significantly improved it.
In form, it is similar to old facebook text games like Mafia, where you have a bunch of numbers for resources and items that change around as you click. The difference is that this has really nice backgrounds, a ton of well-written text (I think a couple million words?) and a card-based system for storylets.
The game is set in a version of London that was sold to dark Masters by queen Victoria. It was taken underground, where the laws of physics no longer apply and death isn't permanent. Hell is a neighbor, and fungus and candles replace plants and sunlight.
It really is two games in one: the first is a time-gated system of customizable stories, with sixty or so actions spread throughout a day (or 80 if you pay a monthly fee). These stories include sweeping epics of revenge or battle against extradimensional beings that changes entire countries or the world, as well as smaller stories like fighting a spider in the sewers.
The other game is a carefully-balanced resources game. Each 'click' has an optimum number of resources available, growing larger until the endgame, and some powerful items take months to save up for. Some hardcore players compete to buy extravagant items like a hellworm or a cask of immortality-inducing cider.
Many storylets are re-used; so, you can bust a 'tomb colonist' (kind of a decayed sentient zombie) out of prison over and over again. Some are only done once, like deciding whether to support a local mob boss or his cop daughter. The re-used ones tend to occur in 'grinds' which are pretty common in this game, although much less than they once were in the early game.
To me, the best stories are:
-Making Your Name, early storylines that help you progress the four stats: Watchful (used for detective work with a Sherlock Holmes substitute, archaeology or university work studying bizarre magical languages), Persuasive (used for romantic and creative work, including writing operas and engaging in courtly romances), Dangerous (used for fighting duels and capturing monsters), and Shadowy (used for pickpocketing and elaborate heists)
-Ambitions. These are stories that span the entire length of the game, starting from something simple (usually tracking down an old friend or lead) and ending up dealing with godlike beings. They include a horror story, a revenge story, an adventure story and a sort of legend or fantasy about wish fulfillment.
-The final stat-capping storylines. These include the railway, an end-game segment where you become a railroad baron, building a railway to hell that gets stranger and stranger the further from London you get; the University Lab, where you discover the dark secrets of the Masters; a series of wars that you lead as a general in a bizarre place; and elaborate thefts that make you a legendary thief.
The game can be 'completed' without paying, but the monthly fee makes grinding a lot easier and provides access to some amazingly good short stories called 'exceptional stories'. Older exceptional stories are available for a fairly hefty sum, but they are generally worth it (especially ones by Chandler Groover and Emily Short).
There's a lot of interesting material up front in the 'making your name' segments, so it's worth checking it out just to see the overall style and feel.
Edit: Looking at the other reviews, I'd say their criticisms are absolutely true (stories can be shallow, clues and hints are items instead of actual stories). I just can't give 4 stars after having played this game for hundreds of hours and honestly investing over $100 or $200 in bits or pieces after years.
An extremely long fanfic-style dark fantasy story , February 2, 2021Edit: There are several alternative takes on this game available in the comments.
This story is one of the main games displayed on the front page of ChooseYourStory.com and has been upheld by some in the community as some of their best work.
ChooseYourStory's corpus was downloaded and used to fuel the original AI Dungeon (although the new version, I think, uses other material), and quite a few on IFDB and intfiction were very interested in AI Dungeon, so I thought it would be interesting to see the source of it.
From the outside, the CYS community is very different from the other writing communities I've been in. For instance, the SCP wiki mods, Choice of Games editors and IFComp voters are obsessed with games being free from typos and errors. So in that sense, it's more like the Wesnoth campaigns and creepypasta sites, where the focus is more on just size of writing and worldbuilding.
Edit: several comments about CYS as whole were removed.
This game is an example of all of these things. In content, it reminds me of nothing more than when I started browsing some fanfiction. The worldbuilding is very detailed, and the content is huge. Reading every branch would easily take over 10 hours.
Structure-wise, it's more like a long chapter-based novel where the next chapter is determined by your choices at the end of each section. Choices are usually binary, unless they are 'reference' choices that give you optional backstory. Out of the binary options, one is usually a death. The graph of this game's choice structure would generally be a tree.
In fact, it's almost like three games in one, since one of the earliest (maybe the very first?) choice lets you pick one of three branches that offer different perspectives on the same story.
Content-wise, this is a dark power fantasy. You are essentially like Darth Vader but in a fantasy world, in the sense that you are a ruthless murderer and assassin in the service of an emperor.
The content is labeled as 'grimdark'. There is content in it that I found offensive, especially (Spoiler - click to show)the main character's penchant for violently raping women before killing them, or the way many women want to be raped, the way that the character helps run a concentration camp to eliminate another race, the character's joy in sexually humiliating or physically defacing others, or acting like King David by sleeping with a married woman then killing her husband discreetly. Interestingly, the only thing that the player regrets is accidentally sleeping with an enemy by mistake when she was disguised as his true love, with him later realizing that it was rape and he feels upset.
I generally just stop playing games in these situations, but in this one, the game was oddly distant from the graphic situations, generally because there wasn't a lot of lead-up. I've been deeply affected by traumatic scenes in stories before, but usually because there was a previous investment in character development to make me care for the people involved and an expectation of normalcy established that made the later broken barriers seem shocking. Like Ethan Frome, for instance, which I hated. Or Vespers, the game, which led me to try actions with awful results with no one else to blame but me for typing them in. In this game, it was more like 'you walk into a room and slit someone's throat to establish dominance'. In any case, I only finished so that I could give an accurate report for my first CYS review (although I did review Briar Rose before).
The author himself seemed to eventually tire of the rape-murder fantasies, leaving much of the second half of the game devoted to political intrigue.
My grading scale is not designed for this type of game, but I'll give it a go anyway:
-Polish: There were numerous typos and other errors.
+Descriptiveness: The worldbuilding was detailed and vivid.
+Interactivity: The game had a lot of real choices, with even dead ends having thousands of words poured into them.
+Emotional impact: Not always ones I wanted, but it was there.
-Would I play again? No, and in the future I'll heed the warnings available on the site for various games.
Edit: It should be added that this game has over 8000 ratings and over 400,000 plays on their website, far outstripping any IFComp game.
EditEdit: I should also say that Champion of the Gods is a game I loved that has a fairly similar concept but without any non-consensual encounters. In that game, it was fun playing a wild barbarian, but the justification for it was much stronger. Also, I played this game with a profanity filter in the browser.
A very long Choicescript game about shooting ghosts in an alternate timeline, January 9, 2021This is a very long game. At 600,000 words, it's only half as long as Jolly Good: Cakes and Ale, but has much less branching, I believe, as my total playtime was over 10 hours, a first for a Choicescript game for me.
Just the first two chapters alone felt longer than most Choicescript games.
You play as the leader of a two-person team of ghostbusters. It's an alternate world where the year is about 1100, there are different gods, different timeline, etc.
There's a lot to admire in this game. The last few chapters are exciting, and some people on reddit and the CoG forums seem very happy with it. Overall, it's a polished experience.
But I feel like it suffers from several structural issues.
