Make It Good

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A slightly scuffed masterpiece, April 21, 2009
"Make It Good" is oddly-flavored detective noir. Though nominally set in the US in an unspecified year (but one in which a television is a luxury), it uses British spellings and cultural conventions throughout. The protagonist is a down-on-his-luck cop one drink away from being kicked off the force, who made a fool of himself with the Michaelmas liquor. One of the keen-eyed, not-to-be-trusted suspects is... a vicar. This sort of thing makes the game feel, from the beginning, as though it is somehow askew from the normal genres and normal reality.

That feeling only deepens as play goes on. What starts out seeming like a fairly straightforward mystery of looking for evidence and interrogating suspects quickly turns into something more: it's easy to begin to assemble a case, but a lot harder to know what you want to do with that information. The protagonist needs to make a careful plan and stick to it in order to bring the investigation to a satisfactory conclusion -- and that includes manipulating just what all the NPCs know, and when they learn it, and how they feel about him and about one another.

Ambitious coding underlies this design. There are five NPCs. Two of them walk around and perform somewhat complex tasks; all five talk, observe, and remember. This is not the sort of game where you can blithely carry evidence past someone and have him not notice. They will even, on occasion, talk to one another in your absence-- a dangerous matter. There are still some bugs in the implementation I played, but the astonishing thing is not their presence but how well most of this enormous machine does work.

The need to plan around these NPCs makes for an intensely difficult game. Like "Varicella" or "Moebius", "Make It Good" needs to be played over and over to be solved; and there are times in this process where the design is not quite as helpful as it needs to be, and it is hard to figure out just exactly what should change in order to make the next iteration more successful. It can, especially in the late-middle section, become a very frustrating play -- though releases after the first have become more generous with clues and somewhat fairer in scoring what the player has done.

Nor is the result of all the careful NPC code anything like a naturalistic portrayal of character. It would be more accurate to say that it is in support of allowing the characters to behave according to certain genre conventions, in which everyone has a secret and the best people are often the weakest and the most easily destroyed.

The PC, too, is an odd duck. "Make It Good" definitely uses what Paul O'Brian dubbed the accretive PC (in reference to "Varicella" and "Lock & Key"): the player starts out not knowing much about the protagonist or his motives, but after many playthroughs is playing a very specific role to specific ends. And yet even then, there is a touch of distance and strangeness; corners of the protagonist's mind that are never quite illuminated, trains of thought that are intentionally ambiguous.

In the end it all does come clear, in a breathless, vivid epilogue, and the player is left victorious, exhausted, and alienated all at once. But then a mystery of this genre never leaves everyone comfortable.

So: a little imperfect, but nonetheless brilliantly conceived and ambitiously executed.

Some thoughts about ‘Make it Good’ by Jon Ingold, April 27, 2009
We have to wave the hat in front of Make it Good, because of two reasons. The first is that this is an excellent job, with a smooth writing and an excellent design. The second is due to the fact that in this IF we impersonate a drunk and ‘bad’ detective, dressed in the usual waterproof coat and hat, who will have to deal with a terrible crime. The frame of the investigation will be an anonymous terraced house, with a suspicious maid whose boyfriend conceals a mysterious past, a desperate housewife with a shattered marriage whose ‘close friend’ is a vicar of the near parish and also an excellent victim: an average man by the not so average past.

So the ingredients are all there to make the plot of Make it Good a real noir, sophisticated and engaging.

The game design is innovative and well-maintained. Let’s forget about a story with a simple linear sequence of commands or actions. Make it Good is a story alive with dozens of items to consider, different rooms and locations to be visited and some riddles of low difficulty rating, but definitely good and affordable through various strategies. This is the highlight of this text adventure, which leaves ample room for the player. The NPC’s artificial intelligence is really nice and there is a distinction between the interaction with the mere dialogue, with which you can inform an NPC about your latest developments on the crime investigation, and interaction with interrogation applications, which can be used to collect the suspecteds’ alibi and modus operandi. It is worth also to say a few words about the intensity of the betatesting which has undergone the game in the first period of public release and the considerable speed with which the author has fixed some bugs, more or less heavy, afflicting the first version. All of this has made the current version of the game, namely the ninth, very pleasant and more enjoyable.

