Reviews by Chin Kee Yong
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A masterclass in science fiction, April 27, 2021Choice of Robots is an excellent, highly replayable SF story about the impact of automation and artificial intelligence on modern society. It's so good that I would buy it again twice over if I could.
At its heart, science fiction is about "what if" questions: what if you could travel back in time? What if androids were indistinguishable from humans? The best SF stories take an intriguing "what if" question and spin it into a gripping vision of a world that could be. The genius of Choice of Robots is that it lets you ask the "what if" question yourself -- through your actions and choices, you write the SF prompt that you find most personally appealing, and the game presents you with the future defined by your choices. The result is a riveting story structure that makes perfect sense for a science-fiction CYOA, full of player agency, surprises, and replayability.
The prose and narrative design of Choice of Robots are consistently excellent. Character and story arcs are vividly elaborated in sharp, elegant paragraphs. The game clearly foreshadows decision points and the results of your choices, resulting in a game that feels responsive and fair. And all the way through the game, those choices are remembered and referenced with staggering fidelity: your robot may develop a lifelong love of computer games or TV programming, depending on the corpus you train it with in the very first chapter.
An abundance of science fiction, IF, and computer science references betray the author's dedication and passion for his work. Turn-of-the-millennium American culture is lovingly illustrated, explored, and lampooned. Perhaps most importantly, the philosophical themes of the work are imbued in every chapter -- the ethics of artificial life, the balance between inquiry and humanity -- resulting in a cohesive authorial voice that resonates from every page.
But enough gushing. The point is that Choice of Robots is a damn good work, worthy of its pedestal in the IF canon; in my opinion, it could even be ranked among the all-time science fiction classics. This is a bona fide interactive fiction masterpiece: thoughtful, funny, heartwarming, solemn, and yet full of joy.
5/5 game, would conquer Alaska with killer robots again.
A ship without cargo, April 19, 2021This is a very basic pirate game where the objective is to steal treasures and bring them back home. I played it to practice reading French, but there's not much "fiction" in this interactive fiction: the story is lightly sketched out in single sentences, and gameplay revolves largely around learning and mastering the mechanical gameplay loop.
La Nageuse Écarlate revolves around randomly generated ship encounters, which hail from one of a variety of nations and have ship classes indicating their combat strength. If you attack and defeat a ship -- a random chance depending on its strength -- you have a chance to loot resources and, potentially, its flag. Once you have a false flag, you can use it to meet peacefully with other ships and expend resources to gather information on the treasures you're stealing.
Once you've discovered a treasure and its location, the actual heist gameplay is remarkably simple: binary success if you learned all the requisite information, and slap-on-the-wrist failure if you didn't. The game thus becomes an exercise in grinding random ships for resources and information until you inevitably accumulate what you need to win. In the late game, La Nageuse Écarlate becomes a chore of clicking through identical prompts until you finally see a ship with the correct flag, or you finally get the right random drop from combat.
It's a shame that the core gameplay is so unsatisfying, because La Nageuse Écarlate's polished visuals are a breath of fresh air in the sometimes staid world of interactive fiction. At its best, it evokes Superluminal Vagrant Twin in its breezy prose and resource-juggling gameplay. Remove the randomness and add some narrative threads and questlines, and I could see it becoming an addictive pirate simulator in the vein of Sunless Sea.
Overall rating: a decent attempt at a game, but nothing special in its current state. There's treasure here, if the author is willing to put in the hard work to uncover it. Until then, you aren't missing much by passing this ship by.
A somber story about dementia, April 11, 2021Growing old is one of my greatest fears. As a young person, it seems nightmarish to me that I may one day be reduced to a shadow, slowly losing control of my faculties and my agency, waiting for the story of my life to end.
This is a text game, but it's not the kind of game you play for fun. Like That Dragon, Cancer, its purpose is to be a certain kind of experience, which takes you on a particular emotional journey. You play Fred Strickland in a series of slice-of-life vignettes, and in doing so, come to understand his joys and his sorrows as well as his ultimate tragic fate.
The most significant thing about this story is its emotional weight. As a reader, I tend to avoid stories set in mundane settings -- I think slice-of-life Americana is extremely difficult to write, because it's such a well-trodden, vanilla setting. In the absence of a fascinating setting or high-stakes drama, it takes a very skilled author to make the reader emotionally invested in the main character. It is therefore notable that Will Not Let Me Go approached its subject matter with such grace that it made me tear up.
Will Not Let Me Go's Twine interface is excellent as well, simple but well-considered with nothing left to chance. The background changes subtly to reflect the main character's state of mind in each vignette, and the hypertext form maps very well to the way that the main character's stream of consciousness jumps between thoughts. This is used to great effect in one emotional scene near the end, when the narration breaks down into fragments held together by hyperlinked threads.
(There's a nod to accessibility as well, with a small button in the lower right letting users switch to a higher-contrast theme.)
On the whole I would call this a memorable work of literature -- for it is literature in the most rarified sense of the word. It uses the medium of interactive fiction to tell a poignant and gripping story about the horror of dementia. It's not the kind of story I would normally go in for, but there's a time and place for these kinds of stories, and in this aspect Will Not Let Me Go is a memorable and beautifully crafted masterpiece.
A high-concept game undone by poor execution, April 10, 2021The Edifice is a puzzly, rather sparsely implemented parser game in the tradition of Zork. It's very well-regarded, winning a XYZZY award and appearing on several "best of" lists, but I think it's aged very poorly and it doesn't meet my standards for interactive fiction in 2021.
