Ratings and Reviews by JonathanCR
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A masterclass in innovative game design, March 5, 2022There's not much I can say about this masterpiece that hasn't already been said, but I'll give it a go anyway!
I think the most impressive feature of this game is the combination of wild, extravagant possibility with tight focus. Once you get the hang of your letter-remover, the range of possibilities seems almost paralysing in its scope: you can turn the objects around you into completely different objects with a flick of the wrist. A single item can yield all kinds of wildly different new items depending on which letter you remove, and these in their turn can do the same thing. More possibilities open up as you gain access to more word-manipulation tools - the anagram gun, in particular, is a dizzyingly powerful piece of kit that, once you get it running, makes you feel well-nigh omnipotent. All of the comments about the sheer scale of the task the author must have faced in coding all of these possibilities are, if anything, understated.
And yet at the same time it all works, because the game's scope never gets too out of control. For example, restricting the main mechanic to removing letters (and not adding them, except for one limited tool) means that any given object can only yield a limited number of new objects. Judicious use of adjectives in object names means that many cannot be manipulated at all, or only in fairly limited ways. Even the mighty anagram gun can only turn most objects into one other object, and most of those are useless if hilarious. I think this is the true achievement of this game - to create a world of apparently infinite possibility, that nevertheless limits that possibility without ever feeling restrictive. Enough range of possibility remains to allow the player freedom to try all kinds of things which don't help advance the game at all but are still possible. Here a shout-out has to go to the Britishizing Goggles, which are much appreciated if completely useless, and must have been another headache to implement. (Though they're not infallible e.g. "rigourous" is not correct British English, sad to say.)
This is one of the few puzzle-based games that I managed to complete entirely on my own, though some sections gave me lengthy pause for thought. It's all logical, and while "guess the verb" is effectively replaced by "guess the noun", you at least have all those possible nouns in front of you, in theory. On some occasions the gameplay slows as you read repeatedly through your entire inventory, trying to work out which word, with a letter removed, might produce something useful - and the game's adherence to the modern convention that it's possible to carry in your arms literally everything that's not nailed down means this can be a time-consuming process. More often than not, though, the relevant object is fairly easy to identify. One point to bear in mind is that everything you need to solve a puzzle is always available in locations you can travel to from that puzzle point, something that in the later stages of the game means you can discount much of your swollen inventory when trying to work out what to do.
The parser is very friendly, allowing you to take back game-losing moves. Conversations are rather mechanical, but as we all know, conversations are impossible to implement well in IF. The parser does suffer from frustrating limits in the underlying engine - e.g. it cannot handle "Put X and Y on the Z", requiring instead "Put X on the Z" followed by "Put Y on the Z", even though there are a number of times when you do have to put two things onto or into something.
Most importantly though, this game is just absurdly fun to play. The fact that something like this is free when it outclasses on every level the classic Infocom-era games - that we had to buy with actual money, from actual shops - is something to be profoundly grateful for.
I must add that it's thanks to this game that I discovered Toki Pona, which I'm going to investigate in more detail. Oh, and finally, playing this game late at night leads to very strange dreams.
[EDIT] tenpo ni la, mi sona e toki pona. jan Emili o, pona!
A hard one to review, February 19, 2022It's clear from looking through these reviews that this is a rather divisive game. Praised greatly by most - including the "editorial reviews" (which always seem especially weighty from their prominence in games' entry pages) - there's a significant minority of reviewers who don't like it, including one or two who really hate it. A smaller minority sit somewhere in the middle, liking it well enough, but not greatly so.
I find myself in that last group. I certainly don't dislike the game. But if it hadn't appeared on almost every "must-play" list, and if it weren't by a renowned author of IF, and if it didn't have all those glowing testimonials, and if it were just an obscure game I'd happened upon by chance, I wouldn't think it anything exceptional. Of course it's hard to say - perhaps under those circumstances I'd be more impressed by it. After all, when something is praised this much, it has a high expectation to live up to. And besides, when you're told repeatedly that something is deeply creepy and you can expect an experience of terrifying psychological horror, little short of being trapped in a vault with Edgar Allan Poe is going to impress.
So all that said, I thought it was a good game. It's a good idea well implemented. The writing is excellent. I liked "A broad mirror tries to make the place seem twice its size; it halfway works" - very droll. The implementation is mostly good - as others have noted, the idea of having sub-locations within the single location is effective. There were some oversights though - "go to kitchen", for example, doesn't work (you need to "go into kitchen" or "enter kitchen"). (Spoiler - click to show)Also, there's no "shower drain" object at all to interact with, even though it's specifically mentioned in the to-do list. I don't have a problem with the fact that the game railroads you through its narrative - that's not the kind of game I mostly enjoy, but it can still be effective, and once I'd worked out how to progress, I rather liked almost sitting back and allowing the narrative to take its course.