I would really like to note the hinting system which automatically comes to the aid of the player by suggesting the appropriate commands for some situations (this system can be deactivated by the most hardcore gamers!). Good and concise documentation in the game.

I would like to return a moment on the quality of the work’s plot (some spoilers below!).

As with his other work, in fact, the author tries to reflect on the deep dichotomy between the player in flesh and bones and his digital alter ego, making the discrepancy between their knowledge a fundamental point for the ending revelation of the main plot storyline. This analysis is an excellent springboard to think about the importance and significance of the information’s medium and the timing of notification. Not only because this trick, we can find that in fact our task is not merely to investigate a crime so savage but to try to understand, through a few bold descriptions, the ironic and grotesque violence of the likely events prior the crime.

Final Vote: As a result, Make it Good ranks as a timeless classic, having the veins of the mystery stories and the verisimilarity of daily life. It offers an extreme interactivity and vivid characters, although in some sections they are a little ’stereotypical’ but always functional to the plot. Watch out, because their behavior will be certainly plausible and exciting! My final vote for Make it Good is 9.5.

Massimo Stella

PS: I'm sorry for my badly managed English, it is not my main language. The italian version of this review can be found here:
http://nonunsolospettacolo.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/pensieri-sparsi-sullavventura-testuale-make-it-good/

The best IF detective yet, November 23, 2009
Make It Good is an excellent detective game. It is both a lot of fun and an absolute must-play for anyone interested in puzzle design.

The player is cast as an alcoholic down-on-his-luck police inspector who has one last chance to show that he can still solve a case. A man has been murdered in his house, and the protagonist must search the house and the garden for physical clues, must talk to a number of NPCs, must call on his reluctant assistant to analyse clues, and must, finally, make a successful accusation.

Now most of that may sound rather standard for a detective game, but this game is far from standard. First, the puzzles are simply excellent. Discovering clues is only the beginning--you'll have to think creatively and psychologically manipulate the NPCs if you want to get anywere with them. Second, there are some interesting plot twists, and your ideas of how to find the murderer will change during the game, which will in turn impact what you want to do with the clues and the NPCs.

Make It Good is a hard game. You will not solve it on your first attempt, and probably not on your fifth either. It is true compliment to the depth of implementation and the amount of possibilities that the game remains fun to play for almost the entire time span needed to solve it--and I heartily do recommend you to show some perseverance. I myself took a look at a walkthrough after I had solved all the major puzzles and the only thing that remained was the somewhat tedious process of putting all the details right. This seems to me the right strategy: you are depriving yourself of a great gaming experience if you look at the walkthrough any earlier.

The final stages of playing the game are a bit tedious, though: you'll still be doing small things wrong, and each time you'll have to restart and go through all the steps again. Given the overall excellence of the game, this is a relatively small complaint, though.

My other complaint is that the story does not make perfect sense at the end, even though it presumably has to if I have to be formulating and carrying out the plan that takes me to the ending. That, however, is a major spoiler, and should only be read by those who have finished the game.

(Spoiler - click to show)Surely the maid will retract her confession when she sees during her trial that there is no evidence pointing to Anthony? It seems to me that unless there is also some hard evidence pointing to Anthony, the whole scheme will not work; and in those endings where the maid confesses, there is no hard evidence pointing to Anthony. Certainly not the kind of evidence Joe wants before he arrests him.

The epilogue hints that the vicar has seen you, and that you are going to be arrested because he has told the police about it, right? But he has been telling lies himself in order to cover up for Angela, lies which are inconsistent with him seeing you. Would he really endanger Angela by accusing you, thus reopening the case while at the same time taking away Angela's alibi?

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