Reviews by Matt Wigdahl

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Dragon's Pass, by Wade Clarke

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Strong tech and writing demo, January 3, 2022
by Matt Wigdahl (Olathe, KS)

This bite-sized game is a very nice tech demo and a brief sample illustrating the high quality of Wade's writing. For more of an introduction to Wade's interactive fiction craft, it would be better to check out the award-winning Six or his less kid-oriented Leadlight Gamma.

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Hadean Lands, by Andrew Plotkin

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
Advancing the Art of the Parser Puzzler, January 7, 2015
by Matt Wigdahl (Olathe, KS)

“O son, how many bodies have we to pass through, how many bands of demons, through how many series of repetitions and cycles of the stars, before we hasten to the One alone?”Hermes Trismegistus

Hadean Lands is a fantastic game in the parser-based format / puzzlefest genre -- so good, and so groundbreaking in its new technology and affordances, that it's easy to overlook the few flaws it does have.

But let's start with the great, because there's plenty to cover! In Hadean Lands, Andrew Plotkin does a whole lot of things well and some things surpassingly well. Spare, precise prose makes the granular actions of his alchemy-based magic system pop off the screen. When you attempt a new ritual, components fizz, liquids simmer, substances transmute and transform, and there's a consistent sense of meaningful participation and accomplishment in working through the ritual steps.

Hadean Lands is a strongly puzzle-oriented work, and although most puzzles fall into the "how can I open this / how can I reach this" subgenre, I found them to be appropriately tough, reasonably diverse, and fair; I never needed hints, but I did hang up on a few obstacles for a while and needed to sleep on them to come up with fresh approaches.

There are four real "challenge factors" in this game, roughly corresponding to the player's progression through the game:

1. Learning the ritual magic system and gaining knowledge about the world model. This is done through gathering reagents, performing rituals and ritual variations, and exhaustive exploration including examining everything you can see with the oculus and planetary lens.

2. Standard IF puzzles, mostly consisting of finding appropriate means to access items, open doors, etc. Most of these puzzles involve proper application of a single ritual (possibly selected from among two or three viable possibilities), or directly applying the end product of a previous ritual. (Spoiler - click to show)It is interesting to note that almost all puzzles in Hadean Lands are solved via ritual either directly or indirectly at one remove. The only non-ritual-powered puzzle I can think of was figuring out how to properly light the swamp pith and blackwood.

3. A resource-management metagame where sequences of rituals must be deployed in the proper order and using proper component choices in order to pass multiple challenges and thus unlock access to more of the ship.

4. Attempting to understand what needs to be done to repair the ship once you have sufficient knowledge and power, and then completing the game.

An immediate and surprising conclusion I drew from this analysis is that one could completely remove the detailed ritual magic system and replace it with an Enchanteresque or Reliques of Tolti-Aph-like spells-with-optional-components system and still leave the game with pretty much all the actual puzzles intact, albeit without all the time spent slaving over a glowing ritual bound. You'd remove most of the first challenge category, but not all of it, and you'd significantly compress the flow of the game.

I don't think that would have been a better design, but it would certainly have been possible, and reveals the ritual magic system as a rich and absorbing but ultimately inessential minigame that is mostly present for the great deal of flavor and pacing it provides.

Several reviewers have mentioned the complexity of the interrelated resource-management puzzles in the mid-to-late game. Ironically, I found myself needing more notes in the early- and mid-game than I did toward the end. I found it much easier to keep track of critical (or, more accurately, consumable) reagent dependencies in my head than to remember all the inaccessible locations and containers to which I still needed to return. Once I had wangled access to most areas, I found myself referring to my notes much less often.

One of the best storytelling features in Hadean Lands is the smooth transition from the granular to the general, as the task of laboriously mastering individual rituals to overcome single obstacles gradually gives way to fluent performance of multiple rituals with a single command in the pursuit of much greater goals. This generates a strong, organic sense of qualitatively increasing power and competence that I have not encountered in any other IF title, and in few other games period. This alone would be a tremendous achievement in storytelling, powered by true advancements in IF technology, but there's much more going on here than just that.

The technical virtuosity of the reset mechanic and what I will call the macro replay system are extremely impressive. These systems feel fully integrated and comprehensive, as if they were part of the I7 standard library. Unfortunately, the very few seams visible in the replay system are somewhat obtrusive given its near perfection.

