Ratings and Reviews by JonathanCR
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Not really a game, but nicely done, October 11, 2022This is effectively a short story told through emails and press clippings. The role of the "player" is simply to read through them, following links within them to more short pieces of text. Reading through everything available causes the next email to come through with new pieces to read.
It's very slickly done. The music is atmospheric, and the pixellated art that accompanies the text does a good job of hinting without ever really revealing. The story behind it all is a simple one of space exploration gone wrong and its horrific after-effects.
So overall, some atmospheric writing and a short story told via "found" materials. It is very short, and there's no interactivity beyond simply clicking on the various links, but what's here is well done.
Tiny but haunting, May 30, 2022To call this a "game" is hardly appropriate - it's more a tiny world that you can move around, containing some objects you can look at. There are no puzzles or challenges at all, though there are some things to do with some of the objects. Since the author is entirely up-front about all of this from the start, one cannot really complain.
What this piece does offer is a small, beautifully described world that tells a story through the descriptions of the locations and the objects found in it. The writing is sparse but descriptive, set out in lines that give it a poetic feel. Often the game encourages you just to look and reflect. As you do so, the rhythm of the days becomes clear in quite an evocative way. Although it is small, this game will reward time spent in it.
Cute curio, May 30, 2022This is a multiple-choice game about getting up and going to work. The hook is that everything is told in emojis, including the player's choices. This is done rather well, and there are some nice jokes in there.
It's interesting to see a game where the challenge lies mainly in understanding the medium in which it's told, particularly when the story goes in rather unexpected directions. I don't think it's always successful, and the small size and limited nature of the game keep its rating fairly low, but it's a cute idea which is worth a look.
Frustrating, strange, uneven in tone, but weirdly gripping, April 28, 2022It puzzles me somewhat that Melbourne House's The Hobbit remains one of the best-remembered games of the 1980s (that's all games, not just text games), and yet their follow-up is rarely mentioned. The only notice of it here on IFDB is the very dismissive Baf's Guide review.
And yet it is, in a number of ways, far more ambitious and technically impressive than The Hobbit was. I bought this game when it came out and - once I'd looked past the dreadful cartoony cover - was deeply impressed by it. With its stark white backgrounds, its clever layering of screens to show which character was under your control, and its glacial response time, it seemed a technical masterpiece. I didn't get very far with it.
Returning to it now, I find that in a number of ways the IF versions of The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings bear the same relation to each other that the books do. This game is bigger, more complicated, and far weirder than its predecessor.
The first thing to say, of course, is that with this game we are in the 1980s and the usual rules apply. You are expected to have to play this game many, many times in order to learn what you're supposed to do in it. You are expected to make a map, and you will be aware that this may be a more complicated business than at first appears. The game is unfair and will punish simple mistakes or lack of knowledge with immediate death. Most objects cannot be "examined" and interaction with NPCs is rudimentary (some disappear in a puff of smoke after fulfilling their sole role in the game). So this is not an experience like any "modern" IF. But as long as one is aware of this from the outset, there are some interesting things to uncover here.
First, this is actually two games, not one, which roughly correspond to the first two books of The Lord of The Rings (which, as those of us who have read the preface know, is not a trilogy but a single novel divided into six books which were initially published in three volumes). You don't have to complete the first game in order to play the second, but if you do, you can bring more items from the first game into the second. Though thankfully you don't have to do that. Also, oddly, the first game is substantially harder than the second.
Next, we find that the NPC system which made The Hobbit so memorable (and frustrating) has been dialled up to 11. As before, your companions follow you around and sometimes do vaguely useful things, but now you can control them directly. Simply type the name of the hobbit you want to become, and off you go, like Dr Sam Beckett leaping from one to the other. The game gives you the option at the start of choosing which hobbits are controllable in this way, creating the somewhat odd possibility that you could choose to control only Merry; it's hard to see why anyone would choose anything other than just Frodo on the one hand or all four hobbits on the other. The game's manual rather charmingly suggests that this system makes multiplayer adventuring possible, with up to four friends sharing a computer and each controlling one character. It's hard to believe that anyone actually did this, and if they did, I doubt they stuck with it for long.
Despite this technical wizardry - which as far as I know remains unreplicated in modern IF - it's easier to restrict yourself to just Frodo, because the other hobbits act more intelligently if they are under sole control of the computer. There isn't really any point in using the multiple first-person system. Indeed I'm not sure it's possible to complete the first part of the game by doing so. (Spoiler - click to show)You need three hobbits to activate green jewels at the same time to defeat the Nazgul, but the other two will only do so if they are wholly out of your control. In any case, even controlling only one character still allows you to issue commands to the others, which can lead to some moderately complex gameplay (not to mention Hobbit Fight Club). However, there still isn't anything like the puzzle with the robot in Zork II. In the second half of the game, you get the entire Fellowship (except Aragorn, for some reason) following you around, and while this makes for some large segments of text as everyone troops around, it does rather feel like you really have a hefty bunch of adventurers at your beck and call (and combat with this lot behind you is more worthwhile than in the first game, though it can still lead to an alarming number of key characters getting their skulls cloven in two).