One of the biggest for me personally is that the first 2/3 is relentlessly negative. The game starts with you failing something, and you fail over an over again. Frequently the choices are between 3 ways you messed up. Your character is pretty negative too, with a different choice being 3 ways to express you are hopeless, or 3 ways to express that you think other people are jerks. This game also has a lot more choices where you have to pick which of your stats go down, more than any other Choicescript game I've seen. Some people like this; someone said on reddit that they're glad it's not just another Chosen One story like most others.
I'm naturally optimistic, so I found the negativity grating. The last 1/3 is definitely more cheerful.
Another issue is repetitiveness. The first 6 or 8 chapters have the exact same pattern repeated a dozen times:
You're called into the subways to deal with a threat. But, this time, it's going to be just ordinary. Ah, but you get a sinking feeling that something's wrong. You experience a minor ghostly threat and finish it off. Then you encounter something magic-related that no human has ever encountered. Then you go home.
Some relationship choices are forced. You'll always feel sorry for Alice, you'll always decide Junker is a jerk (for most of the game, at least).
I think Choicescript games thrive when the author uses external forces on the player instead of internal. That's why school, war, and high society games work out so well: if your principal says you have to do something, you have to do it. If your rich uncle says you have to do something, you have to do it. If your enemy blows up the bridge, you have to find another way around.
But this game will frequently just decide for you what your player will do in situations where it would be natural to let you choose for yourself.
Overall, I think this game will appeal most to people who love to sink into an alternate world. Its length is enormous and there are definitely different paths I'd do in a replay. I was negative about a few things, but I definitely feel like this game is worth its cost. But I definitely think that the author should write another. Nothing helps as much as experience, and the later chapters with more action tell me that they learned as they went, and the length of the game shows they can make content.
Edit: Some other positives that came to mind are the large cast of characters. And it's true there is a crewmate that takes over the show, but I kind of liked there plotline, which was bizarre and seems like a very specific but fun fantasy. I felt like I had real choices in the final chapter, and sweated over a few in a good way. Finally, the blend of fantasy and sci-fi was done masterfully.
A million-word Wodehousian comedy, December 7, 2020I'm fairly certain this is the largest commissioned single-author interactive fiction game ever released.
80 Days has 750K words, and Fallen London (with over 30 authors) has 2.5 million.
The Hosted Game (another label from Choice of Games that essentially helps authors self-publish) called Tin Star has 1.4 million words, making it a little bigger.
This game is 100% in the Wodehousian vein. You are a rich and fairly lazy young man (or woman) who is, unknown to themselves, about to join one of London's prestigious clubs, the Noble Gases.
The story is told with a framing device where you are in the club, explaining to others how you arrived at your present situation. You have the option to retell each of the eight chapters, essentially giving you free save points.
One playthrough of this game took me over 4 hours, and seeing even half the content would take more than 10 hours.
The content branches quite a bit. In each chapter you generally have 4 or more options on how to spend your time, each of them conflicting with each other. In fact, the main mechanic of the game is constantly sacrificing one of your interest for another.
I found it overwhelming at times. I strove to be a subservient and friendly person who constantly tried to please his family, yet ended up with only middling relations with them and everyone else more or less displeased at me. The game allows for that, though, with very interesting writing happening when you fail. I intend to play through in the future.
I spent a great deal of one chapter at the opera (at the expense of other parts). In real life, I love the opera, so it was a little sad seeing my character found it boring. The references in the game are very funny and thrown in everywhere (I even saw a reference to Shakespeare's Cymbeline, which I didn't expect).
To me, this felt like 4 or 5 games in one. By focusing on all the family events and good moral character, I skipped out on all the chances to be a thief, much of the romance, and much of the club activity, but ended up having fun with my aunt's foster orphan and my lovelorn cousin.
As a final note, this is part 1 of a 3 part series, and so most threads are loose by the end of the game.
+Polish: I can't imagine the awful process involved in proofreading and editing a million-world novel with adjustable pronouns. I found no errors, I don't know how.
+Descriptiveness: The writing is lush and filled with snappy dialogue, clever allusions, and funny asides.
+Interactivity: This game takes the same approach as Animalia when it comes to branching: branch a ton and just write a ton of words for every choice, so every playthrough is different but long. It's the hardest approach, but I really respect it.
+Emotional impact: Several choices made me very nervous, and several pieces of dialog made me laugh.
+Would I play again? Definitely. It's like a whole new game, I might as well. I could be a crazy jerk lady-thief if I wanted to.
A very big comedy game about little girls solving clever puzzles, October 7, 2020So I'll admit, I was skeptical before playing this game. Many claims about game length in interactive fiction are wildly exaggerated, and custom engines are typically done poorly. So hearing about a custom engine game with 15 hours of gameplay, I was skeptical that it would be that long and expected it to be quite bad.
In fact, though, this is a very funny game and the mechanics, though hard to get used to at first, end up making sense. I've played about 5 hours so far, using a ton of hints but also taking breaks, and I have explored only about half of the map and still have several puzzles left on that part, so the 15 hour claim is accurate. I definitely intend on finishing it.
You play as a young girl who is asked to chop wood by her mother. You decide it would be more fun to make a friend, though, and that is your first quest. After that, you and your friend have a big open world with many simultaneous puzzles to solve.
The game is translated from Italian, and is generally pretty good (I've sent some possible corrections to the author where I thought it sounded a bit off). The girls' attitude to horrifying or shocking things is pretty funny. The art is also great, especially the background art of the final version that has been shared in a different thread.
The weakest part is the opening. This is a weird system, and most people have trouble adapting to a weird system. That's why many people don't play parser games: you open it up and what do you do? Knowing it's VERB+NOUN and that examining and taking and talking takes some training.
Similarly, this game opens up with a pretty small area (good) but also a ton of menu options from the very beginning. It might be better to give an incredibly easy puzzle right at the very beginning, so easy the game basically solves it for you, with no menu buttons but the one that solves it, just for people to get used to the game, the map, etc.
I found the puzzles engaging and interesting, and it made me happy. They are also hard, and I used all the hints. Sometimes the trigger for events didn't make sense. I had a small period in the game where all the hints said 'you can't do this yet' and I kept talking to people, and eventually a random scene triggered. Several times in the game random scenes trigger that advance the plot and I don't know why (usually 'Let's go talk to so and so').
How does this system compare to others? I think this system is like the programming language C++. C++ is very powerful and lets you do amazing things but it is a pain in the butt to learn, a little scary, and sometimes you feel helpless. I saw that in the graphical version the buttons are replace with pictures, and I think that could help a lot.
Overall, this is a game I would pay money for, especially the art version. Again, I know not everyone agrees. I've realized during this comp that my enjoyment of things is not a reliable indicator of whether other people will enjoy it, and my score isn't always a good indicator of how much I enjoyed things. But I like this game and will score it well, whatever that means to you!
+Polish: Very polished graphically, with some small language problems when I played.
+Descriptiveness: Very funny and easy to imagine.
+Interactivity: Interface was hard to get used to but puzzles were really fun.
+Would I play again? Definitely going to finish it.
+Emotional impact: Very funny.
A very long, complex alchemy game. Polished, and set in a fantasy world, July 21, 2020This game combines an intricate alchemy system with technology aboard a sort of magical spacecraft. This isn't a rocket engine; it's a complex environment that uses magic to translocate in space.
Something has gone horribly wrong on your magical ship, leading to major disruptions in time and space.