The issues I found related to (Spoiler - click to show)the gold rod in its phlogisticated and unphlogisticated states. For some reason, I could never get the game to automatically use the elemental fire on the gold rod to make the fire-devourer potion, even when I performed it that way manually. There were also roadblocks when trying to fashion the gold amalgam wire, even when all the components were present and accounted for.

Both of these new systems work together to greatly improve the playability of the game, and they do so in two distinct ways -- by lowering the barrier to destructive experimentation, and by minimizing the consequences of recovering from errors.

The alchemical flavor of the ritual magic system dictates that some components be consumed or transform irreversibly. As has been noted in other reviews, the reset system allows you to freely experiment without fear of losing items permanently. A given experiment may result in a viable potion or a pile of fuming gunk (unfortunately, usually a pile of fuming gunk). In both cases, the reset mechanism is valuable. In the event of success, reset enables you to lock in your character's knowledge of how to perform the ritual, while removing the consequences of reagent consumption. Multiple undos would work to reset the reagent state, but the protagonist's knowledge of the new ritual would be lost and the player would be forced to perform the steps manually the next time through. In the case of failure, reset provides a one-command means to reset state rather than bumbling through multiple levels of undo.

The macro replay system is complementary to the reset mechanic. Although the granular mechanics of Plotkin's ritual magic system are fun to play with, once you've performed a ritual there's no challenge and minimal motivation to perform the same multi-turn ritual steps again and again and again. In fact, even random alchemical experimentation palled fairly quickly once it became apparent how sparsely-implemented the ritual state space really was. The cost (many turns of annoying fiddling followed by a similar number of undo operations) seldom outweighed the very low chance of reward.

The macro replay system allows you to enjoy the ritual system while it provides novelty and fresh content, while freeing you from fun-killing drudgery once the scale of the game expands. It also neatly allows the player to squelch the urge to ragequit that the reset system would otherwise cause, by amplifying a half dozen or so post-reset command inputs into the hundreds of in-game actions required to get back to roughly the game state you previously had.

Interestingly, the macro replay system actually impeded my ability to solve certain late-game puzzles, by allowing me to forget some of the requirements to make rituals or inscribed items work properly. Specifically, (Spoiler - click to show)I couldn't get through the window in the alien ship with the glass permeability charm, despite having used it dozens of times previously, because I'd forgotten that it needed to be ringing before touching it to the window. Were the game not performing this for me automatically so often, I’m sure I’d have found it easier to remember when I had to do it manually.

I mentioned at the beginning of this review that Hadean Lands has flaws. It’s a great game, but by no means perfect and has some deficiencies in its design, writing and implementation.

After completing the game, I have a love-hate relationship with the ritual magic system. It’s very fun to play with, certainly adds plenty of atmosphere and anchors many accessibility and container puzzles, but it is also a quite sparsely implemented mechanism. If a ritual is not performed precisely to specification it is very likely to result in abject failure.

Certain variations are supported -- others that would seem viable yield nothing but sputtering goo. It became clear early on that rituals that were variable were going to be fairly well cued in their ritual description or with an associated fact, and that if there wasn’t some text that clearly indicated that a substitution would logically yield a different effect, it probably wasn’t going to work.

In one of Andrew Plotkin’s early Kickstarter updates, he talked about this, detailing plans for a lot more dense population of the ritual state space than we received in the final game:

“...Think back to my HL teaser: the untarnishing ritual starts with ginger oil, but you also have peppermint oil available. Shouldn't that lead into a different ritual? What if you start with ginger but use the binding word instead? These don't go anywhere in the teaser, but they will in the full game.

In essence, the space of ingredients and magic words forms a *map* -- and this abstract map should be explorable and interesting, just like the game's *physical* map. So this is what I've started working on now. Making up a lot of Y and Z items, but arranging them in a satisfying way. (While still obeying the major puzzle ordering constraints, of course.)”

He never really delivered on this -- not to any great degree. Exploration of the ritual state space is in the main unproductive as the player never has much theoretical background on how to intelligently explore that space. The base versions of all useful rituals are explicitly laid out for the player. There are some simple, heavily-cued variations that are required, a very few more variations that don't do anything useful, and aside from that there's a barren, Hadean wasteland of failure modes.

The game works with the state space implemented sparsely, but wouldn’t it have been great if there were all sorts of other viable rituals -- some useful, some cosmetic, some perhaps actively dangerous -- implemented as per that original plan?