The next thing one realises with this game is that the map is impressively large. One of the complaints about The Hobbit was that Bag End appears to be practically next door to Rivendell. No such worries here. The Shire is as large and tricky to traverse as it is in the book, and substantial areas of wilderness are available to explore as well. You are not restricted to the locations in the book, either, particularly in the first part of the game. I know there's a school of thought that says that all locations in IF should have a purpose, and that there shouldn't be empty locations that are there just to make the map bigger. I'm not much persuaded by this school of thought, and the makers of this game clearly weren't, either, because there are an awful lot of places here that have no purpose except to be walked through. I rather like this, as it gives the impression of a large and real world.
Making the map is frustrating, though; connections between locations are unpredictable (if you go west from A to B, the way back isn't necessarily east). Because this is the 1980s there is a maze in the first game and *three* in the second. These are all mappable in the usual way, and clearly the game designers expect players to devote whole playthroughs to doing just this. Mazes are very out of fashion today, of course. Personally I don't mind them, at least if they make sense, and if I'm prepared (as one must be with games of this vintage) to do multiple playthroughs. There can be something satisfying about mapping them out and uncovering their secrets, like doing a crossword. Still, tastes here will certainly vary, and I think even the most avid maze fan will find four in one game a tad much. It doesn't reflect well on the designers' puzzle-creating ability that the same already-hackneyed device has to be re-used so many times.
Exploring is also made harder by the limited inventory size - although having companions helps with this - and by the fairly unfriendly parser (this was before the days when parsers unlocked things automatically for you). Notably, there are many objects with the same name and description, leading to terrible confusion; even getting everyone to put on the correct backpacks in Bag End is a true trial. Worse, though, is the quite brutal hunger system. You need to eat constantly, and many actions sap your strength dramatically. This applies to NPCs as well, and it's quite common to notice suddenly that one or more of your companions aren't with you any more, because somewhere along the way they fainted with hunger and are probably lying dead in a field somewhere. The greatest danger in the first game isn't the Nazgul so much as the Bucklebury ferry, operating which can reduce the entire party of hobbits to a state of complete exhaustion. So one of the things one must work out in the multiple playthroughs is which actions and locations will sap the characters' strength and where all the food is.
So what is this world like? This is where things start to get a bit weird. At first glance, the world of this game is large and sweeping, bleak, and rather forlorn - much like the book. You can wander through grey-tinged landscapes, broken ruins, and windswept plains. You can get truly lost in the mines of Moria. The world is dangerous and serious. And yet at the same time there is a strange streak of subversive humour running through the game that undermines the world. Anachronisms abound, right from the very first location, where the walls of Bag End are described as being adorned with photographs. There is an "old-fashioned gramophone" in Michel Delving. At these times, the world feels more like Zork than like Tolkien. Other elements feel very out of place too. (Spoiler - click to show) The whole Blue Mountains area, with its monastery and observatory, and its Green Knight and Red Lady from Authurian legend, is utterly out of place in Middle Earth.
That brings us to the jokes. Some are fairly subtle and in keeping with the setting, especially in the second half, where among other things we find that Boromir winding his horn is the new Thorin sitting down and singing about gold. But some are truly immersion breaking: (Spoiler - click to show)a cannabis plant, an elf doing a Spock impression, a group of Nazgul having a drink in a dingy bar, a "watery tart" in a lake, and a nightclub filled with characters rocking out to an orcish heavy metal band. All of these feel more at home in a parody such as Kingdom o' Magic. To find them in an actual licensed game bearing the Lord of the Rings name is deeply weird. It becomes apparent that the silly cover of the original box wasn't so out of place after all.
What of the story and the puzzles? Well, there aren't really all that many proper puzzles in here. Knowledge of the book will certainly help with some sections (as will knowledge of Arthurian stories, oddly). While it broadly follows the plot of the book, there are additional segments and areas. In the first half this takes the form of a rather tiresome sort of treasure hunt throughout the whole map. I suppose this was the fashion of the time in IF - from Colossal Cave onwards - but it doesn't really sit well with the overall plot or with Tolkien lore, and it doesn't make for fun gameplay either. At times it is impossible to guess what to do. (Spoiler - click to show)How, for example, would you know if you didn't have a walkthrough that you're supposed to get Merry to swim in the lake? The second half of the game is considerably more enjoyable. Here, you actually have a choice of how to cross the mountains. I had a lot of fun going off-piste here. (Spoiler - click to show) And the moment the avalanche struck - and wiped out the entire party other than Frodo, Pippin, and Gimli - was a true shock unlike any I've experienced in IF for quite a while. The tally of each character "(who is dead)" being swept away was astonishing. The randomness in things such as combat means that both the player and their companions are prone to dying, but as long as the player is still alive it's quite possible to lose most of the Fellowship and still keep going. It's an odd mix of brutal and forgiving.
Oh, and there are rather a lot of errors in the writing - mostly inconsistent capitalisation and punctuation.