You collect what may be hundreds of items in this game, perform dozens of rituals, and visit quite a few locations. In this sense, it ranks with other ultra big games like Mulldoon Legacy or Spellbreaker. However, this game has an advantage in that it simplifies things for you. Any ritual, once performed, can be done again with a single command. There are database type commands that allow you to recall all rooms, all items, all rituals, etc.
The setting is barren and mysterious, with the outside world leading to a variety of mysterious lands.
I couldn't put this game down. Very well done.
Vast world with variety of puzzles , July 19, 2020This is a Christmas-themed game with the same gameplay style as Curses or Zork. The character explores a very large shopping mall after hours, trying to get a Christmas present. The feeling of loneliness mixed with wonder gives a nice atmosphere to the game.
The puzzles range in difficulty from very easy to very hard. You should assume you will use the hint system, which is wonderful. Puzzles include mindbenders, find-object-use-object, and some big mazes.
I enjoy games that are too difficult to completely beat on your own, but are large enough and non-linear enough to give even casual players hours of entertainment before turning to hints. This is such a game.
The endgame puzzles are frankly too difficult with too little reward. The game was very fun right up to the time you get (Spoiler - click to show)a ball from Santa. Everything after that felt like work. It may be because I relied so heavily on the walkthrough at this point.
Great game for someone who like Curses and wants a similar experience.
A sci-fi novel in interactive form, July 19, 2020This is by far the largest game I have ever played in terms of text. Unlike most interactive fiction games, the story of Worlds Apart was years in the making, and was the authors main outlet for sharing a world they had imagined their whole life.
This game is set on a completely alien world, with different plants, people, animals, and history. The amount of detail in the game is massive, with NPC's that respond to dozens of topics, every item in the game being implemented in six senses, and a dizzying amount of locations. The game even contains two mini-books, one of which would make a good-sized pamphlet in real life. Just reading the game would take several hours.
I loved this game. However, because of its size, when I got stumped on the puzzles, it ruined the atmosphere. I started looking at the hints once I had exhausted all of the obvious options, because I wanted to read more of the story. But I didn't rush, and I tried to experiment with everything that I could find.
I recommend this game to everyone.
Bigger and in many ways better than the original, April 7, 2020Sunless Sea is a cornerstone of narrative-heavy games. Sunless Skies, the sequel, is better in many ways.
But not in all. I bounced hard off this game for a couple of reasons.
First, the controls require more practice. You have a slippery little flying locomotive that can strafe and aiming is hard.
A bigger issue that almost killed the game for me was the pacing. Sunless Sea had islands grouped in sets of 4-6, with the more dangerous and interesting islands found to the south and east. You could sail east and see everything dangerous, die, and restart, but it was all technically accessible early on. The 'safe islands' near the home port were more safe and boring.
In Sunless Skies, the map is way bigger (with 4 huge worlds), but your entire first world is like that 'safe' region. Ports are gentle and nice, and everything is slow paced. I almost lost interest.
But the other worlds are far better for my tastes. London is full of politics. You can join the rich in their fantasy lands that are gilded cages or you can work to rally workers to rebel against their masters. You can betray Victoria or nurture her child.
Eleutheria is full of darkness and poetry. It riffs on one of the most popular Exceptional Stories of Fallen London (Hojotoho) and has the same vibrant and dangerous feel that Saviour's Rocks or the Chelonate had in Sunless Sea.
The Blue Kingdom is small, but its ports have tons of options, and its 'small ports' are bigger than many of the real ports in the other worlds.
The story content here is immense, with more choices that you can take. Descending in a bathysphere through a black hole was amazing, and confronting Victoria with the true contents of the Serene Mausoleum was also excellent.
Highly recommended. I've played more than 60 hours and have quite a bit left to go on my current storyline, and I plan on doing a different storyline afterwards.
A huge treasure trove of gothic horror stories with a boat mechanic, April 7, 2020This game is visually lush and rich, but its heart is storytelling.
In this game, you pilot a boat from port to port. You start on the fringe of existence, able to die from a few hits by passing monsters, losing your crew to mob bosses, or running out of fuel or food. Slowly, you crawl your way up to being able to afford more and survive attacks. It calls itself Roguelike in combat and I feel that's accurate.
But most of the gameplay is stories. You discover ports which come in increasingly exotic sets as you get further away from home. At first, you discover things like an island of liars or a mysterious military station accepting coffins and nothing else. As you expand, you can find a terrifying castle of ice or an island of guinea pigs and rats. At the very edges, you reach the truly horrifying or truly cute.
Stories range from diplomatic negotiations to bizarre rituals to painful torture and so on.
The Zubmariner expansion adds a ton of stories but not much new in the way of equipment. The main Zubmariner storyline (Immortality) is excellent, and the new ports are some of my favorites (I enjoyed slowly turning my organs into crystal and injecting myself with solidified regrets).
I put about 76 hours into the game+expansion, and plan on playing again in the future.
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Adam Whybray, Adri, Andrew Plotkin, Andy Holloway, Austin Auclair, Baldur Brückner, Ben Collins-Sussman, Bill Maya, Brian Rushton, Buster Hudson, Caleb Wilson, Carl Muckenhoupt, Chandler Groover, Chris Jones, Christopher Conley, Damon L. Wakes, Daniel Ravipinto, Daniel Stelzer, David Jose, David Petrocco, David Sturgis, Drew Mochak, Edward B, Emily Short, Erica Newman, Feneric, Finn Rosenløv, Gary Butterfield, Gavin Inglis, Greg Frost, Hanon Ondricek, Harkness Munt, Harrison Gerard, Ian Holmes, Ivan Roth, Jack Welch, Jacqueline Ashwell, James Eagle, Jason Dyer, Jason Lautzenheiser, Jason Love, Jeremy Freese, Joey Jones, Joshua Porch, Justin de Vesine, Justin Melvin, Katherine Morayati, Kenneth Pedersen, Lane Puetz, Llew Mason, Lucian Smith, Marco Innocenti, Marius Müller, Mark Britton, Mark Sample, Marshal Tenner Winter, Matt Schneider, Matt Weiner, Matthew Korson, Michael Fessler, Michael Gentry, Michael Hilborn, Michael Lin, Mike Spivey, Molly Ying, Monique Padelis, Naomi Hinchen, Nate Edwards, Petter Sjölund, Q Pheevr, Rachel Spitler, Reed Lockwood, Reina Adair, Riff Conner, Roberto Colnaghi, Rowan Lipkovits, Sam Kabo Ashwell, Scott Hammack, Sean M. Shore, Shin, Wade Clarke, Zach Hodgens, Zack Johnson An enormous collaboration horror game, December 8, 2018I've played and reviewed over 1500 interactive fiction games, and there has never been anything like Cragne Manor.
This game was written by 84 authors. Some authors (including me) wrote small rooms with one minor puzzle, or, occasionally, only one.
Others wrote rooms that themselves could be entered into IFComp and do well, including complicated conversational games, (Spoiler - click to show)a miniature version of Hadean Lands, a monster breeding game, and story-focused cutscenes.
The game is a mishmash of different styles and levels of implementation. One room might be the most elaborate and smooth game you've ever seen, with varied tenses, custom parser responses, and complex state tracking; while another room might be basically a pile of dirt with nothing implemented. Puzzles range from super easy to very unfair.