Let's begin with The Edifice's narrative. Although this game is mainly puzzle-focused, it makes a stab at an ambitious high-concept theme -- a sweeping retelling of the dawn of humanity, the discovery of fire, and so on. Unfortunately, this is handled very superficially and comes off more as set dressing than a real story. There is no overarching conflict, no rising tension, and no resolution. The central plot device of the Edifice hardly even plays a role in the different stages of human evolution; rather, it escorts the player from half-baked vignette to half-baked vignette. And that's a shame, because in creating these grand narrative expectations, The Edifice sets itself up to disappoint when it doesn't follow through.
What about the puzzles, then? The Edifice is centered around three major self-contained puzzles, each one representing a particular period of human history. There are also minor puzzles peppered at the beginning and within individual time periods. I thought that all the puzzles were competently implemented and their solutions made in-world sense, but I found them unfair, unfun, and kind of painful to play through. (I used the walkthrough to complete the game.)
What is a fair puzzle? In my opinion, every puzzle is a sort of contract between the puzzle designer and the puzzle solver. The puzzle solver promises that she will make a good-faith attempt at solving the puzzle, using all means available to her. Meanwhile, the puzzle designer promises that if such a good-faith attempt is made, the puzzle is solvable and the solution is obvious in hindsight. If you can't figure out a puzzle, look at the walkthrough, and think "Oh, of course, I'm an idiot" -- that's a fair puzzle. On the other hand, if the puzzle forces you to guess verbs, or make use of information you couldn't possibly have known, the puzzle is unfair and poorly designed.
The Edifice's puzzles suffer from that boogeyman of 90s parser games: guess-the-verb. All of the puzzles require verbs that are rarely used in parser games, have never previously been hinted at in the text, are only used for a specific puzzle, and never appear again. For example, the very first puzzle requires you to (Spoiler - click to show)HIDE from the Enemies. Other examples of puzzle solutions that require flash-in-the-pan inspiration to solve are (Spoiler - click to show)STRIP to turn branches into kindling, SHARPEN to create the spear, and POINT and DRAW for the language puzzle everyone seems to love so much. The game includes a list of commands, but it's condescending, hidden behind a dismissively written fake help page, and doesn't include any of the verbs I listed above (and also omits some others that are required to complete the game, like DROP and ENTER). So much for "info."
Even when the puzzle solutions don't require guessing verbs, they include leaps of logic that don't follow from any in-game clues. They make sense according to real-world logic, but no one expects a game to perfectly model everything that a person could try in real life; for the player to try an action, some kind of hint has to be placed that the action is actually possible in the game world. To solve the language puzzle, (Spoiler - click to show)we not only have to come up with the idea of DRAWing an image, but the idea that the crushed berries will make suitable ink, the bone will make a suitable writing implement, the bark is suitable for writing on, and the author has taken the time to implement all these things. This insistence on off-the-wall puzzle solutions is exacerbated by confusing room descriptions that don't always make clear the positions of things. (Spoiler - click to show)I didn't realize the protagonist's Hut could be entered, because it didn't appear in the list of exits. I thought the bark was across the river and spent many turns skipping rocks across the water, only to find that the river was an unimportant diversion and I could just have typed TAKE BARK.
Over and over, my playthrough of The Edifice ran into pain points that made me feel as though the author was more interested in creating theoretically elegant puzzles than making sure the game was a positive experience for players. One puzzle is possible to make unwinnable, and the solution is so convoluted that it's likely you'll do this multiple times before reaching the solution; the game does reset the puzzle after a while, but this requires waiting so many turns that you might as well restore a saved game instead. When you do happen on a useful action that can solve a puzzle, it's blocked with an unhelpful message that comes across as a "you can't do this at all" message -- unless you do it at precisely the right time and place that the author wants you to. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)if you aren't holding the Useful Rock, SHARPEN STICK returns "The Stick will not readily hold an edge." An even more egregious example is (Spoiler - click to show)TAKE OFF HEADDRESS, which returns "Headdress represents your authority in the Village. If you took it off, you would be abdicating your position, and the People would elect a new leader. If you want to accomplish anything here, you had best leave it on." This reads as the clearest "You can't do that" message I've ever seen -- and yet it's a required move to solve the horse puzzle. Insane.
Perhaps I'm being too harsh on this game: after all, this is a Z-code offering from 1997, when Short and Veeder and Reed and all the other vanguards of the "new school" of IF hadn't yet entered the scene. Perhaps some allowances should be made for the game as a historical artifact of the Before Time. But then again, Graham Nelson wrote The Craft of the Adventure in 1995, with a Bill of Player's Rights that reads much the same as the criticism I'm offering now. And discussions of accessibility, of affordances, of the user experience, have been around as long as the field of design has existed.
In closing: The Edifice is an ambitious but fatally flawed classic parser game. It attempts and soundly fails to convey a high-concept narrative. Its prose is mechanical and derivative without a memorable voice of its own. Its puzzles are so unfair as to be impossible to solve without a guide. Overall I wouldn't recommend this to anyone, except as an example of why so many modern game-players think of "text adventures" as a dead genre.
A brilliant take on noir, April 10, 2021This is the kind of game that lures you in with twee storybook trappings before bopping you on the head and leaving you out cold in a dark alley. It's a magnificently competent parser game with far more worldbuilding chops and emotional weight than it has any right to have.
You play Good Fairy, Senior Detective, in a brilliant noir plot about corruption, cheese-dealing, and cutthroat economic pressures. There's a gunfight. There's a femme fatale. The prose is good; the drama meaty. That the author has turned a story about fairies and talking animals into a piece of gripping crime fiction is, I think, a truly commendable effort.
The puzzles were straightforward and signposted well, and I enjoyed the diegetic hint system in the form of Murphy (although I didn't use it very often). I very much enjoyed the multiple plot twists and the moral choices that Good Fairy was called upon to make.
Overall 9/10 game. Short, sweet, and wonderfully sharp, like a meringue you could cut someone with.
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