So overall, this is a strange game. In some ways it gives you a surprising amount of freedom to explore the world, take paths untrodden in the books, and watch in stunned horror as Gandalf or Sam Gamgee get their skulls cloven in two. The first part takes you to some unfamiliar (and sometimes wildly inappropriate) settings, while the more enjoyable second half gives you alternative ways of reaching the ending and a big posse of imposing, if unintelligent, companions to help you get there. The multiple-character gimmick is interesting, if never really used to its full potential, while the sheer size of the world is impressive and makes some real exploration possible (especially in the first half - the locations are more linear in the second). At the same time, hindrances such as the horrible hunger system, multiple objects with the same name, inconsistent map directions, and random events block your progress. The immersion and depth promised by the expansive maps and often evocative descriptions is undermined, with apparently perverse deliberateness, by the anachronistic and outright parodic elements that stand out like a plaster nose on a Roman bust. And yet sometimes it rises above this to give the player some truly memorable moments, and if you give it the time that its designers intended players to take with it, it will yield rewards. It feels more dated than its Infocom rivals do today, but I think it deserves to be remembered.
Solid and polished, March 24, 2022It's hard to fault The Orion Agenda as far as its execution goes. It is well written, flows logically, has puzzles that make sense, always gives clues when you need them, and even has a storyline with a nice moral dilemma.
I have two issues with it, though. The first is that the world isn't really very fleshed out. The planet is described in pleasingly alien terms, but there isn't much to explore and examine as far as flora and fauna go. Most of the time on the alien world is spent trapped in a small village. The Orionites are very sketchily described, and seem to behave and talk much like humans. Their religion, which is important to the plot, is even sketchier. We have the names of some gods, some moral values, and a prophet. I'd have liked to see far more depth here. As it is, I didn't really feel immersed in an interesting alien world.
The second issue is that the game presents an interesting moral dilemma, but you're only able to make one choice. Wouldn't it have been more interesting to let either decision play out? The fact that doubts remain right to the end concerning the rightness of the decision sits uneasily with the fact that the player is railroaded into it.
So overall, this is a very competent game that offers a good storyline to follow and some well crafted puzzles along the way, but which doesn't feel like it quite does justice to its premise.
As beautiful and distant as the light of Vega, March 23, 2022I first played this game a while ago. And I think it's a testament to the writing and the design that I remember it clearly, and playing it again held no surprises - other than being delighted once again by the conceit and by the writing.
It is very like Dual Transform, also by Plotkin: a jewel of a game, tiny but perfect in its simplicity. Like that game, Heliopause hints at vast worlds to explore but delivers only a fraction of them; like that game, the sense of freedom conveyed by the clever writing conceals a short plot that runs entirely on rails. But again like that game, the writing is so beautiful, conveying so much with such economy, that it gets away with it.
I can see why some people don't like this game and others like it. There is something distant and clinical about it: its beauty is remote and grand, not personal and intimate. But I love this sort of thing. The story is simple but memorable; the settings are stark and evocative. I'd love to play a game like this that combined this kind of writing and imagery with true freedom and immense scope, but until that game appears, I'm very happy with ones like this.
Perfectly written, March 22, 2022I found this game deeply engrossing and immersive to a rare degree. This is partly down to the clever puzzle mechanic: it's unusual, but also quite intuitive once you get the hang of it, and it's deeply satisfying to try things out and find that they do work. I'm not very good at puzzles but I found the difficulty here just right.
But the evocative "locations" and beautiful writing are equally important. This game is a masterclass in how to write IF. Each location has just the right amount of description, coupled with background events, to conjure it perfectly in the mind's eye.
I would have loved a longer, more in-depth implementation of this, perhaps with whole Myst-style "worlds" rather than single rooms, and multiple objects to carry between them - but that would be a quite different sort of game. As it is, this one is perfect for what it is. (Though I do find the ending rather unsatisfying. *Is* there a sequel...?)
Tiny, haunting, beautiful, March 17, 2022The title of this game promises much, and it mostly delivers. This is, in a way, a one-move game. You simply have to select the components for your dragon and then launch it. Most combinations don't work, and you must try again until you find the right combination.
The writing is terse but excellent. The surreal setting is evoked well, and the descriptions of the available components are rather beautiful. A nice element is that once you have launched the dragon, any components you didn't use go on to interact with each other as the cosmos itself is reborn. The game describes both how the components of the dragon interact with each other and what the other items do. It's surreal but has its own strange logic.
It's a very short game, and probably won't take many tries to complete, but the prose and imagery may linger for much longer.
More fun than it has a right to be, March 11, 2022I enjoyed this more than I thought I was going to. If you're now instinctively thinking "That's what she said" then you're probably in the target audience for this game too. It has an over-long introduction, and there aren't really a whole lot of different ways that the encounter itself can go, but it's all so charmingly and daftly written that you can't help liking the meaty protagonist and his improbable adventure.
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.
A single idea, but a good one, November 16, 2009This is a very clever little game. It is one of those games that basically have a single puzzle. In this case there are a couple of things you have to do, but once you work out what’s going on, it’s not enormously difficult to do them. The tricky part is working out what’s going on. The best procedure if you are having difficulty with this is but don’t want to be told the answer outright is (Spoiler - click to show)to make a map, showing where you actually can and can’t go, and compare that to the map that is provided.
It is hard to say any more than that without spoiling the game.
The basic mechanic is very simple (if utterly confusing at first), and there is nothing really to the game other than this: no objects besides the couple involved in the puzzle, and not much else to look at along the way. The puzzle itself is short and the game does not take long to play at all once you twig. What content there is seems to be well implemented and I didn’t find any bugs.
Overall, then, this is a simple game that does little other than introduce an initially confusing but ultimately elegant mechanic and leave the player to work out what that mechanic is – but it does it very well indeed.