For fans of big puzzle games, people who wish that longer games would be released, Infocom fans, fans of any of the people in the author list, conversational games, or IF in general, this game will provide hours of enjoyment.
As a warning, this game is overwhelming. It has 500K+ words, which is huge for parser games. As a comparison, Blue Lacuna had less than 400K, and much of that was devoted to verbose text descriptions. This game is just pure content. This game is longer than Curses!, Mulldoon Legacy, Worlds Apart, and roughly the same size as Finding Martin.
Prepare for the sinking in your stomach you will experience as you open a door to find another 6 or 7 rooms, each with their own fully-fleshed out puzzles. Prepare to keep notes for information you find in the game, tracking the many keys and doors.
The content warnings for the game are accurate. Every author has their own style, so some rooms have more of profanity or explicit content than others. I would say that maybe one or two rooms has anything sexual, and about a dozen rooms have violence or gore running from silly to horrifying.
As of writing this, there is no walkthrough, although that will likely be remedied soon. With the help of many of the authors, as I tested this game, I still took well over ten hours to beat this. Expect a long, long, long play time.
Perhaps the last thing I'd like to say about Cragne Manor is that this is almost like a little IFComp of its own. The number of games in the two is similar and the quality of the entries is similar, except that even the weakest rooms in this game have been tested and worked on as a group, and all the rooms in this game support each other, instead of fighting against each other.
Please enjoy this wonderful game.
A sort of unofficial sequel to Spellbreaker. Big, puzzly, and difficult, September 25, 2018This game is the result of an immense amount of work, and was, for a few years, frequently recommended on rec.games.int-fiction.
I'm giving it such a low score due to my rubric. The overall game design is mixed, with the most time spent in the least interesting areas, extreme amounts of waiting being required, and so on. The game feels fairly unpolished, and could have used more tester feedback. It's the kind of game that could use a group of people working together over time, sharing hints on the forums, more than one person solving it, which is probably why it was once so popular, especially since it was released before 1998 and the explosion in high-quality story-focused games with original storylines.
This game copies the format of Spellbreaker, with spells that you gnusto into a spellbook and cast, and which frequently fail. You spend a lot of the game wandering around a monastery, as well as investigating other parts of the Great Underground Empire.
If there is someone who is a fan of Infocom games, feels like current games are too easy, and loves picking over a difficult game during a period of weeks or months, keeping careful notes and a map, then this would be a 5 star game for them.
For everyone else, I wouldn't recommend this game in general.
A real-time messaging game with an involved story and some rough patches, September 8, 2018I purchased Project Hyrax a month or two ago.
The design and formatting are well done. It's a text-based game where you receive messages from a time traveller.
The writing seems like it is not from a native speaker, with numerous typos and grammatical errors. Also, many of the choices are clearly irrelevant to what happens after, adding nothing to the gameplay, and only two choices are available at a time.
However, the timed messages and the length of the game drew it out to over a month as I tried to finish it to write a review. It eventually grew on me, and I found myself having a good time.
I would have given it 4 stars for that reason, but it froze on me after many, many choices, and I couldn't get it unfrozen.
A massive game of intense difficulty, April 11, 2018This game is the third by Mike Gerwat, after Hill 160 and Escape from Terra.
This is in the top tier of long parser games if played without a walkthrough. You play a version of the author, a former piano tuner who was born blind and is now deaf and tuned pianos for famous bands. You now go back through time to college and other places.
The gameplay length is increased by the difficulty. Some important room descriptions are only printed once. If you didn't see it the first time, you'll never see it again. Seemingly minor actions lead to game over's hundreds of moves later. Searching the code, there are 542 instances of the phrase "GAME OVER!", ranging from leaving the taps on when exiting the shower to using shoddy condoms.
The walkthrough is not completely accurate, either, leading to more random deaths. Random deaths cannot be undone, meaning that you must save constantly.
The game is split into four sections, the first and last of which have alternate paths. I was unable to complete the first section with either path, but I read through much of the game in the decompiled text strings.
I'm giving it three stars because it is descriptive, it is reasonably polished, and it seems to communicate the emotional feeling that the author was going for when adding in all of the pitfalls.
A sprawling RPG with color use, September 15, 2017This game is so different from Panks's other games. Panks's IFComp games were short and trivial, or mocking.
This game is really, really big, and reasonably well polished.
You can play a lot of mini games, visit tons of locations, order NPCs, etc.
The problem is that it was developed for a long time by one person with only a little input from others, meaning that several of the mechanics are just spotty.
The original, and one of the best depending on your likes, September 4, 2017Adventure was the very first text adventure of all time. It inspired the genre and its name.
The point of the game is to gather a variety of treasures and bring them back to a small building. The game is pretty accurately based on the Mammoth Caves, which explains the mazes and the fact that exits and entrances sometimes don't match up exactly (i.e. going west and then east may not leave you where you started).
For me, the most enjoyable way to play this game was to keep it at a slow pace, going back to it time and again while playing other games. I kept a numbered list of every room with all of its exits to other rooms. This made the game much easier. After several weeks, I got to a point where I couldn't get any further for several days. I finally looked up a walkthrough for the last three or four puzzles.
Once you get all the treasures, there is an endgame that is surprisingly good; it seems more like a modern deconstruction of the game than the very first game of all.
I played the 350 point version, and I found the game incredibly enjoyable. I admit that I used the wicker cage bug (as mentioned in another review), where you can carry everything in the wicker cage. To get full points, you must remove the items from the cage outside of the building before placing them in there.
Every Interactive Fiction player should play this game because so many other games reference it heavily.
A classic game with some difficulty due to randomization, August 15, 2017This is one of the best selling IF games ever. It has graphics and runs on Spectrum emulators (like Fuse).
It has graphics, and is intended to cover the same material as the book The Hobbit. It does so with a great deal of NPC independence, which ends up (to me) being somewhat frustrating. Back in the early days of text adventures, many of the companies (especially outside of Infocom) hadn't really thought about player guidance, and so games devolved into 'guess the verb' on every occasion.
Still, this game has a good deal of charm, and I've had fun exploring it.
An insanely hard puzzle game that is huge, July 16, 2017This MSDOS game, which I played in DOSBOX, is a collection of extraordinarily hard puzzles. You enter an intersection of hallways, with each direction in the hallway having a door with a puzzle. Past those puzzles are harder puzzles. Past those puzzles are...way too many puzzles.
This is one of the very largest adventure games, and even the easiest puzzles are way too hard for most people. If you are an adventure puzzle fanatic, you can try this game. Expect many, many, many random deaths. I'm giving it 3 stars for being polished, descriptive, and good at instilling an emotion: annoyance.
Andy Phillip's best game; a massive city spy thriller, July 1, 2017This game took me about 2500 moves to complete this game using the hints; this is an extremely long game, among the very longest I have ever played.
You are in a 40-story city, with about 20 of the stories implemented. Each story that's implemented has 3-4 puzzles.
The game is a spy thriller, with you as the spy. As usual for Andy Phillips games, there is a lot of action, a lot of 'guess what he's thinking', and some male gaze, although it is toned down from his other games.
This is an epic, sprawling game; I have no idea how this fit in the z-machine. It also has a very well executed plot twist that was almost as good as Spider and Web's.
