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Number of Ratings: 42
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- Wren, April 14, 2024
1 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
This game marked me, March 7, 2024Man, what a game. It sets the atmosphere perfectly, and follows through on all its ideas. It just rocks; there's nothing else to say. I loved it from the start to the finish. The puzzles are challenging but forgiving, but the writing is the real star of the show. It just oozes with confidence and mastery. Absolutely brilliant.
- jakomo, February 18, 2024
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Thought-provoking and polished TADS 3 work, January 5, 2024This is only my second IFDB review, so I'm going to reuse the disclaimer I used in the first one and say that I don't feel especially given to writing insightful reviews, even when I have specific thoughts about a game. (I tried being a reviewer in the '23 IFComp, but mostly devolved into writing limericks for the games instead.)
In spite of that, I'm a recently first-time published game author, and I appreciate when others take the time to tell me (and others) what they thought of my game.
I didn't really have time for game-playing when this game came out in IFComp '22, but as a fellow TADS 3 author, I wanted to come back around to it when life allowed and give a little TADS support and solidarity. So I did, recently, and I was impressed. I like the atmosphere created by the sidebar graphics and the Middle Eastern-sounding soundtrack. One of my favorite parts of the experience was taking in the whole what-if scenario in which the lead-up to Abel's murder seems very plausible, and one sympathizes with Cain's plight. I have no idea if that kind of material exists in legend or if it's all the author's creation, but I appreciated the ingenuity of the story.
The game also gets very high marks for polish and implementation. I hit one point (Spoiler - click to show)where I tried to LOOK UP IRON and failed the puzzle because I was required to LOOK UP METAL, which wasn't otherwise clued at other than through induction/lateral thinking. I mentioned this to the author, so it is very possible that this was accommodated in a more recent update.
All in all, this is an erudite, engaging game that deserves to stand out and be recognized. I enjoyed the experience that Jim Nelson prepared for us to partake of.
- Doug Orleans (Somerville, MA, USA), December 29, 2023
- Fie, November 16, 2023
- Arioch, October 30, 2023
- Zape, September 30, 2023
- Laney Berry, September 24, 2023
- Tabitha / alyshkalia, September 4, 2023
- Sammel, August 30, 2023
- Ms. Woods, July 7, 2023
- thesleuthacademy, June 17, 2023
- odetolava, May 29, 2023
- elysee, May 18, 2023
- egostat (Purgatory of Social Ineptitude), May 1, 2023
- WorstPunk, April 12, 2023
6 of
6 people found the following review helpful:
A modern classic, March 25, 2023The premise for this game is excellent, whether you are religious or not. You are travelling back in time to find out what the mark of Cain was. The game mechanics are also great with many recipe puzzles which reminded me very much of the potion brewing in Gnome Ranger so good stuff! The game has a built-in hint system which answered all my questions. To begin with, I wanted to solve all puzzles by myself but at some point I became impatient because I was very eager to read the ending so I was less patient than usually. So I looked at the hints a few times. However, I never felt the game was unfair though at some point you need to refer to a part of some machinery which was in the protagonist's plain sight but wasn't mentioned unless under very specific circumstances (the spout) so that small bit could be improved.
Parser/Vocabulary (8/10)
Pretty good parser with a few strange responses but that happens rarely.
Atmosphere (9/10)
The writing is really good without being too verbose.
Cruelty: Merciful
I think you can never bring yourself in an unwinnable situation in this game.
Puzzles (9/10)
Great, satisfying puzzles.
Overall (9/10)
This may become a modern classic. It is a great game.
- Rovarsson (Belgium), February 18, 2023
- Jaded Pangolin, February 10, 2023
- Phil Riley, February 1, 2023
- Jade68, January 29, 2023
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
I wanted to enjoy it more than I did, January 29, 2023I like a lot of the ideas in this game, and many of the puzzles were solid, but I became totally dependent on the in-game HINTS command, and I felt I had to conclude that a lot of the puzzles weren't fair.
