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- Space45, November 25, 2023
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- ENyman78 (Gold Beach, OR), October 29, 2023
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4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Greetings from the Near Future, July 19, 2023There's a rather famous quote about the Velvet Underground's first album. It comes from an LA Times interview with Brian Eno:
“I was talking to Lou Reed the other day, and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet, that was an enormously important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!"
In 1985, Steve Meretzky was hardly a Lou Reed. He was probably one of the better-known game developers in America, thanks to the success of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Infocom, for its part, was hardly Verve Records. They had published some of the most successful microcomputer games ever made, and were making a play for big, corporate software dollars.
And yet, for all of Infocom's lavish production and post-production resources, A Mind Forever Voyaging has the aspirational earnestness of a small art film. According to Jimmy Maher, people around the office referred to it as "Steve Meretzky's Interiors," an unflattering comparison to Woody Allen's 1978 film of the same name. In fairness to Meretzky's contemporaries, amused bafflement is a possible reaction to something that one has never seen, anticipated, or imagined.
I could go on like this for hours. In fact, I already have elsewhere. So let's let this review be a review. In A Mind Forever Voyaging, the player guides an artificial intelligence, Perry Simm, though various iterations of a simulated future. The point of the simulation is to evaluate the effects of a sweeping legislative package usually referred to as "The Plan." The author of said plan is "Richard Ryder," and he and his policies are meant to remind us of Ronald Reagan.
The gameplay here is radically different from what one would have been used to in 1985. Perry must observe and record events and conditions that the game considers significant in terms of enriching or expanding the simulation. The AI is expanding its data set, in other words, while we guide Perry through daily life in Rockvil, Dakota. What is popular entertainment like, for instance, across the decades following the implementation of The Plan? How does the Simm family - Perry, Jill, and little Mitchell - get on? How are things at Perry's favorite Chinese restaurant?
Contemporary reviewers sometimes gloss over these innovations, missing the significance of centering human experiences and relationships in interactive narratives in 1985. Perhaps it is because we see these things everywhere nowadays. It can be easy to miss the influence of A Mind Forever Voyaging because it is everywhere. It can be hard to find an absence from which we can begin, from which we can detect its presence.
It has problems as a video game, and some of those problems are serious. It is not always clear what data is and is not useful for Perry, which can lead to feelings of being stuck. There is a climactic puzzle that has no relationship to the gameplay in the rest of the game. A game should train the player for its endgame, which A Mind Forever Voyaging fails to do.
I encourage contemporary players to refer to the Invisiclues - written by Meretzky himself - when stuck. If you don't understand a word or phrase in a Shakespeare play, do you look it up? The language of 1980s interactive fiction can seem equally arcane. Sometimes, these old games can feel mechanically obsolete. Which is fine! We have resources to help us through them as needed.
Some critics have invested significant ink in characterizing the model of AI in AMFV as unrealistic or incredible, as if A Mind Forever Voyaging was ever meant to be about computers. Despite appearances, it is about human beings. Humans wielding power, humans making art, humans forging friendships and families. Humans getting old together, humans insisting - rather shockingly in this context - that care, thoughtfulness, and imagination are essential to well-lived lives.
Adventure Classic Gaming
There are no traditional puzzles until the endgame, and even then, they are innovative, requiring you as the player to think like the machine you are supposed to represent. Rather, A Mind Forever Voyaging is about watching the life of a singular individual as it is effected by global changes and about observing a city's descent into mismanagement, neglect, and despair.
Yet, it is because of its innovative premise that A Mind Forever Voyaging ultimately falls short. The story that it casts is too simplistic, with few shades of grey. Like too many works of science fiction, it tells of a socialistic government obsessed with order and security that lapses into totalitarianism, a techno church that can preach only wacky space babble and a medieval strain of intolerance, and credit card breadlines that run dry. As well, the characters encountered tend to be as flat as a computer simulation in 1985—they have no personality.
-- Joseph Lindell
Adventure Gamers
Part of me is tempted to use the patronising cliché that A Mind Forever Voyaging is remarkably good “for a game.” There's no getting around the fact that the prose is mostly utilitarian, the characters are markedly thin, and the ideas presented often lack nuance. Infocom boldly compared the game to Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, comparisons which only highlight these complaints further. But in the end, I feel its best aspects are in fact because it is a game. The great sense of exploration and non-linearity make you feel more like a historian researching for a book than a mere reader and player, curiously gathering evidence to evaluate The Plan for Renewed Purpose, all in a clearly-imagined and at times frightening world that seems more contemporary now than when it was written. For those who enjoy games heavy on exploration or with a political bent – or just want to experience a fascinating moment in gaming history – you should definitely check it out.
