Reviews by Emily Short
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The Foundation of an IF Mystery Genre, July 11, 2011Deadline is one of Infocom's most difficult games, and requires a number of playthroughs to win. Important events happen at specific times of day, and you have to know about them and be in the right place at the right time to take advantage. It's easy to miss evidence or misunderstand it. There's limited time to complete your investigation. And, of course, you can ruin everything by arresting the wrong person. It's really best to approach the game by recognizing that you need to thoroughly explore it in four dimensions -- getting to know what is going to happen at different times -- before expecting to reach a happy solution.
The things that make the game difficult are also the things that make it great. Instead of offering an underpopulated world full of set-piece puzzles, Deadline challenges the player to make sense of a coherent reality full of active people and sometimes misleading clues. Characters move around the house, pursuing their own agendas. People have a schedule and plans of their own. There are more conversation options than in most old classics.
The sense of a solid and coherent world carries over into the game's feelies. These are some of Infocom's best, with police reports and evidence establishing the backstory of the case, and unlike the feelies for the Enchanter series or Hollywood Hijinx, they're presented straight, not as joking riffs on the situation of the game.
Deadline is the first IF I ever played at length on my own. I didn't solve it until many years later, but I returned to it over and over again as a kid. What captured my imagination then, and still has a certain appeal, is the recurring sense of excitement from observing without being observed: listening in on phone extensions, looking for secret rooms, following people. There was always the sense that important and significant secrets were hidden under every surface.
While the depth of implementation and the complexity of character reactions aren't quite up there with modern mysteries such as Make It Good and Varicella, Deadline is a foundational work. It established a number of traditional features, such as the sidekick, Duffy, who can run lab tests on your evidence, and the use of ACCUSE to accost suspects, and laid the groundwork for the still-popular genre of IF mystery that focuses on evidence collection and NPC interrogation within a compact map.
Buggy but amusing, July 10, 2011This is speed-IF, and like many of its ilk, it's short and doesn't make much sense. The premise involves a robot who is your opponent in an eating contest, but the story goes in some unexpected directions from there, and the whole thing is pleasurably surreal.
Implementation is rocky enough that it may discourage some players. It's possible to run into game-stopping problems with this piece, as the implementation allows the player to re-enter previous game states by accident, and an important event depends on asking a character about the right topic. Puzzles are fairly easy, though one in particular may be under-hinted for people not familiar with the work of IF it's riffing on.
These issues aside, though, Light of My Stomach is peppy and entertaining, and contains a poem of such astounding awfulness that it must be seen to be believed. Those features lift it above the run of the mill in speed-IF, even if it's really not solid or coherent enough to compete with more serious games.
Interesting concept, not a strong story, July 10, 2011The premise of the Erudition Chamber is that the protagonist is being put through a series of tests in order to determine which of four sects -- Warrior, Alchemist, Artisan, Seer -- he belongs to.
To this end, each chamber contains a puzzle with multiple solutions; each of the possible solutions is associated with a given personality trait. There's also some add-on effect, in that certain equipment can be lost or used up if you follow certain solutions. It's an experiment with the idea that the player is essentially defining a character through the way he chooses to act in the world. We see that in RPGs all the time (e.g. in games where you can earn melee experience points every time you swing your sword), but less frequently in IF.
All this said, I'm not sure how well the game actually works as an assessment of personal problem-solving skills. Some of the puzzle solution styles are much more obvious than others, and I found that rather than play through the puzzles as a personality test, I quickly started to try to game the system. Getting the Warrior sect point by bashing through something was usually the easiest option, but also therefore the least satisfying, and it was more fun to try for some other approach. Completist players will likely want to find all four solutions to every puzzle.
The writing is not as interesting. The story, such as it is, is all about being tested. It feels pretty artificial, both in the idea of setting up this test in the first place and in the lore that goes with the various puzzle-solving styles. There's a lot to read about, say, what it means to be a Seer, but very little sense of characters or of the broader setting that would make this kind of world possible.