One of the variants that did work(Spoiler - click to show), modification of the glass permeability ritual to make an aluminum permeability inscription, has its own problems. (Spoiler - click to show)The glass ritual uses an F-sharp chime, which is associated with aluminum (as the "obfuscated music" fact states). The ritual using that charm makes glass permeable. Substituting a B chime, which is associated with bronze, makes aluminum permeable. If this makes sense in any way, I can’t figure it out. I’m also curious to know how the protagonist could possibly know that the resulting symbol is an aluminum permeability charm given that there’s no aluminum to test it on anywhere in the game.

I felt quite detached and apathetic towards the characters in the game, other than the Sergeant, who was only ever physically seen as a dead hand “protruding obscenely” from some wreckage. Direct exposition of snippets of the characters’ mental states and a limited set of facial expressions didn’t generate a great deal of sympathy. (Spoiler - click to show)Extracting information from the shadows and frozen characters was an interesting game mechanic, but there just wasn’t enough there to make me care about what they were doing or why, particularly as who did what seemed to change as the dragon subsumption chain progressed. I saw their relationships as a generic, mutable tangle of vice -- vaguely interesting in the abstract but lacking specific emotional resonance, particularly as the protagonist seemed pretty uninvested in it.

My biggest problem with Hadean Lands, though, isn’t a technical or implementation issue or even a character issue. It’s the obscurity of the worldbuilding and the unsatisfying ending. The game reminded me of the works of Neil Stephenson. He writes great fiction, but tends to cut off right after the climax without any sense of resolution. Andrew Plotkin writes great interactive fiction, but tends to write coy endings that shy away from actual closure.

But the ending wouldn’t have bothered me as much if I had a better feel for what was actually going on. Plotkin may have reams of detail on how his alchemical universe works and precisely what the situation on the Retort was, but if so he’s the only one truly in the know. There simply isn’t enough information in the game to even broadly reconstruct what actually happened to the Retort. Others have praised the writing and worldbuilding as allusive, but in my opinion this goes beyond allusive and settles firmly in the hinterlands of the cryptic.

Players on the forums have extracted almost every word of backstory provided in the game, and there are tons of imaginative theories kicking around as to what the heck is/was/will be going on. Some might be exactly right. But there’s no way to be sure -- there’s clearly not enough data to actually confirm any speculation. (Spoiler - click to show)The nature of the aliens and their technology is left utterly mysterious. Are we fixing their ship along with our own? Consuming it to save our own? Being consumed by them to save their own? All of the above? Is the homunculus part-alien due to the incorporation of the black marks? We’re obviously not ever meant to know, and hence I find it hard to care to speculate too much as I will almost certainly be wrong.

If I believed Plotkin was working with an authentic, overarching alchemical theme for this work, I would guess it was framed such that the repeated iterations were a recapitulation of the alchemical Great Work, a quest for spiritual perfection through an iterative process of purification, eventually leading to the salvific gnosis that raises the protagonist out of the flawed shadow world into the perfection of the true reality. (Spoiler - click to show)The aliens merge with the humans of the marcher in an analogue of alchemical conjunction (recall where the marks were placed in the Nave), both dying and putrefying together to eventually distill and purify their essences through the repetition of the protagonist’s work with the glyphs and dragons before finally coagulating in the ultimate process, producing the pure spirit of resurrection for both.

...All this translated, of course, into whatever modern alchemico-scientific phraseology His Majesty’s Navy would have used.

If you squint a bit, this take on the work might look plausible. But I don’t really think that’s where Plotkin was going. There are too many situations that don't line up and the emphasis on (Spoiler - click to show)recursive soul-echoes seems to have more in common with quantum mechanics or nested virtual realities than it does with medieval Gnostic spirituality. Although the surface resemblance is there, the spiritual essence of classical alchemy seems absent from the syncretic ritual magic system and the cryptomilitary setting.

It's possible, I suppose, that there are deeper references here that are too subtle or obscure for me, but I just don't see very much to indicate that the traditional narrative of classical alchemy was really a guiding theme for the worldbuilding or gameplay of Hadean Lands. It seems a bit of a shame to me, and certainly a missed opportunity.

A missed opportunity is all it is, though, and Hadean Lands seizes so many other opportunities with both hands that I can’t fault it too much for not being something its creator may never have intended. This is an important work, an enjoyable puzzlefest, a technological showpiece, and, most importantly, a great game. Don’t miss it.