Good fun, some interesting ideas., November 16, 2009This is a fun if fairly short game. The setup is nothing too unfamiliar. You play a private eye, disgraced and penniless after a disastrous court case with an evil corporation. The evil corporation has now kidnapped your wife and is about to unleash a diabolical scheme of world domination. Naturally, only you can stop it.
The game is not enormously difficult, mainly because with each section completed, it is made fairly obvious where you need to go next and who you need to speak to. It’s mainly a matter of simply following the cues. One complication is that the game rather unexpectedly contains riddles! Which to my mind rather breaks the suspension of disbelief. I must also say that one of the riddles stumped me, and it seems that I wouldn’t ever have got it without using the hints as it required cultural knowledge that I lack (Spoiler - click to show)(when on earth is a hearse white? I’m going to guess Asia, but I used to live in Asia and I never saw a white hearse, so it can’t be that mainstream a reference).
However, the game also contains alternate routes to victory. Following the fairly clear cues as outlined above will take you through the “main” route. But you can also behave quite differently to find the “saboteur” route and, best of all, the “dancing man” route. I followed the walkthrough for the dancing man, but it would probably be possible to work it out without help – although a lot of experimentation, undoing, and restarting would probably be necessary. (At least this route doesn’t involve any riddles.) I found this way through the game to be very interesting. The “dancing man” route is so-called because it achieves victory without any deaths, leading to a happier victory – but as you go down the route, the game plays with what you’re doing. There has been much discussion of games where the player must do things that the player character would never do, or never have any reason to do, since the player has knowledge (perhaps derived from previous attempts at the game) which the PC should lack. This is certainly the case with the dancing man route through Resonance – but the game comments on it. As the game progresses and the PC does increasingly weird things the purpose of which is not immediately clear, other characters comment on it and wonder what is going on. The PC himself begins to act rather strangely, inexplicably literally dancing his way through the scenes and telling other characters he cannot be beaten.
I thought this very interesting, simply as a comment on how PCs behave when the player knows all the strange actions required for victory, and it added a lot to the game.
The game is well implemented and largely free of errors. There were one or two minor ones that I spotted. I got an error message when examining the cabinet. At one point I was told that I had dropped something, but in fact I had not. And there’s the occasional typo (e.g. “get his” instead of “get this”).
Overall: the game is fairly short and relatively easy. The main point of interest is that you can choose to follow the not-too-difficult route that is clearly cued, or strike off on your own and try to find one of the alternatives. Doing that leads to interestingly postmodern stuff along the way.
Baffling, capricious, but always entertaining., November 16, 2009This game is tremendous fun – at least, once you work out what’s going on. The game combines a ruthless logic with dazzling capriciousness. The best example comes in the introduction. The first part of the game introduces you to the game mechanics and explains what your task is going to be. As it turns out, however, you never perform that task at all. No sooner is the introduction over than the game takes a wildly different turn. You’ll still need the skills you learned in the introduction, but you won’t be doing what you thought you were going to be doing.
It quickly becomes apparent that the game revolves around word play of a kind very similar to that of the seminal “Nord and Bert”. Like that game, you change the world by changing the words that describe the world. Moreover, like that game, the action is extremely episodic. The tools you need to solve each scene are within that scene, and when you move to the next scene, you won’t take any with you.
There is a story, though, and there are even characters who appear in different scenes. (I especially liked the Earl himself.) Even having completed the game, however, I’m not entirely clear on the details of the story – but one gets the impression that it doesn’t really matter. Nothing in this game is to be taken seriously, even by the characters in it.
A very nice touch which brings this home is the “thought line”. This is displayed *after* the command prompt, and gives the PC’s thoughts on what has just happened – which are usually fairly sarcastic and pretty funny. I don’t think these thoughts are ever essential to the game, although they sometimes give vague hints. One slight annoyance is that the contents of the runebag are displayed in the thought line, which changes after you type the next command. That means that you might forget what those contents are after a couple of moves and have to check it again.
The puzzles are fairly logical – in a sort of a way – although tackling them can become fairly mechanical. When I couldn’t think what else to do, I found myself examining everything and then trying to manipulate pretty much every word I saw in a methodical way. Most of the time, however, it was easier to guess what to do, although it was not always clear why.
Negative points: there isn’t a great deal of freedom in this one. You can effect the transformations that are required to solve the puzzles, but no others. So the great promise of your world-altering abilities isn’t really met. You can’t take objects, only transform them. There is very much the sense that you are progressing through a set series of events rather than really controlling what’s going on. Similarly, you can TALK TO characters, but that’s it – you can’t specify subjects. In fact, this works well and keeps the story flowing – when the character stops being responsive you know it’s time to start changing objects. However, the game’s rails can sometimes work against it, especially when it is far from obvious even what you’re attempting, let alone how to do it. (Spoiler - click to show)Perhaps the worst example of this comes at the beginning, when you finish learning how to use the runebag, but Eaves won’t let you go into town until you’ve finished your training. What to do? In fact you’re supposed to turn the plants into pants, thereby driving Eaves mad and initiating the events that drive the actual adventure, but it’s not clear why you’d want to drive Eaves mad at all!
These negative points don’t really detract from the game. This is the kind of game it is, and it does it very well. All in all, a lot of fun and a genuinely funny game to boot.
