Reviews by Snave
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The way out is through, May 16, 2021Adventure game protagonists tend to be greedy-grabby types, yeah? Fitting, then, that a child is the protagonist here, with sickly sweets in the very first room. Transgression without judgment, that's what Eat Me offers, and an engaged player will quickly become complicit. Thankfully, Eat Me draws you in with a deft touch rather than going hard-meta, and even on the latter front it allows a chance of subversion by the end. It's also unabashedly weird and gross. I loved it.
On the writing: I have played many well-written games, but this is the first one I replayed primarily so I could read it again. Additionally, this game has the most effective writing I've seen used in service of the traditional exploration-and-puzzles format. It guides and instructs. It tempts and discourages. It acts as both feedback and reward. The imagery and characterization are sensuous and vivid. The writing in this game is highly suggestive, in all senses of the word, and it performs all of these tricks simultaneously without ever sacrificing the mood or being too obviously symbolic. Granted, none of the tricks Eat Me uses are new--some of them are Text Adventure Narration 101--but I haven't played any other game that balances the text and the mechanics so perfectly while operating on so many levels. It is, in a word, harmonious. Every sentence has punch, not a single word feels wasted, and the game is a joy to read and interact with.
It helps, of course, that the game is so focused and small. In fact, if there's one major criticism to be made, it's that neither the puzzles nor the story are terribly complex. I forgive Eat Me in this regard for three reasons: one, it's framed as a fairy tale, and those traditionally don't have terribly complex stories either. Two, there's a lot of optional depth to explore (again: temptation, and complicity once the player starts digging). And three, Groover packs in a variety of escalating surprises as the main events unfold. Even if you guess what's going to happen next, there's probably another layer to reflect on, an alternative that you missed, or at least an amused sense of "okay, well, I didn't expect things to go quite THAT far" afterward.
In the end, Eat Me works better as a simulation than as a captivating tale. It's a slice of Wonderland, a little model of a creepy fantasy world that you can inhabit and play around in for a while, rather than a satisfying story proper. But few games do it better or with more style.
Alien technology vs. the Infocom world model, October 26, 2018I needed several hints to finish Starcross and am slightly bitter about it. Not because the game is unfair, but because I really like science fiction and wanted to be good at being inside a sci-fi adventure! Spaceships, computers, aliens, high-tech gadgets... all stuff I like thinking about. I thought the theme would give me the extra determination I needed to tough it out and solve everything by myself, and I did make good headway at first, but ultimately I tripped myself up by thinking too much about how I wanted the game to be rather than how it is.
Starcross is from 1982. It was only Infocom's fifth game. Anyone playing this today should expect sparse implementation compared to modern games, and I certainly knew that going in, having played other Infocom titles. But the setting of a high-tech alien spaceship turns out to be a mismatch in a way that the more whimsical settings of Zork and the like are not. In Zork, when I come across a weird room containing something out of a myth or fable, I take it as a goofy fantasy reference and don't expect there to be much point in poking around the edges of the scenery. But in Starcross, when I came across a room with lights or machines or dials or doors in the descriptions, I wanted to examine everything closely. And in some cases, the game lets you. My favorite parts were when the game gives lengthy, detailed descriptions of control panels and what the symbols look like, and you have to figure out what it all means and how to make it work. There are some very good puzzles in this game that involve fiddling with alien technology. But there is also lots of scenery that I wanted to prod for clues, but couldn't.
The upside is that there isn't much cruelly hidden stuff (there is one case where SEARCH really should yield success, but I didn't get stuck because of it). There aren't even that many objects you can pick up. The room connections are straightforward and the ship is quite easy to map out. Almost all of the possible dead-ends come from doing things in the wrong order or wasting items in ways that obviously have no effect. I can only think of one action in the game that seems like an alternate solution but actually ends up making the game unwinnable. There are also no wacky, jokey, implausible, or otherwise off-the-wall solutions. In that respect, the game is quite fair. Thinking "What sort of thing might I actually try if I was in that situation?" can get you a long way. Of course, you may come up with several plausible solutions, so you still need a lot of methodical perseverance to figure out which particular one was implemented, and the game isn't going to give you any nudges if you only get close, but that's just how you have to play these old games. Overall, the structure of the puzzles and traps has more in common with an old Dungeons & Dragons module than, say, Riven. I should have remembered that, and I should have spent less time wishing for clearer details from the game and more time thinking about how to give my actions more specificity. Old Infocom games may not implement every single noun, but the world model does allow you to specify where you put something or where you look.
The parts I liked best about Starcross probably make up 50% of the game. I wish the whole game was figuring out symbols and technology, but the other half is still well-constructed and fair, so I give this game high marks for the era. Also, as it turns out, there is an in-universe explanation for why the game's puzzles are the way they are. It's not a terribly satisfying one, but I appreciate the attempt at thematic consistency.
The map is not the territory, March 26, 2014This is a game for experienced players, not just because it practically requires knowledge of genre conventions, but because the way The Gostak obfuscates its output is pushing directly against an old-school drive: the player's desire to construct a mental model of the game world. For old-school games, this often also means drawing an actual map on paper. Here, there are only a handful of rooms, but you have to start taking notes and make your own little dictionary before you can start connecting any of them, let alone visualize what's supposed to be in them. Understanding the language is the main puzzle of the game, and it's a great one. As you build your vocabulary and your understanding of objects and the relationships between them, descriptions that were impenetrable nonsense at first glance become more and more sensible until you're reading fairly naturally and typing back commands that would seem like crazy talk to anyone looking over your shoulder. It's extremely satisfying.
Of course, you have to constantly remind yourself that your model is only a model. The world of The Gostak is an alien one, and although there are many terms that seem to have close analogues in our reality or other games, there's never enough information to really know what anything is like. To some extent this is true of all text games, with many details left up to the player to fill in mentally, but in The Gostak you're painting with broad strokes. Abstract splatters, really. And no matter how vague and fuzzy you try to keep the picture in your head, you'll almost certainly over-imagine things and make assumptions about concepts that lead you astray. A particular term can turn out to be dual-purpose in a way you wouldn't expect, or a physical action may be only superficially similar to whatever you were thinking of as its equivalent. In a longer or crueler game, this tension would be infuriating. Here, the push and pull is a dual pleasure.
I do have gripes about two puzzles. One relies on a word that I felt was too obscure (it was barely present in any of the output, as far as I could tell), and another has a solution that doesn't match well with the information provided (there are sufficient clues to reach the solution through experimentation, but it was not clear to me why that particular action was necessary or why it would be that effective). I regret being so late to the party for this game--it would be interesting to play this one at the same time as someone else and see which details stuck out to them, and to have them describe the particular way they imagined this weird world in their head.
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