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The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode, by Victor Gijsbers

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
Wheels Within Wheels, March 3, 2011
by Matt Wigdahl (Olathe, KS)

Sometimes Victor Gijsbers gives you everything you need to understand one of his works within the context of the work itself (The Baron, Fate) and sometimes you can't get the full picture without external information (Vampires). So when Victor releases a game on September 11th called The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode, and it contains both source code and an accompanying essay explaining his original goals, I find it hard to believe that this is merely the well-packaged remnants of a failed experiment.

So once we get past the cute cover-art bunny that has a vague resemblance to a certain WW II leader, what do we have? Emily Short has already analyzed the apparent argument posed by the game as released: if TGFKAHNM has truly had its hidden Nazi mode stripped out, how would we really know? Sure, we can inspect the source he provided -- even build it ourselves -- but since a compiled version was included, how can we know that version was built from the source that's in front of us? Could I7 source be obfuscated sufficiently to hide this material in plain sight, even with access to the source? Probably. In fact, it would be theoretically possible for an IF compiler to include a "Hidden Nazi Mode" that injected objectionable material into otherwise unobjectionable source text.

This line of argument risks being taken to sophomoric extremes, however. Emily correctly boils this down to an issue of trust; at some point you have to trust your toolchain, or trust the author(s) of the games you choose to play. Or not. Either way, you make a decision to play or not, and that decision may or may not turn out to have been wise.

But let's go beyond the surface argument. Victor didn't have to release this game with the title he did, nor with the essay that spelled out what was originally in the game. He particularly didn't have to do so and also release a precompiled version of the game.

What if Victor had simply released the source code to a game called Fluffy Bunny Friends, saying only that it was, perhaps, a mildly interesting experiment with integrated personalization and tutorials? But for the highly suspicious circumstance that it would be Victor Gijsbers releasing a game called Fluffy Bunny Friends, would anyone have spent time scouring the game for hidden anti-Semitic content? Had he also provided a compiled version, would anyone have seriously entertained the notion that the compiled version of Fluffy Bunny Friends might not correlate precisely to the provided source? I don't think so. In my opinion, it's fair to say that his intentional choice of title, intentional inclusion of the backstory essay, intentional inclusion of a compiled version of the program, and the possibly intentional choice of September 11 as the publication date all add up to a package deliberately semiotically charged with threat.

And indeed, when you are thus sensitized, there are certainly plenty of unsettling things to find. The prominent challah bread and other traditional Jewish food that is described as "not being appealing to you". The bookcase, filled with books by Jewish authors. Ignoring all the external, non-game context, these are arguably neutral references; it's certainly not inherently wrong to set a rabbit hunt game in a Jewish neighborhood, and not everyone likes rice pudding. But you as a human player can't actually ignore everything outside of the game, and so instead these same details of setting and description take on a darker character in the light of what you bring into the game. Even the personal references by the narrator seem somehow oppressive, and the mere act of searching for and feeding cute little bunnies takes on sinister overtones.

TGFKAHNM is amusingly subtitled as a "game for unattended children". Let's assume that there is no actual programmed hidden Nazi mode -- that Victor played fair with us. You could put this game down in front of a child who didn't know what the word "Nazi" meant, and they would have an enjoyable few minutes searching for bunnies and feeding them carrots, and never connect that experience with anything beyond that. Those of us who do understand the references and symbology Victor uses, though, can't help but become sensitized, and subsequently perceive the exact same game in the light of that sensitization -- literally, we have pre-judged it, and that prejudice colors our perceptions. And in that respect, the hidden Nazi mode is real after all, but it's inside our own heads.

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Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom, by S. John Ross

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
Demented, Hilarious, Brilliant!, December 29, 2010
by Matt Wigdahl (Olathe, KS)

I can see why this game is polarizing. It’s got loads of randomized combat, which is a turn-off for some players. It’s a pastiche of old-old-school imbalanced pen-and-paper RPGs, which may be confusing if you’ve never been a role-player. It restricts available verbs to about a half-dozen, and the plot starts off as barely remixed Conan the Barbarian.

But under the covers, this is a fantastic game. It’s tightly-implemented, bug-free as far as I could see, and takes full advantage of Inform technology to make the playing experience smooth and clean. The writing, although it apes the breathless earnestness of early RPG modules, is chock full of hilarious descriptions. Clever responses to unusual commands are liberally sprinkled throughout ((Spoiler - click to show)try to PARLEY with your DUFFEL BAG, for instance).

