Ratings and Reviews by Ryusui
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Offensive, June 24, 2008Alien Extraction puts you in the boots of a man sent in to find Elian Gonzalez - yes, the Elian Gonzalez - and "shove him in a box and send him home" (the game's exact wording). In addition to its one-dimensional treatment of its subject matter, the implementation is an absolute joke: just about the only exercise of intelligence the game requires is that you must (Spoiler - click to show)knock on the door before you're allowed to enter. The NPCs are cardboard, spouting the exact same canned response regardless of what you ask them about ("talk to" is rejected)...even the "dangerous" fire truck on the floor only responds to "firetruck" (one word). The rest is simply exploring squalid rooms until you find Elian, which prompts an inane victory message (most of which is quoted above) and no further exposition.
About the only good thing that can be said is that the game never forces the player to randomly guess what must be done next; unfortunately, the game is mind-numbingly shallow to the point that simply opening every door (all three of them) and examining every hiding place (all two of them) is enough to win. A minimal solution is only six moves; it would be four, but the game doesn't implicitly attempt to open closed doors when you try to pass through them.
Rather than presenting a thoughtful criticism of an issue, Alien Extraction insults the player's intelligence by running him through an embarrassingly simple maze under the pretense of being a jackbooted thug intent on sending an innocent child back into Castro's clutches...or maybe you're a soldier for freedom, rooting out the foreign parasite and returning him to his backwards nation? It's hard to tell where the authors stand on the issue; perhaps this game was intended to lampoon both sides, but the presentation of its argument, for, against or neither, is overshadowed by its heavy-handed treatment and weak implementation. Satire is meant to offend people into action; unfortunately, the only action this game is likely to prompt is closing the window.
A story adaptation with all the usual quibbles, June 24, 2008If you've never heard of the story which this is based on, don't feel ashamed. The Gallery of Henri Beauchamp is one of a myriad of so-called "creepypasta" stories brewed up in the depths of 4chan: these are basically bite-sized bits of horror, usually of the Lovecraftian variety, wrapped in the premise of an urban legend.
This is a short game. This is no surprise, as The Gallery of Henri Beauchamp is a short story. A complete walkthrough of the game is only ten lines long. But it remains an adaptation of a story, and as such falls into the same pitfall that most previous attempts at adaptation such as the two MANALIVE games fall into: it assumes an understanding of the source material. So you can't really play the game (without resorting to the in-game help, anyway) unless you're familiar with the source material, but at the same time, if you've read the source material, there's really no impetus to play the game.
The game is implemented well enough to be playable from beginning to end without any awkward responses or guessing games, but then the scope of the game is very narrow: the whole purpose of this exercise is to let the player live through the story on which it is based without any noteworthy deviations or side trips or, truth be told, any incidental detail whatsoever. That said, what detail there is happens to be quite well-written: reading the original story reveals that almost the entire text is drawn from it verbatim (the text written by the game's author tends to falter in comparison).
All told, it's a better first showing than many. The story is itself basically a copy-and-paste job, but the implementation is sound, if shallow. It's not an excellent or even a terribly good game, but it's a decent start for a new author.
An incredibly short game, good for beginners, June 19, 2008This is a one-room game with two simple, but very logical, puzzles. It doesn't aim very high, but it hits its target. The sparse implementation is well-excused by the premise that the protagonist has been abducted by aliens who are not all that sure of what constitutes ideal living conditions for a human being: literally everything plays into one of the game's puzzles in some capacity, and subtle details give the protagonist himself a nice bit of characterization. Taunting Donut is nothing earth-shattering, but the author definitely shows promise with this first effort.
An experiment in underimplemented, self-important interactive fiction, June 18, 2008It's a bad sign when a game's tagline reads like a passage from The Eye of Argon. This self-proclaimed "experiment in affective, embodied interactive fiction" manages to evoke only a vague sense of confusion and a powerful sense of moral indignation.
First off, for whatever reason, it seems the authors have thrown out the standard I6 library in favor of something hand-rolled and unforgivably primitive. Most of the standard IF verbs are absent: you can't listen to the beeping on the first turn, for instance, and even utility verbs such as save, restore and restart respond with an unhelpful "Not implemented yet." Using the standard library would have fixed most of these issues; unfortunately, the loss of most of the standard IF vocabulary isn't the full extent of the game's problems.
Actually exploring your surroundings is a chore, even beyond the obvious parser shortcomings. You can't examine any of your surroundings while you're on your bed; the table and desk are inexplicably described as being "on the floor" and thus supposedly difficult to examine (which doesn't make much sense, seeing you're stuck in bed and thus above the floor). There are "things" scattered on the floor which you can't examine, because the game infuriatingly doesn't recognize the word "things" (or the word "all", for that matter, rendering any attempt to pry some idea of what nouns the game is supposed to recognize from a "take all" attempt futile). The game is so brutally underimplemented that any attempt to glean any kind of story from it will only result in headaches: after "turn off alarm", the next puzzle involves soothing your aching muscles, which can be accomplished via the magic phrase "rub tiger balm on legs"; the problem is, the tiger balm is effectively invisible, likely in the scattered junk on the floor which you can't examine, meaning the only way you'll know it's there is by typing "help", quite possibly the only useful verb in the game, and after I realized that the game's problems extended much, much deeper than the parser I quit in frustration.
The game purports to be an examination of the moral and ethical consequences of drug use by athletes, a one-room game that blasphemously refers to itself as being inspired by Andrew Plotkin's "Shade". What it comes off as is yet another project whose ambition far outstripped the talent behind it. The parser is garbage, important objects are virtually if not entirely unimplemented (you can't even "examine me", for crying out loud)...anyone who can actually play this wreck to completion deserves a medal (not that I have any to give). Whatever story it might have is hopelessly drowned in a sea of ineptitude: apparently, being "avant-garde" mattered more to the authors than producing anything even remotely playable.
In closing, I have three things to say to the authors:
1. The standard library is there for a reason. Use it. (As it stands, this game gives a horrible new meaning to the term "Z-Abuse".)
2. Have your game beta tested before you even consider another release of any sort.
3. "Guess-the-verb", "guess-the-noun" and other general "guess-the-author's-mind" puzzles are generally considered bugs, not features, and it's the fault of the author if the player doesn't leap from, say, "itchy legs" to "tiger balm" if there isn't any tiger balm visible.
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