Not for anyone lacking the patience of Job., November 16, 2009I don’t like giving negative reviews to things or being critical for the sake of it. But I thought it worth tackling this one fairly with the more constructive aim of giving some indications to the author about how to improve things.
If anyone else reading this is like me, they were captivated by Zork in their youth and made fumbling attempts to create their own games in imitation of it, but lacked the imagination or technical ability to produce anything remotely uncringeworthy. This game is those games, but in Inform rather than C64 BASIC. If you’re expecting a jolly, in-joke-filled nostalgia-fest, in the style of “Enlightenment” or “Janitor”, you can forget it. If you’re after a more serious retro-style cave crawl, in the style of “The adventurer’s museum”, you can forget that too. This one tries to recreate the world of Zork but without, it seems, either the imagination which made the early cave crawls such experiences or the wit to parody them amusingly. In fact it’s not merely completely humourless but lacks pretty much any kind of atmosphere or character whatsoever. And that is the first point I want to make: if you’re going to make a game, you need to have some kind of vaguely worthwhile story, or world, or experience to convey to the player.
We don’t get that here. The room descriptions are spartan to the point of meanness:
medium room
You are in a medium-sized room. Exits lead south and west.
A panel is on the wall.
Or:
big room
You are in a huge room. Souoth is a smaller room and hallways lead east and
west.
(That’s just one of the many spelling errors, which it would be tedious to list.)
The implementation is poor:
blue room
You are in a blue room. Exits lead east and south, and there's a glass wall to
the north.
A gray door blocks your way south.
A dial is on the wall.
>x glass wall
You can't see any such thing.
Or:
platform
You are on a small platform over spikes. The platform feels weak beneath you. A
bar leads out over the pit to the south and northwestt lies the maze.
A door leading southeast is here.
A rocky shelf is sticking from the wall.
The platform is collapsing!
>climb onto bar
You can't see any such thing.
>s
You realise that there's a hole blocking your way south.
The platform is collapsing!
You fall onto spikes!
You have died! You wake up in a random room!
It was that last one that finally exhausted my patience. (Spoiler - click to show)I did have a look at the walkthrough at this point, which revealed that what I should have typed was GET ON LEDGE (“climb onto ledge” or “up” or any other alternative wouldn’t have worked). Incidentally, that last room doesn’t really have a door leading southeast – that is actually the door leading northwest, but it seems to have the same description in both of the rooms it’s in. (You can’t go back through it though, for no apparent reason.) There are many other examples of this sort of sloppy implementation. As for the design of the game itself, I could also mention the maze (the rooms of which don’t have any descriptions at all, and which has no original features apart from its thankful shortness); the Room Of Pointless Death (my name), where pressing any button other than the right one will kill you; or the locked door puzzle where you must simply turn the dial next to the door until you hit the right number. There is one part where the game appears to be completely broken (Spoiler - click to show) where you are told that there’s an exit east, but you can’t go east.
The game gets some points for being competent and coherent marginally more often than not, but not many. In short, it feels like a practice game, written as a programming exercise. Its biggest flaw, though, is just a complete lack of imagination.
To the author: as I said at the start, I don’t want to be negative for the sake of it. The criticisms I’ve made are meant to point to questions about why one makes a game and puts it online for others to play. The game has to make sense and be reasonably playable by other people, and that means making sure that objects are properly implemented, that things mentioned in the descriptions can be appropriately manipulated, and that there aren’t points where only one particular form of words is accepted despite the existence of many other equally plausible ones for the same action. That’s just fundamental. Equally important, though, is having something worthwhile for people to play. The Zork games were great games because they took the player to an interesting world that was well described. If you use the Zork name, that’s what people expect. Even if you don’t, people will expect something that’s worth their time. A “big room” and a “medium room” with nothing of interest going on in them isn’t. If you try writing something more original or simply more imaginative in general, and testing it properly, you might well produce something worth playing, but I’m afraid this isn’t it.
A great opening., October 1, 2009I loved this. The main gimmick of the game is its dual setting: you are telling a story to your small son. A nice touch is that the prompt is "The prince then " - inviting you to finish the sentence (in either the past tense, to match the prompt, as if you are really speaking your move to your son, or the present tense, in standard text game format).
Now at first I thought that this was a cute gimmick but nothing more. But in fact the story-telling setting is neatly woven into the whole game. After typing a move, for example, the game may describe what happens in the standard way (in "your" voice - this is what you're saying to your son), and then add the boy's comments. Often the boy decides what happens next, even overriding "your" description of the action. There are points where he takes control of the story quite drastically. The effect of this is that very unpredictable things happen in the story, but while this highlights the unrealistic nature of the story *that you're telling* (about the prince), it actually helps to make the story *that you're in* (about the father and son) much more immersive and believable. When you play this game, you don't believe in the prince and his adventures, but you do believe in the father and son making up the story about the prince. And you care about the prince, despite his obvious unreality, because the father and son care about him, and the telling of his story is an important part of their bonding.