I don't think I experienced the creepy psychological horror that others report. Either I'm deficient in something or being so prepared for it immunised me. So the actual activity of playing it, while fine, wasn't the deep emotional experience that others clearly find it to be. But at the same time, I suspect that the imagery of this game will prove memorable. And even in a game where the player has very little choice, making these happen *to the player* rather than to a character in a conventional story over whom one has no control at all does add to their power.
So that's my small contribution to the mountain of commentary on this game. It's very short, it's straightforward to play, it's memorable. I wouldn't call it greater than plenty of less celebrated works that I've played. But perhaps to some extent it's a victim of its own success.
So... many... words..., February 16, 2022I'm a philosopher by profession, so I really had little choice but to play this. It does mean that I'm one of the few people (according to the game, at least) to know the two meanings of "grue" (I suspect there's a fair bit of overlap in the Venn diagram of those two groups, though, to be honest).
I did enjoy this game. But I didn't enjoy it as much as I hoped I would.
The main positive: this game is genuinely funny a lot of the time. There are some marvellous ideas and images in it. I especially laughed at the idea of Thomas Nagel as a mad scientist desperately dissecting bats while muttering "What is it like?!", and the notion of an argument in a museum about Theseus' Ship was excellent too. A lot of the dialogue options are very funny, poking fun at both the philosophical ideas and at the mechanics of the game itself.
Also, the idea of implementing a "think about..." command to deliver more serious information about the philosophical ideas under discussion is a good one. Most of the information here is sound and well presented.
But as it went on, I did find myself focusing more on the negatives, alas:
"Verbose" is something we often find ourselves typing in IF, but you don't really know the meaning of the word until you play this game. There's a *lot* of text. In itself, I don't mind this, if it adds immersion; but in this game it doesn't really, because of the way the writing dwells so much on the artificiality of the scenario. Often crucial details in room descriptions are too easy to overlook among all the words. It made me yearn for the days of Zork, when so much could be conveyed so sparingly.
Relatedly, the game really thinks it's hilarious. Really, really thinks it, and wants to tell you so. As noted above, it sometimes is, and there's a lot of wit to enjoy along the way, but the way the game never loses an opportunity to tell you how clever and knowing it is makes playing it feel a little like watching a marathon showing of every Mel Brooks film ever made, back-to-back. The authors might have heard of the saying "sometimes less is more" but clearly considered it to be another koan designed to defeat logic, and ignored it.
Then there are the puzzles. This is very much a puzzle-based game. Some are difficult, and I had to search out online help for a couple. There are so many puzzles in here that everyone will probably find one or two that will appeal. I thought that (Spoiler - click to show)the experience machine was rather clever. However, this was the only one, really, where the solution to the puzzle did depend, in a way, on thinking through the actual thought experiment it's based on. For the most part, the different thought experiments in the game just provide characters or scenarios where you need to provide an object and be rewarded with another object.
These fetch quests often don't make much sense. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)why does the librarian reward you with a banana? Why does Aristotle reward you with a copy of the works of *Plato*? Why are the prisoners in Plato's cave wearing ear muffs? Why do you get the Ding an Sich from an unnamed Martyr (rather than from Kant, which would make more sense)? and so on.
Moreover, many of the puzzles are rendered harder by the often poorly implemented parser. This is noticeable right from the first puzzle, the Chinese Room itself, where (Spoiler - click to show)"read manual" doesn't do anything useful, but "use manual" does. Similarly, trying to describe what the person in the Chinese Room is supposed to do - e.g. "compare cards to manual" - doesn't work. I found many cases where obvious synonyms aren't implemented: (Spoiler - click to show)"wine” doesn’t work for “bottle” (though “claret” does); “book” doesn’t work for the works of Plato; you can “fix” the lantern but not “mend” it; the prisoners in the cave are “people”, but not “prisoners”; you have to “hang burden on horn” - “put burden on horn” or “hang burden from horn” don’t work; you have to “look through qualiascope at Socrates” – “look at Socrates through qualiascope” doesn’t work; "put veil on guard” works, but “put veil over guard” doesn’t; “enter tower” doesn’t work – you have to “go up”; in the time machine, “dials” is interpreted as referring to its mechanism – you have to type “chrome dials” to interact with the actual dials; in the Turing Test, you can enter “Type 5” but you can’t enter “Type ‘5’”; and so on.