This game took me about a month of playing 30-60 minutes a day. I could have played 20 IFComp games in the time it took me to beat this.
A Level 9 reworking of Adventure with an expanded endgame, July 1, 2017This game is a reworking of Adventure, and was released commercially by Level 9.
It's generally similar to Adventure, with the dragon puzzle made easier, but it has a much bigger endgame where you have to save hundreds of elves (but your actions save about a hundred at a time).
It has graphics that add a lot to the game, even though they are nowhere near as good as Magnetic Scrolls.
Gargoyle plays level 9 games, so if you want to try this out, it may be a fun way to play the original Adventure game.
Played in tame mode; a silly puzzlefest with great writing , June 25, 2017So, my experience in playing Phobos is atypical; I played in tame mode, and I just used a walkthrough, because I wasn't very interested in the game.
But the writing turned out to be quite good. The mishaps of my companion and the finale were some of the best things I've read in a while. This game ends up reading a lot like the meretzky-adams game Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Also similar to that game is the transportation syste, where you travel between disconnected worlds.
Even in tame mode, some dirty stuff sneaks through, but it is on the level of the movie Space Balls (e.g. a suggestive spaceship, a man or woman getting almost undressed against their will, etc.)
Using the walkthrough, the game seemed pretty hard. The copy protection in this game is achieved by having a horrible maze with horrible monsters, where you have to use two of the feeling to get through.
The game has the infamous t-removing machine, inspiration of future games such as Earl Grey and Counterfeit Monkey.
Overall, I'm not sure if I'll play it again. But I think meretzky does some of his best writing here (perhaps he was enthusiastic about the subject matter).
A massive spy thriller-type game with intricate, unfair puzzles, June 11, 2017Most of Andy Phillips games have the same bones with different overlays. In all of the games, you play a protagonist with some sort of special features (in this one, you're an intelligent accountant), a femme fatale, and cinematic scenes with really hard combinatorial puzzles.
The special features of this one are the setting (most of it in an abandoned boarding school), and the gruesomeness of it. It was a bit over the top, even compared to his other games.
If you haven't tried any of the other games, I really liked Heist and Time.
A long, very British illustrated game about magical charms, June 11, 2017This is the third Magnetic scrolls game. It was meant to be based on magical spells, like Enchanter, but you have to do a LOT of work before you get any spells.
The game lets you get through deathly obstacles, but you will lose a bit of luck if you do, which blocks you out of the endgame. So if it says you lose a little bit of luck, go back to an earlier save!
Overall, a super british game, with all of the spells based on British slang for 'thing' (like wossname and so on).
Very frustrating, very unfair, but interesting and with good graphics.
A big, illustrated classic game with devious puzzles and a good map, June 5, 2017I did not like the first Magnetic Scrolls game, The Pawn, at all. It was juvenile, and the puzzles were unfair.
Guild of Thieves is much better; it's still unfair at times, but not so much, and the juvenilia have been cut back.
You play a thief who has to steal a large number of treasures from a castle and its environs. It's a very Zork-like setting. The map felt large at first, but eventually it was easy to picture it all.
There are treasures absolutely everywhere. It's easy to find several treasures, but I doubt anyone's found all of them on their own. Magnetic Scrolls aren't know for their fairness, anyway, but you can get a lot of enjoyment out of this game right from the getgo.
A very strong free SimEarth-type game with substantial additional paid content, August 15, 2016(Caveat: I played a final (non-beta) version of this game without graphics right before it was released).
Wordsmith by Ade McTavish is a very, very good game. In 2014, the author released Fifteen Minutes, which was one of the best difficult puzzle games in a long time, an intricate time travel game involving half a dozen copies of yourself. Then, in 2015, he took 2nd place in IFComp with Map, a mostly puzzle less but big story-based game that was emotionally powerful.
In this game, he's combined his best of story, setting and puzzles. The game has a free version and a commercial version.
In the free version, you create worlds in several stages, like Sim Earth. Your solar system ages over time, making different planetary orbits more or less favorable over time; you can make a planet for each orbit out of different alchemical materials. You then try to create a form of life that fits that planet , and then you teach the life culture and skills until, hopefully, they develop interstellar travel.
I found this thrilling, well-written (with procedural generation) and difficult. Fortunately, with 6 orbits in each solar system, it isn't too hard to get one to interstellar travel.
The game seemed to require a big info dump at first, which put me off, until I just ignored it and experimented. This worked much better; I should have thought of the book you get as a reference guide, not a book to be read back to back but to be consulted.
As for the commercial portion of the game, it's just getting started after the world building ends. You explore an absolutely huge, 7-level space station with a sprawling plot involving a widespread conspiracy and opposing forces.
I found the world building fascinating, although it was hard to keep track of the various locations; this should be a lot easier with the graphics in the finished version. I especially got lost in the ground floor a few times, as the building rotates.
There is a complicated card game in the finished version which I have yet to try, as I found an alternate path around that part of the game.
Overall, I recommend this game, and would rank it around the level of Blue Lacuna or Sorcery!.
Edit: I forgot to mention that this game uses graphics in a way not seen in parser games ever. The graphics respond to commands in this game in an extremely useful way. It's a technical masterpiece in this sense.
Frankly, I just used a walkthrough and enjoyed the show, February 3, 2016Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy is co-written by Douglas Adams, and the strong prose shows this. The game is very imaginative and vibrant.
On the other hand, the puzzles are (I assume) by Steve Meretzky, who is one of my least favorite puzzle writers from Infocom. Sorcerer, though great, was my least favorite Enchanter game, and I get tired of Planetfall early on. So when I started this game, I was scared of any misstep sending me on a wild goose chase into an unsavable state.
So I just used a walkthrough and sailed through the game, enjoying the witty prose. I plan to go back and read more of the room descriptions and the actual guide. I often find that this approach works with very difficult or unfair games, because the second playthrough can be done without a walkthrough, allowing your memory to help you on some puzzles but still having fun with those you forgot.
The game has several puzzles that are frequently referenced in interactive fiction reviews and forums: the Babel-fish puzzle, and the tea. It may be worthwhile to play through with a walkthrough just to see these.
Note that Douglas Adams released this game for free when Activision went a long time without selling it. I don't know the current status of it, but he intended to freely distribute it at least once in the past. It is not available on Lost Treasures of Infocom for iPad, my usual go-to place for Infocom games.
Wonderful Infocom puzzlefest in a pyramid with coded language, February 3, 2016I loved Infidel. You play a jerk adventurer who has alienated everyone he knows as he searches for a hidden pyramid. The game has a long intro sequence in your camp before reaching the actual pyramid.
The game is very Indiana-Jonesish, although there are no NPC's. Every few rooms, there is a death trap waiting to destroy you. Hieroglyphics on the wall tell you how to avoid some traps, but they sometimes describe things far away, and you have to puzzle out the meaning of the hieroglyphics yourself.
This game is advanced, but I got much further between hints than I usually do in an Infocom game (although Emily Short mentioned two guess-the-verb problems in her review that I found helpful before I even played the game).
This game has a great flavor and style, similar to Ballyhoo's dark circus theme. I strongly recommend this game.