Personally, I found this piece more interesting as a kind of essay about interactivity and the ways a game might detect and adapt to player preferences than as entertainment. But that's still definitely worth checking out for people who are interested in those questions.
Balances is a relatively short, old-fashioned puzzle game set in the world of the Enchanter series and riffing on Spellbreaker in particular: the player must find scrolls, learn their spells, and cast them in order to collect white cubes. It shares a number of design characteristics with those games: rooms represent fairly large open spaces, there are more animal NPCs than humans to interact with, and a loose, playful approach to world-building means that the various areas don't have a great deal to do with one another.
The puzzles are not all fair by modern standards, and it's easy to lock yourself out of winning by doing things in the wrong order. (Spoiler - click to show)In particular, avoid taking any lottery tickets from the barker until you're sure you've found out everything from him that you need to know. One or two discoveries also require the player to act in somewhat counter-intuitive ways. (Spoiler - click to show)The fourth cube can only be found if the player casts a spell he has reason to think will be dangerous.
Fairness was arguably not the game's paramount concern when it was written, however. Balances was released as a source example, showing how to do tasks that were technically virtuosic at the time, such as allowing the player to name objects and subsequently refer to them by name and usefully parsing numbers from a wide range. (Modern systems make most of these very much easier, but at the time these effects were not easy to accomplish.)
For players who have fond feelings towards the Enchanter series, however, Balances offers good value as a game. Several of the puzzles are quite clever, the effects of the various spells are entertainingly applied, and there's a very satisfying twist on the spellcasting mechanic from the original games. (Spoiler - click to show)The lleps spell reverses the effect of any existing spell, so your spell book is essentially twice as effective as it seems. Moreover, the unfairness is mitigated somewhat by the fact that the game is so small and there are only so many things the player can reasonably try to do.
More meditation than game, June 2, 2011Pale Blue Light is a curious, meditative story composed of very disparate scenes: in one you're exploring a mysterious ruin, in the next interacting with poetry by choosing keywords to explore. The effect is at first a little bit disconcerting. Pieces of the story are present tense, other pieces past; first, second, and third-person voices appear in different places. Protagonists come and go. It isn't always clear what the immediate goal might be.
It's only towards the end of the work that the significance of the time shifting and narrative fragmentation becomes entirely clear: which character is "you", which is "I", and what the third-person segments are (and are about).
Certain themes do appear even early on, however: problems of speech and communication, the struggle to recognize the people you are close to, the threat of death, and especially the loss of a sibling. In this it resembles Kazuki Mishima's other works, which have a consistently allusive quality. They do not so much tell a traditionally plotted story as juxtapose a series of ideas for an evocative result: an effect more poetic than narrative.
Ultimately what emerges is a meditation about writing and readers: one character is the reader of another character's manuscript, and is concerned with both the original author's biography and the symbolism of his fictional writings. The player is also invited into this relationship of reading and response. The use of keywords and free-form input alongside more traditional IF commands encourages the player to think about symbolism and personal reactions to the story fragments, not just to try to solve each scene. It's a technique we have seen in Blue Lacuna and in a handful of other places, but it is used to good effect here. I found the ending especially strong.
Recommended, especially for players interested in non-standard forms of interactive storytelling or interactive poetry.
A small concept, effectively executed, June 2, 2011You Find Yourself in a Room explores the concept of text adventure as a mode of abuse. The parser is sinister and overtly hateful. It tells you that it doesn't always understand you because it "likes making you guess." It places you in testing rooms and then mocks you for having trouble, in a way that's vaguely reminiscent of Portal's GLaDOS. The puzzles themselves start very simple and grow progressively more laborious, though they mostly stick to very standard tropes of escape-the-room games, with a lot of hunting for keys or codes.
This may not sound like an especially enjoyable concept, but it does actually work pretty well, for a couple of reasons. First, the scope of action is so tightly confined that it's impossible to get distracted by red herrings. Second, there's no time-wasting. The parser's jeering provides some hints and guidance, and also makes your fumbling part of the story. I at least found that I always figured out how to move on to the next room just before losing faith in the game's fairness.