In addition to this, there are a number of oversights in the implementation, and outright bugs (apart from the quite frequent typos): (Spoiler - click to show)you can still talk to the librarian about the lack of Plato’s works in the library, even after giving them a copy; you can still get the librarian to fetch the encyclopaedia even after you’ve acquired it; the laptop appears in the description of Mary’s room even after you’ve taken it; there's a bug in the conversation with the trees, causing an error message to appear after some dialogue lines; the Categorical Imperativator seems to guide you through the maze even if you’re no longer holding it when you enter; it seems to be impossible to take the Categorical Imperativator out of the sack once you’ve put it in; the first key in the tower can be examined, but the others can’t; and so on. Strangely, and frustratingly, I found at one point that a vital object that I had acquired simply disappeared. I don't know whether it vanished from my inventory, or whether I left it lying around somewhere and it was taken, but I had to restart the game.
Some elements aren't really made the most of. (Spoiler - click to show)The idea of the qualiascope is brilliant, but it always gives the same response when pointed at anyone other than the person who is actually a zombie. Wouldn't it have been more fun to have custom responses for each person? I'm also not convinced by it philosophically; since a zombie by definition does everything that a real person does, including act as if they have qualia, it seems to me that the qualiascope should register a false positive when pointed at them. But, conceivably, I'm nitpicking now.
Notably, it is possible to make the game unwinnable. It is also possible to die by making the (unflagged) wrong choice at one point without any warning. But one can always UNDO, although the game oddly doesn't explicitly offer you this choice at these times.
So, more broadly, what do I think of this game as a philosopher? Well, I think the idea of philosophy IF is fruitful. In fact it seems to me that there's a genuinely interesting piece of IF to be written about philosophical thought experiments, particularly ones in ethics. For example, to take the most famous thought experiment of all (which surprisingly does not appear in The Chinese Room), imagine a game where you are forced to choose whether to let the trolley kill five people or divert it to kill one, and the game lets the consequences of this play out and makes you experience them. But this isn't that game. It is, instead, for the most part a tremendously convoluted fetch quest (as it is happy to admit itself). The whole philosophy theme really just provides the scenery for basic fetch quests rather than informing the structure of the puzzles. One can't usually actually try out different answers to the thought experiments. (And on the rare occasions when you can, the wrong answer just leads to instant death.)
I was a little puzzled by some of the material included. I'm not sure that Plato's cave is really a thought experiment (it's an analogy), or the koan about the tree falling in the forest. Thought experiments are meant to be imaginary scenarios with questions about them, such that answering the question tells us something about our intuitions. But still, these are venerable philosophical ideas, so they fit perfectly well into the theme of the game. One can't, though, say the same about the invisible pink unicorn, which looms pretty large in this game. Unlike all the other references, this isn't from academic philosophy, but is a meme used in popular online polemics about religion. So its inclusion feels rather out of place. (The game is careful to stress that Ayn Rand isn't a "proper" philosopher, after all.) Wouldn't it have fitted the theme better to use Russell's teapot, which has a bit more philosophical heritage? Indeed, I'd have liked to see some more balanced treatment of philosophy of religion here (it would have been fun to see Plantinga's Five Minutism dramatised, for example). But I suppose that, being a philosopher of religion myself, I'm bound to think it's always badly handled at the popular level.
The game reminded me a little of All Hope Abandon, which also overlaps with my academic expertise (is there an evil demon constructing IF specifically for me?). All Hope Abandon is a very different kind of game, since although it has jokes too it intersperses them with more serious elements. I preferred that approach; I think The Chinese Room tries too hard to just be funny. The more serious "think about" material does a good job of showing why the stuff being lampooned does matter, but as I've suggested, I can't help feeling that some opportunities have been missed to dramatise some of these philosophical scenarios more fully in a way that might show the player, rather than tell them, what they're really about.
So overall: there is fun to be had here, as long as you don't mind a fairly mechanical set of get-object-give-object puzzles, a sometimes frustrating parser, and an occasionally slightly unpolished feel.
Brilliantly ingenious mechanic, February 15, 2022This is an excellent game, with a really strong central premise that opens up a whole world of intriguing possibilities. Playing this shortly after Counterfeit Monkey inevitably raised comparisons with that game: Impossible Bottle is much smaller, and part of the fun here is working out the mechanic for yourself rather than being instructed in it, but it's similar in that once you understand how it works there are all sorts of crazy experiments you can try.