This is definitely a game where you benefit from sitting down and reading the documentation first. And there’s plenty of it. The distribution comes with a manual that details the alternate history the game ostensibly comes from, followed by the entire sourcebook for the fictitious Encounter Critical RPG that ToaSK is based upon, followed by encrypted clues. Although you don’t have to read the documentation, the Encounter Critical RPG setting is the central structure for everything in the game, and understanding it will make some puzzles far more clear. Also, for me, reading the documentation made the game far funnier as I was able to quickly pick out the references.

From a design perspective ToaSK is very interesting. The decision to greatly limit the verbs obviously limits the potential actions the player can take, but doing that also helps the player get interesting responses more easily. If there are only a few things you can do to a given object, it’s far easier to code meaningful text for all of them. The result is a game that feels more fully implemented, even though it doesn’t have full physical modeling. But who needs Inform’s physical modeling when you have “scientific realism”?

The other consequence of the restricted verb set is that it makes the player seem smarter. It’s easier to figure out what items do when there are fewer interactions, and even brute-force repetition can work to reveal hidden puzzle solutions. This type of design approach wouldn’t work for every game, but it certainly works here, and works well.

To counteract this, the parser breaks the fourth wall constantly and deliberately, and slings gratuitious insults for the slightest deviation in command input. Fauxld English is used throughout (methinks this be, mayhaps, where Tiberius Thingamus got his inspiration).

There is, of course, no detailed conversation model. And anyway, you’re a barbarian — sophisticated conversation would be wasted on you. Your interactions with characters are limited to the same verb set as inanimate objects, but this still allows a surprising number of things you can do ((Spoiler - click to show)try ENTERing characters, for example…). And the choice to limit character interaction allows ToaSK to include many different interesting characters, from Gina the willing virgin sacrifice to the Viraxian Dark Gods, to the runecarved, peg-legged dwarf Gunwar. And, of course, there’s Vessa, the Delicate Doxy, to whom you will be returning many times.

The game is fairly well paced via its combat leveling mechanic. You’ll need to explore and solve puzzles to gain health points. Gaining health points will enable you to fight more powerful enemies, which will get you more gear and items with which to solve more puzzles. Most combats are potentially fatal, but multi-level UNDO works wonders to get you out of fights where you’re in over your head.

Overall impressions? The world of Encounter Critical feels like a tall, cold Kitchen Sink made with bathtub gin. Think of a handwritten mixture of Gamma World (the original edition, of course), Eldritch Wizardry, and Traveller, with some Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Dune, Sinbad the Sailor, Conan the Barbarian, and a Godzilla movie or two thrown in for flavor. Add snark and sex, then overheat the writing to taste.

Until Christmas Eve, the full version of this game cost $6.95. It’s well worth it at that price (and I paid it on December 23 after discovering it that day), but it’s since been released for free. If you’ve only played the intro version, you haven’t seen anything. Don’t miss the opportunity to play the full game, and experience one of the unsung masterpieces of modern retro IF. Or is that retro modern? Anyway, you should definitely, definitely play it.

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LASH -- Local Asynchronous Satellite Hookup, by Paul O'Brian

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Outstanding Work, Ending Had Issues, August 31, 2010
by Matt Wigdahl (Olathe, KS)

I really enjoyed LASH, and would rank it up with the best modern IF I've played. Other reviews have complained that it just doesn't quite hit the mark for them, and I understand a least somewhat where they're coming from, but for me the impact of the first 4/5's of the game was undiluted by the problems I have with the ending.

I like the fact that the "treasure hunt" aspects of this game are used in the service of the greater plot, and are well-motivated. And then once you finish up that segment of the game, you have a good idea of the geography you'll be dealing with in the next segment.

I appreciated the multiple different endings (including the nested ones) and the obvious care and craft that went into this title. It was obviously well-researched, well-written, and well-implemented. The opening background material and the help menus really helped set the initial post-apocalyptic tone, and I kept expecting the promised bands of slavering mutants to set upon me at any time.

The impact of the ending of the game hinges on several factors: You have to preserve a distinction between the player and the protagonist; you have to have emotional resonance built up in the second half of the game; and you have to (Spoiler - click to show)transfer sympathy for the plight of the slaves to the "plight" of your MULE.

I thought the distinction between player and protagonist was well-established through use of first person perspective (paradoxically more distancing, as others have observed in the past) and specific error messages that emphasized the robotic nature of the protagonist. Shorting out "x me" was also a nice touch.