It's short (I think it took me all of five minutes), and I'm not sure I would call it either fun or deep, but it does an excellent job of what it sets out to do.
Violet meets Fail-Safe, April 26, 2011This game adopts a rare narrative approach: all of the action takes the form of dialogue between the protagonist and his/her significant other. The SO is exploring the protagonist's apartment; we guide the SO's behavior, giving instructions in the protagonist's voice that are then rephrased as direct dialogue.
The result is intentionally cloying and over-the-top: this couple is heavily into endearments (or, just as bad, criticism disguised by lots of treacle). In a longer game this would be a problem, but this one is short enough that the joke doesn't wear out its welcome.
The two puzzles here aren't especially challenging except that it's possible to get into some difficulties over command phrasing -- a bit more testing and polish would have addressed this, but of course it's Speed-IF, so that type of flaw is to be expected. The ending is truly groan-worthy. But as a narrative experiment, this one may merit revisiting.
Curiously evocative, April 26, 2011Like much Speed-IF, this one is a little under-implemented if you try to interact with scenery too much. Working in its favor, though, is a very clear and straight-ahead plot, so that it's easy to stay on track and avoid getting stuck. There are several possible endings, but in retrospect at the end of the game it's pretty easy to tell what might have changed the outcome.
The story is a snack-sized piece about threatened love in the context of a supremely bizarre universe with zeppelins, archaeologists, savage deities and squid-men. The few locations we get to visit are vividly drawn and suggest an entire larger culture. (Possibly even the same culture as in "Walker and Silhouette"? Both feature an identifiable England continuous with lands of unidentifiable strangeness and fantasy.)
Definitely worth a try, especially for those who already know they enjoy Pacian's style.
A cute little game and an interesting argument, just not in the same place, September 15, 2010The game here is a cutesy piece about finding rabbits and feeding them carrots. It takes maybe five minutes to play. Probably the most interesting thing about it is the way it has tutorial commentary folded in with the gameplay, an approach that might work for other larger and more serious games (especially if the tutorial comments could be turned off).
As the title suggests, there was originally going to be a hidden mode in the game that would spew nastiness of some sort. Instead the game now comes with an essay about why open source is important for games that are going to be assigned for classroom use, so that teachers can be sure they're not giving their students something that might be triggered into showing inappropriate content.
I can see the concern, but am not completely convinced that this is practical. Unless the teacher is not only going to read and understand the source but recompile the game himself, he can't be absolutely certain that the compiled version he's given was actually generated by the same source code.
(For that matter, I find myself wondering whether this is an elaborate double-bluff on Victor's part and there *is* a further hidden mode to the game, and the included source code is truncated from what he actually compiled. If so, I didn't find it.)
So some amount of trust is probably required somewhere along the line, either in the author himself or in the community that has provided feedback about the game file.
This is an oddity -- not made with any of the standard systems, and entered in an experimental gameplay competition that asks how much a player can do in 10 seconds. The author of Cold As Death doubled that limit, but the player is required to do a warming-up action (running, jumping in place) every 20 seconds, or else freeze to death and lose the game.
That mechanic might just conceivably have worked out under the right circumstances -- perhaps with very stripped prose and easy-to-grok puzzles. Cold As Death makes some of the necessary concessions, for instance by sticking to a very small list of actions, so that there are only so many things you could possibly try to do at a given time.
Unfortunately, the environment is fairly surreal and sensible actions are badly hinted. To make matters worse, the anxiety about keeping warm keeps the player from having time to read the text in a leisurely way. The parser is extremely finicky, too: you must type every object name in full, including the adjective and noun in the order given, or the object will not be recognized. I did eventually win, after several tries, and it was gratifying in an odd way, but I can't claim it was a great IF experience.
Still, it's interesting that someone tried something like this.
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