The Cabal

by Stephen Bond profile

Humor
2004

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Number of Reviews: 6
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Conspiratorial in-joke, February 13, 2022
by Cody Gaisser (Florence, Alabama, United States of America, North America, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, Known Universe, ???)

The Cabal is a piece of satirical adventure about infighting within the interactive fiction community (I think). It blends more "traditional" conspiracy theory tropes with references to the history of text adventures and the culture surrounding them. I didn't understand many of the references to the politics of the IF newsgroups (not my time and place), but the game was entertaining nonetheless.

The Cabal is pretty short, and the few puzzles are mostly painless. One puzzle is taken directly from the old Infocom game Infidel, so I had to consult a walkthrough of that game, which itself amused me.

Even though I found The Cabal amusing, I can't say I'd necessarily recommend it, as the in-jokes are pretty arcane.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Funny, fast-paced excitement. Indiana Jones with IF references, February 3, 2016

This game was one of my favorite types of IF: fast, action-packed thriller games. It is a string of conversations mixed with intermittent, simple puzzles.

The plot is just references to old IF groups. The idea is that there is a cabal of authors that all support each other and hang out and act as gatekeepers. To some extent, I think this is true. IF is a small group, all the big authors and many others know each other well, and they organize stuff with each other. But this is normal; everyone craves companionship and wants to be part of a group. Cabals and cliques form in the academic world for the same reason. And the IF cabal seems to have open membership. If anything, I think the cabal(s) wish that everyone would join them.

I wasn't around during the events of this game, but it didn't diminish my enjoyment of the game. The game parodies right wing sexist men, which I think anyone can enjoy. It mentions Graham Nelson and Andrew Plotkin, which are still fairly familiar names. And everyone is characterized in such a silly way that it really doesn't matter who they are. There were two or three characters I never heard of, but it doesn't matter.

Overall, a fun game. It really does spoil Infidel by Mike Berlin a lot, so watch out for that.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
No LaRouches? Author, I am disappointed., June 17, 2014
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I don't have a ton of conspiracy theories, myself, but for so long, I was simply unable to tell theorists to stop with that nonsense, already, whether it was about workplace, classroom or global politics. It's so tempting to listen, because that stuff's imaginative if you haven't heard it, yet it dies out.

Fortunately, conspiracy theory is fertile ground for satire, and The Cabal hits a lot of good points. It collapses several favorite political theories, places and lore into being about text adventures. This highlighted, to me, how conspiracy theorists like the me-me-me angle while really it's just more about an uncaring world and people willing to accept how things are to get by.

There's only one potentially vicious part. Though most characterizations are clear jokes, one personality is depicted as living at Ruby Ridge, which left me uncomfortable enough to look for an explanation. I got one here--well, at an archive.org copy of it--and was impressed. The essay's worth it even if it's a necessary distraction from an otherwise free-flowing game, because it hits on conspiracy theories some writers have when really it's about laziness or time limitation. It's also nice to have conspiracy literature that actually cleans things up.

I found the puzzles worked as conspiracy debunkers by giving you the opportunity to go off on useless tangents. So many of them (Spoiler - click to show)give the solution up front, then provide absorbing writing so it's possible to get caught up in details that utterly don't matter. The final maze is particularly funny, as (Spoiler - click to show)the game seems far more likely to trap you if you map it by UNDOing.

The author did the right thing by throwing a large chunk of this work into multiple-choice conversation. It establishes the character-player as someone with bizarre thoughts but never really kicks him--it's more about outlining your basic conspiracy theory fallacies. It's good for a thoughtful laugh, even for someone who wasn't present when the game was released.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Went over my head, December 25, 2012
by Andromache (Hawaii)

There were times during Cabal that I laughed aloud, and the irony of the player character investigating conspiracy theories while being the very thing he was hunting was not lost on me. I appreciated that I was able to enjoy the narrative and not get bogged down by puzzles. Honestly, I wouldn't even call them puzzles. They have the veneer of puzzles, but solutions are clear and obvious if you pay attention to the writing and you're basically told what to do. (Spoiler - click to show)The twisty maze was familiar and evoked prior memories of torment. It was fitting it was part of the new Archive somehow. And the elevator puzzle, the only true one, was actually pretty intuitive after a few rounds of getting slapped. Heh. The ending didn't surprise me much. (Spoiler - click to show)You're clued early on that the player character is a bit strange, maybe not all there. The narrative is well done, and despite personally not liking the PC much, the story was short enough and the game easy enough that I was able to finish it with little effort. Parsing was excellent. No errors about not understanding what I wanted, even if the game is conversation-based for the most part. I even got the game and author references, though not the politics. Being someone who favors modern IF and IF as art form and narrative, I had a hard time getting into the mindset of the player character.

I would not replay this game. It was well-implemented, characters were stock and more plot device, but while I am enough of an IF gamer that I understood what was meant by story-based versus puzzle-based, I am not enough of an insider to appreciate the inspiration for this game and what it's poking fun at. The tie-ins with real-world conspiracy organizations helped to understand the story, but if there are any Freemasons, etc, they probably shouldn't play this. I know of RAIF, RGIF, etc, but I think this game appeals only to a small group of IF authors/players. Perhaps I could have rated the game higher if I were part of the "Cabal." :)

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1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Entertaining and amusing, September 9, 2010

OK, I'm fairly new to IF so I probably didn't get half of the references to all of the big names. Though I've since learned a fair bit about them.

The action was well paced, never let me get bored. I did get stuck for a while on a few of the puzzles (there's not that many), but given time to relax and think about them I could work them out.

The setting and story telling in it I liked, finding it easy to immerse myself into Stephen's variation on reality. (Spoiler - click to show)I liked the many references to the Illuminatus. I'll probably play it again to see if there is much variation if I do things differently.

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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
Ages badly, December 23, 2007

This game has a lot going for it in respect of craft: it's well-written by someone with a keen sense of humor; the characterizations are often amusing; though the game is quite linear, the pacing works pretty well and I rarely felt bored.

The problem with it is its huge self-indulgence. This is a work, now several years old, about contemporary rec.arts.int-fiction politics. It is peppered with endless references to newsgroup personalities and squabbles that people outside the IF community are unlikely to understand, and even for those of us who were around at the time, it ages badly. A few years down the line, it's likely to need a critical commentary to make sense.

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