I also thought the simulation section did a good job of furthering this distinction, using the mechanism of the bracketed comments from the robot.(Spoiler - click to show) I found myself strongly identifying with the simulated slave, to the point that I felt very much on edge while sneaking around to get my supplies for the escape. When you're in the room off the kitchen, with nowhere to run, and you hear the Master's feet approaching? These types of scenarios were very well done and left me feeling trapped and panicked.

As far as depth of characterization goes, I felt that Momma and the Master were well-written given their roles in the story, but I never got that feeling from Matthew. He seemed insufficiently motivated to me, and mostly seemed to exist to recite pro-Abolition lines to give his father something to tee off on.


Unfortunately, successes on the first two points were rendered largely irrelevant(Spoiler - click to show) by the failure to facilitate transferring the emotion generated by the mistreatment of the slaves in the second section to your MULE in the third.

The robot was nothing but an emotionless perfect servant during the first part of the game. Granted, the documentation talks about it being part-organic, but it didn't really act like it. It interacted with the world in an emotionless state that didn't really do much to make you think that it was a feeling being with rights that should be respected. After the simulation, it did start expressing more of these feelings, but all that did for me was to establish cognitive dissonance and make me confused. In fact, the first time I played, I just ran down to the airlift platform and ordered an airlift, never having received any of the balking messages it mentioned in the ending blurb, so it just confused me as to why I was suddenly the bad guy
.

I would sum up LASH as a brilliant concept implemented in a just-short-of-brilliant way, or a brilliant game with a misstep at the end. Still enough for a 5 in my book.

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Fail-Safe, by Jon Ingold

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
Innovative and Polished, July 9, 2010
by Matt Wigdahl (Olathe, KS)

This was one of the first games I played on my return to interactive fiction. I count myself lucky to have picked it first. Fail-Safe is very short, often confusing, and experiments with the player/protagonist relationship in interesting ways. It's a fascinating brief work that really only could work as IF, and when you finish it, you'll want (or in my case, _need_) to play it again. You'll understand when you get there.

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Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home, by Andrew Plotkin

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Short but Sweet, June 23, 2010
by Matt Wigdahl (Olathe, KS)

I really enjoyed this work. It was short and linear, but very creative and the setting was very evocative. Plotkin is quite good at using a few well-chosen strokes of the literary brush to allude to an extensive backstory, while letting the reader fill in most of the details themselves.

The style nods to classic SF of the pulp era -- Jack Williamson's "rhodomagnetics" makes a distinctive appearance early on, and I'm sure I missed many others. In style and tone I was reminded powerfully of both John Clute's Appleseed and the works of Jack Vance. The society of d'Accord is so advanced that the mechanics and time scales of space travel are of no real relevance to the protagonist, and the nautical metaphor Plotkin uses maps very well onto this setting.

And there's a maze. I don't mind mazes as much as some do, but even maze-haters should enjoy this one. The "room" descriptions are well-written and the mechanics are both novel and thematic.

The ending sequence was a nice finishing touch as well -- I won't spoil it here.

Overall, an excellent short work by a master of the art.

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Islands Far Away, by Shanon Fernald

3 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Good First Effort, April 27, 2010
by Matt Wigdahl (Olathe, KS)

I haven't had a chance to play yet, but I wanted to address what you said about your Inform 7 code quality getting much better by the end of the game compared with the beginning.

This is common -- in fact, it's exactly the same experience I had. It can be maddening to look at some of your early code and realize just how broken it is! Regardless of what you or anyone else thinks of your first effort, I congratulate you on finishing it and encourage you to keep moving forward with your newfound skills.

**Update**

Just finished it. Not bad for a quick first game! If you enjoy this type of scenario you should also check out Violet by Jeremy Freese, which has a similar type of set-up. For a 48-hour coding turnaround it's pretty impressive. The main problem I found was with underimplementation -- certain things you mentioned in room descriptions were not implemented as objects. There were also a couple of fairly bizarre responses:

(Spoiler - click to show)
>code
(the game)
But you're already on the broken chair.


(Spoiler - click to show)
>smell
You smell nothing unexpected. [[oh, really?]]


(Spoiler - click to show)
Typing "get shit" when you have the poster gives you the scooping message (and the point awarding message) no matter how many times you repeat it. The "for the first time" clause would probably help here...


(Spoiler - click to show)
The command "feed corky" works, but "give sandwich to corky" doesn't.


With a bit more time and polish I could see this being a 3-star short game. I look forward to playing your future work!

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