In short, then, what might be a cutesy gimmick is actually a clever and charming technique that draws you into a story in a way that often eludes games that make far more effort for "believability". It is funny, but the humour is not just about jokes, but serves the deeper purpose of fleshing out the characters of the father and son (and the mother) and their relationships. The game as it stands has basically a single, not-too-hard puzzle before its disappointingly premature ending. I give it only a 3 because it is only an introduction, but it is a spectacular introduction and I would absolutely love to play a full-length version of this. I can easily see how more serious aspects of the family relationships hinted at in the introduction could emerge in a longer story, making this potentially quite a thoughtful and moving piece as well as a very entertaining one.
More thoughtful than it at first appears, September 21, 2009This is one of the stranger ideas I've ever seen for a game, but it's a lot of fun. A nice twist here is that most of the pleasure of this game comes from *not* completing it. Winning is dead easy, but it's more interesting to have a look around first. The NPC is enjoyably unpleasant and both the PC and the absent artist are given a lot of character - or at least, a lot is hinted at.
A couple of striking points about this game, which I'll hide not because they're really spoilers but because working these things out is part of the enjoyment: (Spoiler - click to show)The game appears to be set in the distant future, at least given that Britney seems to have been visiting the moon and the PC is apparently purple. I thought this interesting given that there is nothing overtly SF about the setting at all - apart from the talking fish, of course, which I initially assumed was a sort of whimsical fantasy element rather than a SF one. Perhaps it is and the SF elements have got absolutely nothing to do with it. (Spoiler - click to show)I think this is the first game I've played where the PC is gay and this makes no difference to the plot. That's also very refreshing.
Practically perfect, September 21, 2009I can't really add much to what has been said about this game already, except to say that I simply found it virtually perfect. The writing is absolutely beautiful, consistently funny, and often surprisingly moving. That is partly because Grunk, as a character, has such integrity and believability. Although presented as incredibly dense, the way he describes locations and objects, often incorporating quite shrewd observations along the way, suggests that he's not all that stupid at all. That gives him depth and emotional resonance. It must be said also that by having Grunk narrate the game in its entirety offers a neat approach to the problem of who the parser is supposed to be, and whether the narrator of the game is a different person from the PC. This game solves that problem by identifying the PC with the narrator, although at the cost of distancing the player from the PC (if Grunk is telling me what's going on, I'm clearly not Grunk, just in case I'd had any uncertainty on that score). There's no emotional distancing though, because Grunk is so engaging a personality.
The puzzles are nicely logical and the gnome NPC has a dry, educated wit that meshes perfectly with Grunk's rather more straightforward approach to life. There are a truly vast number of things you can ASK GNOME ABOUT, most of which have no bearing on the game itself, although some of course contain vital clues. It's a lot of fun to explore these topics, although this can result in the gnome seeming a bit like one of those information-dispenser sort of NPCs who are inexplicably willing to be grilled at length by over-curious PCs. But the gnome's sardonic wit and the fact that he's busily doing other things whilst satisfying Grunk's curiosity make him much more than a talking pedia.
The pig also has a lot of character, making this whole thing rather like one of those children's books that adults can also enjoy. I liked the author's attention to detail, which often brought out extra little elements of the characters (e.g. try taking your trousers off in front of the pig). I must admit that having apparently completed the game I was puzzled by how to gain the elusive last point and looked it up fully in the hints. I rather wished I hadn't, not only as it would have been more fun to work out by myself, but also because the behaviour required to get the last point is the sort of behaviour that I instinctively engage in when playing this sort of game anyway, but generally don't bother, because it seems not to matter. The fact that it mattered in this game says a great deal about it. This is a game with heart.
A beautifully engaging puzzle, September 21, 2009I don't normally like puzzle games, partly because I like to be immersed in a believable world and puzzles are intrinsically unrealistic, but mainly because I'm not very good at them. This one, however, is one of the most beautiful and satisfying puzzles I've encountered, simply because it is so logical. Everything in it flows neatly, and once you've understood how the set-up works and the sort of thing that you need to do, it is simply a matter of making it so. Each time I played, I managed to overcome the latest obstacle, only to find a new one; each time, again, the solution to the new obstacle was generally not too hard to work out once I'd got used to the way that this world worked. (Spoiler - click to show)I must add that I especially loved the problem of the battery, which I solved almost instantly and was delighted to find that my solution worked perfectly - this made me feel clever, which is not something that often happens when I play puzzle games. The constant replaying in light of new information sounds tedious but in fact replaying each time, carefully taking into account the new problem that had to be overcome while still doing what had to be done to account for the ones encountered before, was enormously satisfying. It is like putting together a series of simple, overlapping themes, one by one, and ending up with a complex symphony.
I thought that the small world of the game is believably structured and described, and that everything is implemented extremely well. The basic conceit of the game - (Spoiler - click to show)having to move around and perform actions at the same time as your earlier self, also moving around and doing things, while avoiding meeting her - must have been a nightmare to code, but everything seemed exactly as it should be to me. I also liked the fact that there are somewhat different paths to victory. (Spoiler - click to show)The walkthrough had the player setting the bomb and then using the time machine for a second time to go back a bit and leave, avoiding the explosion. I, however, did it differently, setting the bomb immediately before using the time machine the *first* time, and doing all the stuff I needed to do and escaping just before it went off. So I only travelled in time once.