A fantastic retooling of material from MIT Zork, with some new material, February 3, 2016Zork II incorporates my favorite puzzles from MIT Zork: the palantirs, the tea room, the round room, the robot, the volcano, the glacier room. The dragon (a callback to Adventure) was a fun challenge, and the two or three NPCs made the game quite fun. I enjoyed watching the wizard travel around zapping me.
I prefer Zork I's treasure drop off system, however. It was annoying having a huge pile of treasure, not knowing what to do with it.
I used a walkthrough on a few places (especially the oddly-angled room), because I wanted to see the whole game. Having completed MIT Zork before made some of the hardest puzzles trivial.
Infocom's Lovecraftian game set on a campus: mixed puzzles, great creatures, February 3, 2016It's hard for me to review this game (the first horror IF game by Infocom, and one of the first horror games ever) without comparing it to later Interactive Fiction based on Lovecraft's work. Specifically, Theatre, Anchorhead, and Lydia's Heart come to mind. How does this one compare?
First, size. The Lurking Horror is on the small side, due to PC capabilities at the time of publication. It is about the same size as Theatre, and much smaller than Anchorhead or Lydia's Heart.
Next, setting. The game is set in an alternate version of the MIT campus called GUE Tech during the winter. This worked well for me in the end, with the creepy Department of Alchemy, dark buildings and deep basements, and the gross muddy areas. It gave them game a more campy feel though, like Theatre, as opposed to the bigger games.
NPC's and enemies. While The Lurking Horror has a few okay PC's, it really shines in the creature department. I had played for a few hours without encountering more than one 'creature', and nothing that threatened me, so I was quite shocked when I (Spoiler - click to show)buried an axe in the chest of the maintenance man without any reaction from him. The further the game got, the more disturbing the creatures got. The enemies are more like Theatre's than the later games.
Puzzles. The Lurking Horror has some puzzles that are just dumb (especially the carton in the fridge). Later on, though, the puzzles get more fun, especially as you use the same objects in more and more ways. In the end, the puzzles are more like Lydia's Heart than the other two games, although there are much less puzzles overall.
Overall, it seems to me that the Lurking Horror was a great success that became eclipsed by later games. Theatre ('95) seems to be strongly inspired by The Lurking Horror, while Anchorhead ('98) seems to be inspired at least partially by Theatre (as it includes some similar puzzles). Lydia's Heart ('07) was more of a successful reboot of the Lovecraft idea using newer technology.
A nice commercial clean-up of the MIT version, February 3, 2016Until last week, I had no idea that Infocom games were still available on current platforms. After downloading an iPad app, I had the pleasure of trying my first commercial game after 5 years of free interactive fiction.
The manual and feelies were great, and the parser was very smooth, with great runtime. I missed several of Inform's features, especially when killing enemies. Overall, the game felt thoroughly tested, and a large number of the annoying features of MIT Zork were removed. Examples include a better coal maze, some of the smug writing, and better correlation between exits and etrances of nearby rooms.
I thought at first it was silly to split up the game into three, but having started Zork II, I am really enjoying the expanded versions. Very few of the free games I have played rival this kind of polished game, with Curses! and Anchorhead as my main examples of great gameplay.
Wonderful, intricate, intimidating story and puzzles. Better than Sorceror., February 3, 2016I rushed through Ballyhoo, but even so the story was marvelous and stunning. This is a mystery game set in a dreary circus. The feel is a lot like Not Just and Ordinary Ballerina. You investigate the disappearance of the owner's daughter after hours.
This game could have been played without hints for a month. The puzzle solutions are intricate and the world is detailed.
I relied on hints out of fear that there was way too much I could do wrong. In fact, almost everything is reversible, once you reach an area, you get unlimited chances to return. If not, you don't need to return. The game was shockingly forgiving.
Unfortunately, the walkthrough may have been necessary simply because of guess-the-verb problems, especially with conversations.
The much-feared dream sequence is very easy to map and overcome (the lines situation was harder for me).
This is a fantastic game, the name and blurb really turned me off, but this game was more fun than the Lurking Horror or Sorceror.
**Edit:** I've been asked to clarify what I mean by better than Sorceror (or Lurking Horror). As I considered why I used that comparison, I realized that there are many parallels between Ballyhoo and Sorceror: both contain a dark carnival, both are centered on searching for a missing person, both have a pair of gatekeeper puzzles, many wild animals etc. In both, you slowly develop into an expert in the skills that surround you (magic or circus abilities), and the humor and writing are similar.
Why do I prefer Ballyhoo? It condenses the map of Sorceror, and has far more NPCs and interesting, scripted events, as well as far less red herrings. It has more feeling, too. In Ballyhoo, when you are in (Spoiler - click to show)Eddie's trailer and he realises you aren't a clown, I felt real anxiety for my character, and when (Spoiler - click to show)you break through Tina's shell and she solemnly shakes your hand, I felt a tug on my heartstrings. Contrast this to Sorceror's over the top 'scary moments' like (Spoiler - click to show)burning in flame forever or its few moments of pathos (Spoiler - click to show)which I can't even think of; perhaps giving up your spellbook?.
As for lurking horror, I'm just still mad about the Chinese food puzzle. It's actually a great game.
Wonderful, exciting Infocom pirate game with sporadic romance elements., February 3, 2016This Infocom game nails the pacing. The game always felt exciting. You play a young woman searching for her father who is abducted by pirates. You carry out increasingly bold tasks throughout the game, and, as a player, I felt excited at my ability to be part of the action instead of being helpless on the side.
The game has two main areas: a ship, and a house. Events are tightly scripted and well-thought-out to keep the action flowing. The tight pacing may require frequent saving.
I found the game slightly easier than usual for Infocom; however, I was stumped twice in the middle (around points 16-19). It took about a week or a bit less of playing on and off to finish it (total time around 4-5 hours).
Be warned that this game uses Infocom's piracy protection, so you need access to the 'feelies' to solve key puzzles in the game. I used the Lost Treasures of Infocom app, which has the feelies included as images.
The romance novel aspects were infrequent, mostly resorting to ardent glasses, although right around the 16-19 point range where I got stuck, things got a bit heated as I was losing, but the game avoids anything explicit.
Overall, one of my favorite Infocom games, probably due to the great writing and simpler (but rewarding) puzzles.
A gigantic epic with intensely hard puzzles. One of Infocom's hardest games, February 3, 2016Spellbreaker must have been the inspiration for games like Mulldoon Legacy, Lydia's Heart, Jigsaw, and other intensely long puzzle fests (I feel like Curses! is slightly easier). This is Infocom's last game of the Enchanter trilogy, which follows the Zork Trilogy.
This game is incredibly long and difficult. I played to about 150 points out of 600 before turning to a walkthrough (eristic's), and most of those points I got because I had played Balances by Graham Nelson, which copied many items from Spellbreaker (to show that Inform could achieve the same results). The game is purposely murderously hard; I suggest that everyone use a walkthrough after reaching a predetermined number of points.
Magic is failing, and you must chase a mysterious figure to learn why. The game is pretty disjointed, but purposely so, much like Jigsaw, where you enter and exit various areas miraculously. It has a very different feel from Sorcerer, and especially from Enchanter, which was very easy to map and simple in its presentation.
