The Edifice

Baf's Guide

Starting as an early anthropoid, you find a mysterious stone structure that leads you to three crucial moments in the development of humanity, from tool use to the domestication of animals. Good prose, reflective of differing perceptions at the various levels of development. Satisfying puzzles, including one of the best and most interactive ones I've ever seen. The original release is quite buggy, so get the latest version.

-- Carl Muckenhoupt

>VERBOSE -- Paul O'Brian's Interactive Fiction Page

One section of the game in particular I found really remarkable. [PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD] On the second level of the edifice, you find yourself as a very early human, living in a family unit in the woods. Your son has a fever, and to cure him you must find the Feverleaf, which can be made into a healing tea. However, no Feverleaf seems to be available anywhere, until you stumble across a Stranger. Unsurprisingly, however, the Stranger does not speak your language, and so you are faced with a problem of communication. The game does an incredible job with simulating this situation. I was astonished at the level of realism which this character was able to achieve, and at the care that must clearly have gone into fashioning this interaction. I've rarely seen such a thorough and effective establishment of the illusion of interactivity. The Stranger did not of course respond to English words in understandable ways. However, you could point to objects, or speak words in the Stranger's language, and gradually the two of you could arrive at an understanding. It was an amazing feeling to be experiencing this kind of exchange in IF... I really felt like I was learning the Stranger's language. It will always remain one of the most memorable moments of this 1997 competition for me.
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The best single puzzle I've played, October 16, 2007
Edifice is a short game that takes the player through the various stages of development of human civilization. The game stands out because it has the best puzzle I've seen in any game so far. The writing is solid but unremarkable, and the other puzzles are good, but the language puzzle is by far the reason to play the game.

In Edifice, the player begins as a caveman, and is faced with a puzzling edifice. The player must teach the caveman to use basic tools, to open a door in the edifice. Inside, there are stairways taking the player up to different levels, each one of which takes him to a new stage of the development of civilization. In each stage, he must advance the state of civilization by solving a certain puzzle that teaches his character how to do something.

The puzzle that makes the game is the language puzzle, in which the player must learn to communicate in the foreign language of an NPC. It is hard to describe, without giving spoilers, why this puzzle is so much fun, but I've found that it's simply the most satisfying puzzle of any game I've played.

An awesome time travel game, August 21, 2009
Wonderfully put together, with a feel to it that reminds me of a combination between civilization, the intro of 2001, and an exploration game...this masterful work of IF charts your prehistoric exploration of a large black stone monolith, which leads throughout time and space. To say more would give away the plot, but the game has several endings and is very satisfying.

Good concept, mediocre execution, August 23, 2009
The Edifice has you participate/spectate a few events occurring along the timeline of evolution of an anthropoid species (presumably, (Spoiler - click to show)Australopithecus, Homo Erectus, Neanderthal (?), and finally Homo Sapiens). It's an interesting conceit, and one segment has a particularly interesting puzzle in which you piece together a stranger's language... but in practice, it's just a little too clumsily put together, and somehow the emotional connection just never quite clicked for me.

If you want to try it without referring to the walkthrough, be aware that Edifice will expect some rather non-clued and non-standard language (for IF) in places.

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