There are some flaws with the game. I think the greatest is simply its believability - not because of the SF elements, but because of the implausibility of what your character knows. Paul O'Brian mentions this in his review. There are various items in the complex that the PC needs to take in order to win. In order to take those items, the PC must engage in rather complex and carefully timed behaviour (to put it mildly). The way she acts (on the winning scenario), she absolutely must know precisely what she's doing and be acting with considerable foresight. (Spoiler - click to show)For example, pressing the button for the upstairs door, knowing that her future self will be standing there to walk through it. But of course if she knew all that in advance she might as well just bring some of these things with her and not have to jump through hoops to find them in the complex. I must admit, however, that I don't really find that a serious problem with this game. The game is, above all, a puzzle. Its purpose is not to immerse you in a completely believable world (although of course it must meet minimal believability criteria if the world is to function logically enough to work as a puzzle, and it passes this test with flying colours). When I actually played the game, I didn't care in the slightest that the PC couldn't know this or should be doing that. All I cared about was *me* solving the puzzle that was presented to *me* in the game, and I enjoyed doing that enormously.
Also a word about puzzle-solving here. I saw some reviews that complained about having to write down lots of information in order to complete the game - like mapping Zork, but mapping the timing of events rather than the locations of rooms. I didn't do any of this. As I worked out the solution to the puzzle there were one or two key times that I needed to remember, but I didn't find any need to write them down. Admittedly I used brute force for one part of the puzzle. (Spoiler - click to show)The problem of how to break the glass without making my earlier self hear the alarm had me stumped for a bit, until I realised that I could just wait until my earlier self used the time machine, and then break the glass with impunity. To do this elegantly I should have replayed, noting down the time when I used the machine. In fact I just waited a few turns, tried breaking the glass, undid when I lost as a result, waited a few turns, and so on until breaking the glass did not result in a lost game. Again: unrealistic, of course, but it didn't matter (in my opinion) because I'd worked out how to solve the puzzle, and that's the main thing. So I would say that those who fear mapping or who don't fancy having to write lots of stuff down to complete a game needn't fear this one. You very much have to keep your wits about you and be able to visualise what's going on, and detailed logging might help, but it's hardly essential.
Do the Bultmann, August 19, 2009After seeing the previous review I had to give this a go myself, since I'm a theologian too (not a New Testament scholar, but I know enough about that to appreciate the jokes). Perhaps the audience for theological text games is larger than one might think?
The game does a hilarious job of satirising trends in academic theology (well, I thought it was hilarious anyway). The basic joke is that the spiritual world has to adapt to match theological trends, so when our protagonist dies of boredom during a lecture on Mark's Gospel, he finds that hell is being closed down to conform to "demythologisation". Admittedly the satire is rather blunted by the datedness of the target (Bultmann's famous essay on demythologisation was written in the 1940s, and this sort of thing hasn't been top of the theological agenda for some decades) but I think we can live with that.
Despite the humorous style (I especially liked (Spoiler - click to show)the theology exam from hell - this actually gave me uncomfortable flashbacks to my own finals) there are some sections with more serious and even moving overtones. The recurring theme of the Empty Tomb makes that inevitable. (Spoiler - click to show) I found this especially so with the Golgotha scene, where you must inscribe words onto the cross of Christ. I'm not certain if this mixing of moods is confusing or adds depth; it is probably down to individual taste.
How does the game play? It is extremely episodic. For the most part, you move from area to area without going back, and often without carrying objects over. This can feel quite disjointed, and there seems to be little logic in what scene follows what. That, is perhaps, deliberate. (Spoiler - click to show)It is, after all, a stumble through the landscape of someone's mind. It also makes the game quite a fun series of discrete puzzles; you don't have to worry about what's already happened, or worry that you should have brought some object that you missed. But it can also feel quite illogical. (Spoiler - click to show)It is odd to re-enact the resurrection and then shortly afterwards come to the scene of the crucifixion!
The puzzles are variable in difficulty, of course, but I found some of them hard without using the hints. There are a number of guess-the-verb issues. (Spoiler - click to show)You are told that you cannot MOVE the statue's hair, but you are still expected to PULL it. That's annoying. Also, COMMANDing the stone to move doesn't work, but TELLing it to do so does. I have to say that some are rather badly clued as well. (Spoiler - click to show)In the empty tomb, you are told that this is *Mark's* version of the story - so you can't appeal to an angel to move the stone, since that doesn't happen in Mark. I thought that this must mean that the young man in a white garment, who appears in Mark, was relevant, and spent some time trying to work out how to acquire such a garment. It turned out that I was supposed simply to tell the stone to move. But that doesn't happen in Mark either!
The sheer fun of the game, not to mention the audacity of a game that revolves around theological jokes, overcome these issues enough to make this a 4 for me. The writing is very good throughout, and the world is extremely well implemented (being able to examine not only the characters in pictures, but the objects they are holding, is pretty impressive). The hints are also excellently done, revealing the solution suitably gradually.
A surprisingly thoughtful piece., August 6, 2009One of the most interesting things about playing text games, in my view, is the way in which problems that are relatively small or unimportant in the grand scheme of things become far more significant when *you* are the one faced with them. Often, a problem that, were it to feature in a conventional story, might not interest us, can become all-consuming in a text game, where if the writing is strong enough and the puzzle well-paced enough, we can feel something of the protagonist's fear or frustration.