Many people have talked about the time travel puzzle in Sorcerer, which I enjoyed, but felt a little down because there was so much hype. Unfortunately, I am now hyping the last big puzzle of Spellbreaker to you. What a puzzle; to me, it was great because it completely ties in with the game's theme of loss and ending. It is a puzzle integrated with the plot.
As a final note, I should really emphasize that this is a LONG game, 2 or 3 times as long as any other Zork or Enchanter game. When using a walkthrough, I finished each of those games in a total recorded time (not counting my numerous restarts) of about 16 minutes; this game, including several restarts to shave off the starting time, took 1 hour and 22 minutes.
I played this game on iOS's Lost Treasures of Infocom.
One of Infocom's best; the first game where you memorize and cast spells, February 3, 2016Possibly inspired by the Wizard of Frobozz in Zork II,and originally intended to be Zork IV, Enchanter was my favorite Infocom game up to this point. You play an apprentice enchanter who is chosen to defeat the Warlock Krill, due to your not being a big enough threat for him to notice (like Lord of the Rings).
The main idea of Enchanter, and the entire focus of the game, is the spells. Unlike the wand in Zork II (which is described as unreliable and old-fashioned here), scrolls are copied into your spell book, and then can be cast over and over again.
There are well over a dozen spells. It was designed to give you a feel of more power than in Zork. The things you can do feel amazing.
I got up to about 150 points before consulting a walkthrough. I couldn't solve two key puzzles. One I knew what to do, but wasn't clever enough to figure it how. The other came out of left field, although I later realized that your dreams are a clue to the puzzle.
Which brings me to the one point that may be most divisive: your player's bodily needs. You constantly have to satisfy hunger, thirst, and sleep! You have a replenishable water supply, but you're toast when your food is gone.
I recommend reading the manual on NPC conversations, or one puzzle will be far too difficult.
I played this game on the iOS Lost Treasures of Infocom App.
How Lewis Carrol learned to love the bomb, February 3, 2016Trinity surprised me by being a fantasy game about nuclear weapons. I expected the game to have a sci-if feel like Jigsaw or Babel, but this game was very similar to the feel of Moriarty's other Infocom game, Wishbringer. In both games, you travel from an opening, normal world to a parallel world, where helpful animals, witches, cemeteries and grim birds await.
I loved exploring the main area of Trinity, and accessing several of the mini-areas. Brian is stunningly creative; I didn't realize until recently that he also wrote Loom, one of my favorite graphical games of all time. The sheer ingenuity of it all is wonderful.
I began running out of steam forward after visiting four of the sub areas. I went to a walkthrough, and discovered that I had forgotten to revisit some area with new equipment, and hadn't searched some scenery items that I didn't know we're searchable. This opened up two more mini areas, which I explored a little bit more before using a walkthrough the rest of the game.
The final area was a beast, although everything is fairly well hinted at. Or not... In any case, I loved this game. I can't help but enjoy this author's worldview.
Infocom game for beginnners with a light world/dark world concept, February 3, 2016This Infocom game is directed towards younger players but is appropriate for adults; in fact, the game is still very challenging. The fantasy elements are charming and fun (and sometimes pretty creepy): an army of boots, a witch who steals cats, ghosts who murder you...
All the puzzles can be solved with sufficient exploration and minor logic; I missed a few areas and items in my exploring, though, because the world is rich and beautiful.
As far as I can tell, the game is for beginners because there are only the n,e,s,w directions (no ne, se, nw, or sw); most puzzles have multiple solutions; most items are easily visible (except for the most important one); and death won't come unless you have been repeatedly warned.
The game is split into two sections; one where the player explores a quaint village with minor annoyances (such as locked gates and a poodle); and a second section where the village has turned dark and evil (with murderous ghosts and a hellhound).
As many have stated, this is a memorable game, more so than most of the Infocom games I have played, or interactive fiction in general. As usual, I played this game on the Lost Treasures of Infocom app on the iPad.
A haunting and evocative finale to the Zork series., February 3, 2016The finale in the Zork series is a big change from the first two games. The game is smaller as to puzzles and map, but much bigger on ambiance. This game feels like a refining purgatory, with a chance to demonstrate your courage, mercy, trust, and bravery. The setting is dreamlike and thoughtful. The puzzles are very difficult. For all of them, it is easy to try to solve them, get part way through, and have no idea if you succeeded or failed. Almost all of them are time-based, requiring you to wait, do several actions in succession, or to return frequently to a given place. Some places (like the land of shadow or the viewing table) will stay in my mind for a long time.
The Royal Puzzle breaks up the gameplay a bit, but I loved it. I first solved it in MIT Zork; as a mathematician that is terrible at most IF puzzles, it was fun to have a puzzle that I could finally solve on my own. I literally used a walkthrough on every other puzzle in this game.
Big, puzzle-filled game with deep backstory somewhat spoiled by bottlenecks, February 3, 2016Muldoon Legacy is an enormous game, one of the largest I have ever seen. It has a wide variety of interesting puzzles, with a sci-if/fantasy backstory.
I fully expected to deeply enjoy this game, having loved Curses and Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina, and having just come off the similar game Theatre. However, I just couldn't get into the game.
I played without a walkthrough for a few days, getting only around 11 points. I am not the greatest puzzle solver, and I don't mind using walkthroughs when I'm stuck, but the game gets stuck too frequently.
Case in point: after the intro (which required some, to me, unintuitive commands), you begin at the museum's steps. As you are immediately told, getting in requires not one, but two keys. And the second key requires (Spoiler - click to show)a seemingly random sequence of button presses on a keypad). There is virtually nothing to do while waiting to solve this puzzle.
Compare this to other games with early bottlenecks, like Zork. There, if you can't get in the house, you can always explore the forest. And if you do stay to solve the puzzle, putting yourself in the mindset of the character gives you the answer almost immediately. (Spoiler - click to show) Door locked? Try the window . The beginnings of other games such as Curses, Ballerina, and Theatre all give you more options or a more gentle beginning, and giving you a pile of smaller puzzles that aren't that hard to work through while digesting the big ones.
One bottleneck would be fine, but they occur over and over again. It is as if ALL puzzles require "two keys" (for instance, another early puzzle requires (Spoiler - click to show) lighting a match with a brick you had to search for outside, then using the match to light a branch you found in another room. And the brick can't be found by using "examine"). This is compounded by my least favorite way of creating fake difficulty, which is giving rooms exits that are not in the description (although you are given hints in other areas about these exits).
I suppose that this game resembles Jigsaw more than anything else, with similar fake difficulty and bottlenecks. Both games, however, are still fun to play through, but don't expect to get far without a walkthrough.
As a final note, Jon Ingold writes some great games. I especially enjoyed the short game "Failsafe", and many people have enjoyed "All Roads".
Revised comments:
I decided to at least see the rest of the game. The nozzle room was one of the best things I had seen in all of interactive fiction. But I stand bh my original review. What makes this game not click if it has great puzzles and enormous amounts of locations, and a developed plot?
Pacing.
J.R.R. Tolkien had the same issue. He developed a massive world, and coalesced it into the Silmarillion, which had great, well-written, detailed stories. It flopped. I like it, but it flopped. He then learned to trim his work down and focus on likable characters, a well-developed plotline and beautiful location descriptions.
