The Equivocal Ingredient

The Equivocal Ingredient
by James Dingle

2009

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

Too Frustrating to Finish, May 29, 2010

by Bernie (Fredericksburg, VA)

This game could be classified as a less-interesting version of Varicella. In order to solve the puzzles, you will need to replay scenes over and over. (This repetition is necessary since the author has disabled the 'undo' command and limits the number of saves to 3) Once I hit my 8th time replaying the opening scene, I gave up and resorted to the 'hints' section.

This game is all about the puzzles (which the author states very clearly), so once you resort to the hints, all fun is removed from the game. The PC is unsympathetic and dopey (you must open doors before you walk through them, or he will bang into them, an event that ceases to be funny very quickly) and the NPCs understand almost nothing that you tell them.

Adding to the general frustration of the game were a few strange yet amusing bugs. For example, as I tried to hand one child a gold star, she responded "I don't want seconds." Apparently, she had already eaten all the gold stars she could. And when faced with an envelope full of gold stars, the command 'take gold star' meant that I would wrestle a gold star away from a crying child rather than take one out of the envelope.

Overall, the game's frustration factor was too high for me to finish it. I had to replay several boring turns just to arrive at the crucial puzzle point I was stuck at. I would attempt yet another unsuccessful solution, only to have to restart the game again to replay the entire first boring scene in order to get to the puzzle yet again. Being able to use the 'undo' command might have made this game more tolerable. There does not seem to be any good reason for disabling 'undo' except to make the game more obnoxious to solve. And if a game is going to be this obnoxious, it had better be really fun to play, which this one, sadly, isn't.

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AmberShards, May 30, 2010 - Reply
Wow. Disabling the undo command is the IF equivalent of cutting someone off at the knees. If the author's intention was to make the game harder, that's one cheap and lazy way of doing it, although harder is not the same thing as challenging.

JamesDingle, June 7, 2010 - Reply
AmberShard, I respectfully disagree that disabling undo is a "cheap and lazy" design choice. In my humble opinion undo often allows players to proceed without caution or fear of consequence and encourages thoughtless play.

Perhaps I'm simply too old and curmudgeonly to understand the conventions of modern IF. I grew up playing text adventures in the 1970s and 1980s without undo. All my favorite games - none of which I consider cheap or lazy - lack the command. These old gems would be considered incredibly frustrating and cruel by today's forgiveness rating.

AmberShards, June 9, 2010 (updated June 11, 2010) - Reply
Serious memory and processor constraints -- like in Scott Adams' games -- lead to abandoning a lot of features, such as full sentences. UNDO wasn't even on the horizon in those situations. IF itself was still developing as a field and didn't have the advantage of a much feedback from players. Now we have the hindsight of 20+ years of IF playtesting. At the very least UNDO saves us from the repetitious save-do something-save routine. That's what everyone who played those games did: Save. Enter pool. Save. Swim. Restore.

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