Oddly, I found this more true in this game than in any other I've yet played. The game falls into three main sections. The first is a time-based challenge: you must get fed before you collapse from hunger. The second is less constrained, and allows you to roam about in search of more satisfying food. And the third is another time-based challenge, this one more serious than the first.
The game gets progressively harder as it goes on, and it starts off pretty hard. As other reviewers have commented, some of the puzzles are not fiendish so much as virtually unguessable (although I was pleased to figure out by myself what was, in retrospect, probably the most outlandish of them - (Spoiler - click to show)tying the cat food tin to the balloon, taking it onto the roof, and dropping it in the direction of the boy). This can be especially frustrating in the second part of the game, where you must solve a variety of puzzles in order to get to the coveted soft food, but it is not always clear what your goal in each puzzle is, or why solving it matters, or indeed what's going on at all.
There is also an uneasy tension between your limitations and goals as a cat and the uncatlike intelligence you must show in overcoming the limitations and attaining the goals. The game itself shows awareness of this; show an object to the Provider, and he looks puzzled at the fact you're carrying it around, as well he should if you're just an ordinary cat. This comes to the fore in the final part of the game, where you must do things that clearly no cat would ever do, and rely upon knowledge that not only would no cat know, but this cat apparently doesn't know either ((Spoiler - click to show)the cat does not know that the liquid dripping from the car is petrol - it doesn't even know that it's a car - but you must still soak the shirt in it in order to make a fire). But even in the same sequence, the cat is sometimes characterised as a typically amoral, food-obsessed feline ((Spoiler - click to show)in one grim possible ending, you simply eat your stricken Provider, the game commenting dryly that he remained a Provider right to the end).
It must be said that the game also suffers from a fair few technical problems and unrecognised words. Trying to fill a container at the stream, for example, is greeted with the response that there is no water here. At one point I attempted to do something with my claws, to be told that I needed to be holding them first. It is also odd that a game with an unusual protagonist doesn't allow you to examine yourself, although some self-description is included in the inventory. It doesn't seem to recognise "it". Finally, there are one or two spelling mistakes (including one in a location description, which is annoying).
So why four stars, given these flaws? It's partly because of how well written the game is. There is understated humour in the descriptions and narrative, which presents everything precisely as a cat *would* think of it. The kitchen is simply the "food room", where the only object of any interest is the cat's bowl. A chair becomes a "lumpy mountain", the main interesting feature being its impressive collection of scratch marks. Cars are shiny beasts and cat food tins are eggs. But the game doesn't go overboard with this; the balloon, for example, is described as simply that. Moreover, the prose is admirably restrained, and despite the humour, never comes across as overtly funny. There is a starkness and seriousness to the game which matches the feline protagonist perfectly, and which is reflected in the snowy landscape surrounding the house, which is largely hostile to the cat. The only character who seems happy, the boy behind the fence, remains largely unseen. The cat begins the game starving, there is a brutal Rival roaming about, and the Provider is not well at all.
That leads into the other reason for a high score. The end game is, in some respects, annoying and frustrating. As I have commented, it forces the player to behave in distinctly uncatlike ways, and the difficulty of the puzzles does not let up. But it captures the attention like nothing else I have played. The time constraint now seems far more serious than that used in the first part of the game, with failure a much scarier prospect. There are various ways to fail the end game, all rather grim and depressing, despite the relative lack of care that the cat displays in them (which, as previously mentioned, clashes somewhat with the attitude that the cat must display when under the player's control). Finally, even the victory text is understated, rather sad, and poignant, despite the upbeat end. Despite the thinness of the characterisation of the Provider (as is only right, given that the cat cares only that he provides), I cared very much about what happened to him and the cat. That is why, for me at least, this is not just a strangely powerful and memorable game, but also a successful piece of interactive fiction. It demonstrates the power of the genre to make us care about situations and characters by making us part of them, in a way that could never work in any other genre.
Solid stuff, July 31, 2009This is a fairly straightforward game, but one which is fun to play. The plot: in the aftermath of an alien occupation of earth, you - a mercenary type person - have stolen one of their ships to investigate a mysterious and possibly valuable object in the solar system. The object turns out to be a huge space station. You must explore it, discover its secret, and return to earth before the thing enters earth's atmosphere and is destroyed. Shades of Rendezvous with Rama here, with a few twists.
The game is well implemented, with good writing. There are a few welcome humorous twists, although the attempt to marry different tones and styles doesn't always work. The introduction, for example, with its cavalier account of the liquidation of much of earth's population, and the amusingly disgusting ship piloted by the PC, suggests a setting of black humour. However, the bulk of the game, and especially the revelation of the nature and origin of the space station, seems grimmer and less in keeping with the introduction.
The game is not very long, and follows quite a linear progression, so there isn't great freedom to do your own thing - but the story flows in a way that makes sense, so this isn't a great handicap. The puzzles are pretty simple and shouldn't keep you guessing for too long. In fact the only part I had difficulty with was the final sequence, which is also fairly straightforward but much harder to do right - much saving and restoring required here. I encountered an odd bug with restoring saved games, in which a great deal of extraneous text was displayed after each move, but the game was still playable and this may have been a problem associated with iPhone Frotz, which I played it on, rather than with the game itself.
All in all, there's nothing groundbreaking here, but it's a decent game that should prove a pleasant diversion for an hour or two. It doesn't do a great deal, but what it sets out to do, it does well.
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