Reviews by perching path
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(Warning: This review might contain spoilers. Click to show the full review.)5 years on, I find the perspective from which I wrote this review naive and unreflective.
De Baron is about the sexual abuse of a child. I almost completely failed to deal with that (central) aspect of the story, and my concluding paragraph is (as streever's comment pointed out) entirely incorrect.
What I wrote about the piece's structural aspects may still be of interest.
review from August 1st 2008:
(Spoiler - click to show)There's evil in De Baron, and the medieval trappings of the narrative do very little to pad its edges. It's real evil, and it resides primarily in the PC (though there is no character in this story whom a sane person would want to be). Trying to deal with this evil through the necessarily limited choices provided by dialogue menus can be frustrating. I can reject the importance of guilt and forgiveness by typing numbers, but there is of course no way for me to inject my own ideas about the psychological and interpersonal mechanisms of the consequences of wrongdoing.
One can say that these ideas are not things the PC would think of, but I'm not sure Gijsbers would wish to have the universality of his piece eroded in this way.
Pavel Soukenik described De Baron as a psychological test which does not give its results. I think the results can be given by the player throughout their second playthrough of the piece. Even if they choose not to do so, what further analysis could the program give beyond its final series of choices, which try to force the player to think through the motivations behind their (and/or the PC's) actions?
The prose did jar me out of the story at a couple of points. I didn't particularly mind the occasional grammatical errors, but certain phrases were so melodramatic as to undermine the piece's general seriousness. I would be interested in reading a review of the Dutch version.
The mechanics of the game are smooth, though I'm inclined to think that the occasional bits of physical interaction should be either complicated or further simplified. Having to retrieve the torch to read something, though it only took 4 turns, seemed a pointless chore.
As my rating would indicate, these minor technical flaws don't do the piece too much damage.
Why do I think this a very good work, despite its limitations? Possibly because its structure involves both the inexplicit revelation of what one is and the creation of sympathy with an unsympathetic protagonist, my favourite IF devices. Possibly because it's well-implemented enough that I spontaneously (Spoiler - click to show)howled at a wolf and received an appropriate response. Possibly because it treats its victims as humanely as is possible from inside the PC's head. Certainly because it succeeded in its ambitious aim of making me think about human will from a novel angle.
Finally, I'm inclined to think that the content warnings and minimum age requirements associated with De Baron are unnecessary. As with most written works, those who lack the maturity to deal with it will find it neither interesting nor entirely comprehensible.
Sea and Fog, Polish and Dubious Politics, July 24, 2009After waking up waterlogged (but thankfully not stricken with amnesia) on the titular uncharted island, your soldier protagonist is gradually introduced to the local personalities and their various conflicting opinions. As you explore the large and evocatively described landscape, you're free to act on the wishes of whomever you choose to trust.
While there are mechanical puzzles, interaction with NPCs forms the bulk of the plot. The dialogue system, which suggests topics when necessary but generally allows for free interaction, often facilitated impressively smooth conversations. I applaud Eve both for allowing me to be polite to those of my interlocutors who deserved it, and for making a world real enough that I felt to urge to.
The game's hands-off, character-driven approach to guiding your actions has its downsides, of course: it's quite possible to finish the game leaving major plot lines hanging. For similar reasons, I ended up accompanied by a character whose rationale for sticking with me was never really established. It seems to me that fully experiencing what Blighted Isle offers depends a bit too much on the player's completism and too little on in-game motivations.
These flaws aside, my opinion of Blighted Isle was overwhelmingly positive until the endgame. Take this next spoiler tag seriously- I'm going to reveal a couple of big twists. (Spoiler - click to show)The ending I reached involved my saving Winston Churchill's life on the orders of King Arthur. By which I mean saving a racist warmonger of questionable competence because an absolute monarch told me to. Yeah, the protagonist might well be up for that. I'd built up sympathy for him by that point, though, and felt a bit betrayed (not to mention deprived of a satisfying conclusion). On the plus side, the Arthurian, time-bending reality of the island was very well-foreshadowed.
In the end, I found Blighted Isle an impressive application of writing and programming skill to slightly unworthy material. I would recommend trying it: its successes are numerous and its failures are interesting.
6 Bullets, 1 Heart, No Tongue, July 6, 2008Who doesn't enjoy aiming a six-gun at cyborgs? I do, and it's even more fun in a program which usually manages to parse my commands as fluidly as Mute Lawton draws his sidearm.
Considering that the game is based around combat puzzles, the emotions here are pretty nuanced. Not everyone who takes a shot at you is your enemy, and there's a few lines which get across the idea that rampant violence and small populations make for some difficult choices. Still, what can you do? Your man's got a noose 'round his neck.
Gun Mute limits the scenario's combinatorial explosiveness in a very intuitive way. I never felt that my options as a player were significantly more constrained than those of the character, though both were very constrained indeed.
Vexing, June 30, 2008While the game takes place in a serene country house being emptied by genial removal men, the player doesn't interact much with the plot or setting on a mimetic level. Rather, they wander about converting things into letters.
While the wordplay-saturated atmosphere was quite pleasant, it wasn't enough to keep me from resorting to a walkthrough after my first encounter with the time limit.
Completing the game without the hints would require multiple playthroughs, a certain amount of trial and error, and, most likely, a bit of research. When a description is curiously specific but the cultural or scientific reference escapes you, I wouldn't hesitate to resort to Google- some of the answers aren't to be found in-game.
I'm tempted to recommend this one for those who enjoy difficult cryptic crosswords, but the game lacks the structural fairness of that standardized form. The items and the letters into which you convert them do not have a consistent relationship.
an enjoyable flight, though not without turbulence, June 10, 2008The setting and the nature of the interaction are both novel to the form and aimed straight at my brain. WWI-era technology, one-eyed aces, snow-covered wilderness, and difficult romance between fierce rivals? These are what I dream about, and Pacian does them quite a bit of justice.
More technically, the passage-by-passage quality of the prose was mostly sufficient to overcome the piece's structural (especially pacing) weaknesses.
The characterization of the protagonist inhabits a middle ground between a fully defined person and a shell for the user. This works well in some genres, but it's slightly awkward in a game as personality- (and conversation-) driven as this one. The talk is rather one-sided, and the NPC's emotions seem less justified for lack of a worthy target. This could be largely overcome by making the conversational options more symmetrical, by which I mean writing responses for "tell X" analogous to those already written for "ask X", although this risks making the conversation overly mechanical if carried out poorly. (Such a modification might also increase the perceived "challenge" of changing the relationship between the characters, which I agree would be an improvement.)
Don't let these problems put you off, though: like those of the protagonists of Aces, my attacks are made with admiration. Forget my criticisms and get in your plane.
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