I'm not great at puzzles, but I solved all of them myself apart from (Spoiler - click to show) getting into the bottle, for which I did have to rely on the very well implemented hint system. I think I simply hadn't appreciated the sheer scale of the central conceit! I do feel that some of the puzzles are rather unintuitive, but the writing is charming enough that it gets away with it.
I like to interpret all the weird goings on as taking place in the protagonist's imagination, but of course you could read it differently...
Tremendous fun, December 27, 2021I had more fun playing this game than almost any other IF title I can remember. The game is in some ways stripped to its bare bones: most planets are a single location; most characters have only a single piece of dialogue; you cannot examine anything. All of this makes actually playing the game a lot pleasanter than you'd think. No need to keep on examining, for example - the information you need is all there already. Interactions are limited to talking to people, taking, selling, or buying objects, and one or two other rarely-used actions.
The travel system in this game is rather brilliant. You need only "jump" (or "go") to any planet whose name you know. New locations are learned simply by talking to characters. There are surprisingly many of them, all described tersely yet very evocatively, with considerable imagination.
Achieving the main goal isn't tremendously hard, but scoring all of the achievements takes a lot more exploration and ingenuity. Despite its claim to shallowness, this game is extraordinarily immersive, and I can't recommend it highly enough.
Grunk!, December 25, 2021This game very short game, but it have Grunk. Any game with Grunk good game. Grunk not need do much thinking in this game, so not too many star, but still, it have Grunk, so still good.
A great bit of hokum, March 7, 2012As the other reviews make clear, this is a witty and entertaining game. It's certainly not the hardest game you'll play.
There are a number of particularly nice touches, beyond the clever setting and the splendid use of language. One is (Spoiler - click to show)the series of "alternate endings" you can see with the EASTER EGG command - a lot of fun. A more substantial strong point is the originality of the puzzles. I particularly liked the fact that the apparently obvious solutions to the various problems aren't, at all. (Spoiler - click to show)For example, you don't use the coffee to wake the preacher, you don't use the meat to distract the dog, and you don't use the key to open the cell door.
I did, however, encounter some bad guess-the-verbiage. (Spoiler - click to show)I worked out quickly that I should fix the stool with the tube, but finding the right choice of words for this took a long time - especially as I had used "fix" before and the game seemed to understand it. But not for this. I also tried to examine the deputy once I'd knocked him out, eventually having to resort to hints to find that only the verb SEARCH would give the desired results. Worse still are some apparent bugs and inconsistencies. (Spoiler - click to show)Trying to do actions that the game won't allow sometimes results in it telling you that the object is out of reach in the office, even when you're holding it. Trying to touch the deputy when he's lying in front of the bars returns the same message, even though he's certainly not out of reach.
A more minor matter is that despite the great writing, it's not entirely consistent. It struck me that while the "error" messages are written in cowboyese, the rest of the narration is not, which is a little odd.
So the game could certainly use a bit of smoothening up. Despite that, it's a lot of fun, a bit more original than your standard escape puzzle, and consistently witty. Certainly a worthy competition winner.
Tough, nasty, guilty fun, November 16, 2009Broken legs is a gloriously written game, one that revels in the sheer vileness not only of its protagonist but of the world in which she dwells. This is a character who makes Varicella look like Francis of Assisi, and the basic idea of the game is much like Varicella: the loathsome PC must eliminate a series of equally loathsome rivals within a time limit. Rather than a struggle for political power between courtiers, however, this is something much more vicious: a group of teenage wannabe starlets competing for the last place at a prestigious stage school. Lottie, the protagonist, has screwed up her audition, so the only thing to do is to ensure that all her rivals do the same thing even more disastrously. And so the mayhem begins.
I don’t think I’ve ever played a game with a more over-the-top hateable main character: it both adds to the game (as an interesting experience) and detracts from it (you really don’t want Lottie to succeed, given that she’s the nastiest one of the lot). The game’s light touch and superb writing do much to make the nastiness fun, however. The author captures and parodies the ghastly valley speak, not to mention the two-faced bitchiness, of these would-be clean-cut starlets in such an exaggerated way that its basically humorous nature is never obscured. (Spoiler - click to show)The effect is enhanced still further by the glorious twist at the end, complete with the option to play through the game again with additional comments in the light of what we now know is really going on. It turns out that the wickedness of Lottie as revealed throughout the game is entirely fictional – but only because there is even greater duplicity at work. The world of this game is revealed to be even more fathomlessly nasty than we thought.