(Spoiler - click to show)A number of the puzzles (including three of the compound spells) require you to LOOK UP X in the book where X is a term you haven't seen mentioned in the game yet. That could be OK if the answers were extremely clearly right in hindsight, but I kept finding that I tried a bunch of reasonable LOOK UP X commands, and then I'd check the hints, and then… womp womp, none of my reasonable guesses worked. Instead I should have looked up Y.
I don't think it makes sense to have "guess the topic" puzzles unless the author provides support for a lot of topics (or, at the very least, a lot of synonyms), and at the minimum help me out with "warmer/colder" hints. Otherwise, after a few failed guesses, I'm forced to assume that there's no puzzle to solve here at all. Good puzzles have to seem inevitable in hindsight, and none of the "make a wild guess about what to look up" puzzles ever did.
In addition, the puzzle in the cavern was… not good. I'd put the obsidian slab in the obsidian block, and didn't realize that I could bring it back out again. But even if I'd brought the slab with me, I put a bone on the altar and it didn't seem to do anything, so I never discovered that the bone would disappear.
6 of
7 people found the following review helpful:
Hadean Lands meets Worlds Apart, January 28, 2023My favorite thing about this game is the genre: Games that take philosophy seriously. Be Not Afraid: While this game does deal with a story from the Bible, it is not a work of religiosity. We are not in Jarod's Journey territory.
In fact, the conceit of the work is pretty much to talk back to the Bible, and say, "Hey, buddy, did it ever occur to you that Cain might have had his reasons?" The work's subtext is precisely this idea that heresy is no sin, so don't hesitate to ask the obvious questions that come to mind when attempting to make sense of canonical tracts. The game's internal reference book (">CONSULT X ABOUT Y"), having been written by a Scholastic, contains marginalia that critiques itself regularly, creating a sort of internally-consistent closure to drive home the point.
Like any good religion, the Abrahamic canon has plenty of worthwhile philosophy (and, unfortunately, plenty that any thinking person in the modern period will reject out of hand), but it also has plenty of parables that are so terse as to raise more questions than they answer. Why, exactly, did Cain murder Abel? Despite the marked incompleteness of this Biblical lesson (as if to suggest that even to ask the question is to partake of the sin), we know seeking to understand motives for horrible crimes to be a valuable pursuit. This, after all, is what happens in a courtroom.
The reason, as the player discovers right away, was that Abel turns out to have been a massive jerk.
Okay, well, maybe the answer isn't always edifying. That doesn't mean we shouldn't ask.
This did sort of leave me saying to myself, "Well, heck, I could've guessed that much." And if that were the whole story, this review would be over by now. But now we have a new question: Why was Abel a jerk to Cain?
The game rewards the diligent player with an answer to this question too. Multiple answers, actually, of two types. One was a typical family dynamics drama, but the other — Ah! This is where it gets interesting. Abel adopts the self-serving and apparently life-long mindset that his lackadaisical character has a higher purpose, that of teaching his older brother a deep lesson.
(Spoiler - click to show)
Unfortunately — I'm interpreting liberally — Cain considers that his hard work, demonstrably harder than that of his brother, of necessity entitles him to just rewards in this life. Abel, however, not accruing the advantages of being first-born, realizes that if Cain's view were true, those advantages would make Cain more likely to have a good life, and Abel less likely. So Abel acts out in order to prove that doing good work does not entitle Cain to have a servile younger brother; rather, by extension, the best reason for doing good work is the satisfaction of a job well-done, while the reward shall come only after death, where we supposedly discover the absolute truth of our choices, since all we can do is our best in life.
This implies that doing the right thing often requires sacrifice, something that the PC understands all too well by the end.
These themes couldn't be more relevant today, where we struggle with entitlement and meritocracy in a vastly unequal society whose playing field, like the field in the story, is anything but level.