--Steven Watson
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
An interesting early attempt at political commentary in interactive fiction, May 7, 2023by Cody Gaisser (Florence, Alabama, United States of America, North America, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, Known Universe, ???) A Mind Forever Voyaging (1985) is quite good and recommendable, even if it's not quite the masterpiece I was anticipating. The biggest strengths of the game are the dystopian sci-fi setting, the author's lack of inhibition with regard to including political commentary (a rarity at the time, I suspect), and the relative lack of traditional adventure game puzzles. The biggest weaknesses are (I suspect) artifacts of the game's vintage (such as: the manual is required to look up passcodes at various points in the game).
AMFV is less about unlocking doors and solving problems than simply observing changes in a society over time. The player assumes the role of a sentient AI tasked with exploring simulations of the city of Rockvil over the course of 50 years, recording evidence to determine whether or not a proposed policy called The Plan will benefit or harm society.
I found Rockvil difficult to navigate early in the game when there was a checklist of specific tasks to accomplish; however eventually I got used to the layout of the city and found exploration much easier to deal with in the mid-game when the objectives were more open-ended. I still recommend looking up a map, as my several attempts to map the game myself were consistently thwarted.
Likewise, I found the climax (the closest thing in AMFV to a puzzle) to be counter-intuitive. A walkthrough revealed that I needed to be using mechanics which I'd gone the entire game without even realizing existed. This section of the game played out rather dramatically, but the actions required for progress were not well signposted.
There's more to AMFV than just the intro and the climax, though, and the game managed to surprise me a number of times. I especially appreciated the news feed and the unexpected events that will happen from time to time while running the simulation.
I enjoyed my experience with A Mind Forever Voyaging and would recommend it for its historical significance and unique gameplay. I don't feel any regret about utilizing a map or consulting a walkthrough for the climax, though.
- Kastel, April 6, 2023
- jinnturtle, October 5, 2022
- thesacredbagel, July 25, 2022
- penguincascadia (Puget Sound), March 24, 2022
- cgasquid (west of house), February 11, 2022
- Lance Campbell (United States), December 24, 2021
- Nomad, August 20, 2021
8 of
8 people found the following review helpful:
Great Introduction to IF, August 12, 2021by ccpost (Greensboro, North Carolina) As a recent convert to interactive fiction, I have been looking for good games to get started with. Although this is perhaps not a typical work, I was intrigued by the sci-fi dystopian premise and encouraged by the wealth of critical praise heaped upon AMFV. Rather than detailing specific aspects of the gameplay or plot that I found especially effective, I want to focus this review on the merits of AMFV as an introduction to IF.
In short: I found AMFV quite stunning in its own right and also an effective introduction to IF more broadly. The work opened my eyes to the artistic potential of IF as a form and delivered a playing experience that was easy and engaging for someone with only minimal prior exposure to IF.
A few more detailed points:
I appreciated the relative lack of puzzles. Though I'm not averse to puzzle-heavy IF, I wanted a work without punishing puzzles or cruel game design (e.g. unwinnable states, lots of learning by dying). I loved that the main mission of the game is to explore the simulated versions of Rockvil, which still requires some careful attention to the description of places and objects without the demands of a typical puzzle (e.g. finding just the right use of an object to get past an obstacle). AMFV helped to ease me into the playing mechanics of IF without suffering the pain of banging my head (literally or metaphorically) against some puzzle to make progress.
I also thought that AMFV did a great job of introducing the a novice player to the poetics of IF, that is, the joys (and challenges) of navigating a simulated world via a text interface. Cleverly, the simulated versions of Rockvil can be seen as sorts of IF worlds within the broader IF work -- Perry Simm is in the same role as the player. This effect was achieved quite well and not in an eye-winking kind of way.
Finally, this work is clearly significant in the broader history of IF, which is obvious even to a newcomer like myself. Playing it definitely helped me to better understand the historical foundation of where more recent IF works have come from, but the experience was not that of an 'eat your vegetables' history lesson. The work is still fresh and enjoyable on its own terms, and indeed the satirical thrust of the work is still very relevant (even if the political satire could be heavy-handed at times -- probably my only real complaint about AMFV).
- Karlok (Netherlands), April 14, 2021
- beecadee, November 14, 2020
- mifga (Brooklyn, NY), October 15, 2020
- jcompton, June 22, 2020
- The Defiant, June 16, 2020
- Arrowhead12 (Edmonton, Alberta), June 11, 2020
- Zape, May 24, 2020
- Artran (Taipei, Taiwan), May 1, 2020
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