I found the game staggeringly difficult. Some of the methods needed to eliminate the rivals are decidedly hard to work out. That is, of course, as it should be, but some are harder than they need to be because of the fairly basic interaction system. Much of what you need to do involves getting other characters to do things for you, but the limitations of the ASK/TELL conversation system make it hard to do this. (Spoiler - click to show)I worked out, for example, that I needed to get Rosanna to lie to Kassie about the audition, but I couldn’t find any way to even suggest it to her. It turned out that I needed only to give her the memo. But it wasn’t obvious to me that it was merely a lack of the memo that was preventing her from telling the lie. One or two also seemed insufficiently clued to me. (Spoiler - click to show)When talking to Alexandra, the topic of her shoes and music never came up. In fact even after I knew, from reading the hints, that these were the key to defeating her, I never found a way to get her to talk about her music. And these items weren’t visible in the room. So without the explicit clues, I would never even have thought of focusing on them. However, the in-game hint system is a lot of fun and gives helpful hints. It still wasn’t enough for me, though, since I ended up using the walkthrough to see enough of the game to try to judge it fairly. And in this case, I’m glad I did, as I would never have solved most of these puzzles left to my own devices.
For me, the difficulty and rather random nature of many of the puzzles is a negative point against this game, although they may not be for others. Apart from that, though, the game’s gloriously nasty premise and excellent writing make it a very strong and enjoyable offering.
Enjoyable, but ultimately flawed, November 16, 2009I found it hard to evaluate this game. On the one hand, it’s very well written, the plot is engaging, it’s all well implemented, there are many striking images and it draws you in. On the other – well, I leave it feeling very dissatisfied with how it all turns out. (Note: the rest of this review contains unhidden *mild* spoilers - don’t read it if you want the playing experience to be totally unspoiled - I have of course hidden the more explicit spoilers.)
This is one of those games that puts you into a fairly clear situation, lets you play it for a while, and then it turns out that you’re not really in that situation at all. Personally I find this kind of approach not only rather cliched (it’s only a small step from waking up to find it was all just a dream) but also somewhat annoying: it takes energy to invest into believing in the situation that the game presents us with, and to be told that in fact this situation isn’t real after all can make you feel a bit cheated.
In the case of Snowquest there are definitely mitigating factors. Things that happen in one reality are mirrored in another. (Spoiler - click to show)The obvious example is the wolf in the initial story, who appears as Agent Wolf in the final one – and throwing a stick at him defeats him both times. The theme of “snow” is obviously constant throughout as well. However, I found the overall story quite baffling. This was especially so given that there seemed to be not two but three realities. (Spoiler - click to show)The first is the initial situation, which ends with the finding of the book. Then you’re taken back to the cave of the first part of the game, implying that all the stuff that just happened didn’t really happen; this ends with the finding of yourself in the plane. And finally there’s the “real” reality in the airport. It seems that the *second* of these two realities is shown to you by Wolf in an attempt to prevent you from flying off with the parcel. But what on earth is the first reality? Was it part of the hallucination, and if so, why did Wolf induce it? What purpose does this setting – which seems to be far in the future – have within the story as a whole? Why was the book hidden in such an odd way, and why was the skeleton held together with gold thread? Even the final explanations didn’t really explain very much. These things led to my being far more confused than enlightened at the end of the game. On reflection, what I find odd is that the initial scenario seems to be much better thought through, and generally fleshed out and interesting, than the final “reality” is. Is this deliberate? Perhaps, but it feels wrong.
Overall, the game plays well and the writing is good. It is pretty well implemented, although there are occasional annoying lapses (“examine mountain”, when you’re standing on it, doesn’t give a very helpful response). I found one very annoying “guess the verb” puzzle: (Spoiler - click to show)you are supposed to “turn” the bone when it is in the slot, but “move”, “push”, or any other action won’t work. Given that there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of logic to this scene to start with, it’s hard to see how one could be expected to guess that.
So I must admit that I found this game more frustrating than anything else, mainly because the longer it goes on, the less sense it seems to make. Perhaps this is deliberate and the game is meant to leave the player somewhat unsettled, but if so I’m afraid it didn’t do a great deal for me. The good implementation and writing, together with a story that is interesting (if increasingly disorienting), mean it gets a decent score for me, but the aforementioned problems (at least from my point of view) mean the score isn’t as high as perhaps it might have been.
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