Interestingly, this interpretation contradicts the verse in the Targum Jerusalem, which serves as source material for the game, where Abel argues in no uncertain terms that "in goodness was the world created, and in goodness is it conducted. But according to the fruit of good works is it conducted." The game seems to imply that this speech was insincere, which seems like an odd conclusion to draw. In fact, the brothers' positions in the game seem to be close to the opposite of what they are in scripture — but, hey, I'm no Bible scholar.
Of course, understanding that there was a motive in no way excuses the crime. We discover, at the end, whether Cain himself grasps this point.
But philosophy is not the only subject explored in According to Cain. It also explores very effectively some other questions that arise when thinking about the origin of the species, but don't get asked publicly very often. One thing that comes through strongly is that these characters, while they did make mistakes, even grave ones, were doing the best they could under extraordinary conditions.
This is absolutely not merely a religious point. The population explosion is uncomfortable at this end of it, but extrapolating it backward far enough leads to uncomfortable considerations of a different nature, when our species experienced a bottle-neck in numbers. The African Eve studies bear this out. There must have been many sacrifices made for the good of the species. Even without considering modern technology, the existence of other social groupings meant that people generally had somewhere else to go in case of local clashes and other problems. Smaller population implies fewer social resources, no matter how early or late in our timeline. Having so few individuals to rely on must have been a real hardship, and we should be thankful for those hardy forebears who lived and survived over a thousand centuries ago.
To me, the alchemy stuff was cute but not terribly interesting. The puzzle mechanics were derivative of Hadean Lands, and (Spoiler - click to show)it's never explained why the four primary characters should each have a unique characteristic bodily humour not shared with the others. But I think further that my experience of the work of solving the mystery was harmed by the constant hand-holding and coddling in the parser responses and reference entries. I understand the need and the desire to make the game accessible to newbies, but I think it was taken a bit too far. My success would have felt more meaningful if the difficulty in researching alchemical ingredients had been allowed to stand on its own.
It's as if the author felt that I am entitled to see the ending of the game by virtue of having begun it, just as Cain felt entitled. But good interactive fiction, in my view, does not need to assume that I have this right. It does not appear in Graham Nelson's Player Bill of Rights, and with good reason. Whatever else a game is, finishing one can be considered an accomplishment in a way that completing static fiction can't. Exercising the mind is one of the most important things a person can do for his or herself in life, which is why children are encouraged to do it from an early age. Gaming is, in a sense, noble. Performing noble acts involves delayed gratification — a form of sacrifice. For this reason, I felt that this design choice somewhat marred the game's otherwise impressive philosophical self-consistency.
Okay, putting away the soap box.
While the game may not win awards for the best puzzles, it's also true that the puzzles were written to integrate them tightly into the plot in the manner we've come to expect from the best IF. The writing in general is quite good, as would be expected from a published novelist. And, indeed, my next favorite thing about the game, after the philosophical theme, is the atmosphere it creates. The world does feel cataclysmic, as befits the outrage at such a grievous crime when humanity can so ill afford it. But it also feels new and full of possibility. I can only imagine that this balance must have been a challenge to get right. I became so immersed in the world that, during a break in playing, I went to my spice cabinet and opened and smelled each bottle in turn, imagining that I was experiencing each sensation for the first time ever.
The atmosphere is also enhanced by the game's artwork and its appropriately primitivistic and somber background score, which fit well enough that I was surprised to learn that it was not custom-made for the game. It didn't intrude into my concentration, which, for me, says a lot.
Despite the game's general high standards of craft, though, my emotional response to the game was lacking relative to other games that reveal tragic backstory in a similar way, such as Worlds Apart. I'm not sure why that is, other than that the nature of being an investigator doesn't typically involve being moved by the events under investigation. The PC is a pretty hard-nosed, duty-conscious worker, so maybe I felt I didn't have time for hand-wringing. Just get in, find the answers, write the report, and get back.
Or, failing that, just do the best you can.
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