This work is like the Silmarillion. It is 2-4 times the length od the massive curses, which Graham Nelson wisely trimmed down in size from his first draft. Puzzles are dense, and detailed. People say they like hard puzzles, but what they really want are puzzles that make them feel smart for solving them, but can be solved after a reasonable time. And, like the Silmarillion, no characters are especially likable. Everyone seems somewhat elitist. One finak issue is the prevalence of guews-the-verb issues.
I would recommend glancing at a walkthrough after each area to see if you did everything necessary. This game is enjoyable, but don't stress out about getting hints.
Too difficult for most without a walkthrough, little to do when you get stuck., February 3, 2016This is a game with a huge world. The writing is excellent, with interesting historic tidbits and a fun NPC.
However, the game is full of hard puzzles that leave little room to do anything elseif you are stuck. Unlike other games with huge worlds (Zork, Curses, etc.), this game is pretty linear.
Another issue is that many of the puzzles are simply unfair. As other reviewers noted, you are required to look in places you are never told you can look. I got stuck for hours at a time two or three times, and each time was due to an invisible exit I didn't know I could use.
Almost as long as Blue Lacuna; full of pop culture; smooth implementation, October 28, 2015Here is some of the pop culture referenced in this game:
(Spoiler - click to show)Lord of the Rings, Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, Song of the South, Peter Pan, Waiting For Godot, the play Rhinoceros, a knot theory joke, the ten-inch pianist joke, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Star Trek: Voyager, Zen koans (is that pop culture)?, famous mathematicians like Archimedes and Fibonacci, Duck Tales, etc.
And that's just the ones I could remember off the top of my head!
This game joins the list of ultra-long games such as Blue Lacuna, King of Shreds and Patches, Mulldoon Legacy, and Time: All Things Come to an End.
In gameplay, it resembles Mulldoon Legacy a lot; both are supersized versions of Curses!. You explore a huge structure, manipulating a variety of magical or technological systems, with a variety of hint systems.
Finding Martin has smooth implementation, including several very long time travel sequences interacting with multiple copies of yourself. This forms the last third of the game, and is the most technically competent time travel I have seen. Imagine All Things Devours as a subgame, 4 times.
Finding Martin has a tendency for very long text dumps. As I enjoy reading, this wasn't an issue, but there are probably 20+ cutscenes of 2-4 pages of text each.
As others have noted, Finding Martin is spottiest when it comes to hints. Some things are hinted well; in particular, there are several systems of providing hints, and if you get further in some puzzles, you'll unlock long cutscenes containing hints for other puzzles.
However, so many puzzles require leaps of intuition that you are bound to fail multiple times. For this, a walkthrough is essential. I've tried to upload a walkthrough to IFWiki that I found on web.archive.org, but it didn't seem to go through. The link is https://web.archive.org/web/20080516223332/http://www.qrivy.net/~gayla/fm_walk.txt
This game, as with Mulldoon Legacy, should be more played and more discussed. However, both games suffer from information overload. I get stressed playing Blue Lacuna, which can be played puzzlelessly, and even Counterfeit Monkey, where puzzles are well-clued. These games (Mulldoon and Martin) are just too darn hard to be solved by anyone without clues.
However, my strategy for such games is to play through with a walkthrough, then come back months or years later and try to play without a walkthrough. I've done Curses! 3 times now this way, and I hope to do it without a walkthrough. I hope to replay Finding Martin one day.
One of the largest games out there, with very hard puzzles and great plot, August 26, 2015Lydia's Heart is a game in the class of Anchorhead, Mulldoon Legacy, Curses!, and Worlds Apart in terms of size and story. To see the size of the game, check out the provided map, and realize that 90% of the rooms have their own detailed puzzle.
First, the story. You play a young girl at a southern motel who is entrapped in the mysterious plottings of a cult. You must find a way to escape their clutches. There are twelve or more NPC's, each of which can be asked numerous questions. The twelve NPCS's are mostly static, but later they move about a bit. The workings of the cult are explored in great detail, both at the motel and other locations.
As for puzzles, they are very, very difficult. This is the same author as Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina, which had very difficult puzzles as well. As an example, there are several locks in the game, which are opened in three or four different ways, two of which are almost never done in IF games. Items must be gathered from far away and assembled into one whole. Characters must be encouraged to move. And some just completely improbable actions must be taken.
However, I took a simple approach; I would just go as far as I could without getting frustrated, then start consulting the hints. The hint system is AMAZING. Just get as many hints as you need. Don't feel bad about it! The author intended this game as more of a story than just a puzzle fest; by consulting the first few hints for each puzzle, you're just making the level of difficulty low enough that the puzzles are still fun, but the story can still progress.
Several reviewers complained about mazes, but they don't realize that sometimes mazes are fun. The author allows you to bypass them with magic words, but then people feel mad about missing 100% completion. I subscribe to a different view; I love stories and settings, and I would rather skip all puzzles in a game to get a good story. Puzzles are fun, but they aren't the reason I play IF (except for Ad Verbum and Praser 5).
A hard game that gets more fun the further you get, July 1, 2015Zork is the most famous adventure game, although it was not the first. This version contains much of the three Infocom Zork games which were developed later.
Zork is a large puzzle-heavy exploration game. It has inventory limits, a timer of sorts (the light in your lamp), and it has several unfair puzzles (depending on the version you play, some important in-game clues can be omitted). The exits in the rooms work in a non-symmetric way, so going north and then south might bring you back to the wrong place.
I found that mapping out the entire game myself was very helpful. Instead of drawing a map, I just made a numbered list in the notes section of Frotz of all the rooms and their exits. That alone let me get much farther than I did 5 years ago.
I used walkthroughs after getting about half of the points, but the version on IFDB contained a fatal bug preventing me from completing the endgame. I found another version online that ran slower but which allowed me to complete the ending.
The game gets better the further you get. The 'hidden' areas are really fun, and I was surprised how huge this game really is. It makes sense that it was split into 5 games later.
An under-appreciated classic, July 1, 2015Building is a real gem. I enjoyed playing this game on and off over the course of a few months. It is a medium-large size adventure game like Zork or Curses!, but set in a sort of post-apocalyptic office building.
The game has enormous attention to detail; the game's vocabulary is about 2000 words, and the number of in game messages is about 2000 as well.
This attention to detail becomes a bit too much at times, with descriptions that are over packed with words. Many of the puzzles depend on clues hidden in the middle of large paragraphs.
The game contains more red herrings than any other game I have seen.
In the end, after seeing some of the author's reviews here and his blog (the author is AmberShards), I wonder if the game is partially autobiographical. The author and the PC hate conformity, and fight against perceived oppression.
The quintessential interactive fiction game, April 5, 2015Curses is the first game I think of when I think of interactive fiction, together with Anchorhead. Sprawling, light-hearted, with a compelling backstory and cast of supporting characters.
For me, the beauty of the game is in the development of the plot, with a continually increasing sense of wonder. Another wonderful aspect is the open sandbox feel; this is a very non-linear game.
Although the game is very difficult (I've played through it three times, and had to resort to a walkthrough every time), there are so many puzzles that you will still solve quite a few on your own. Many puzzles have multiple solutions, or can be bypassed completely.
*Amusing things: There are three characters that have interesting reactions to all ten of the (Spoiler - click to show)rods. Those characters are (Spoiler - click to show)yourself, the knight, and Austin.
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