Regarding a recent view on Anchorhead

Authoring General Design Discussions
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Necroing a thread here, but speaking of Anchorhead, I ran across a let’s play of it on another forum the other day. Huge spoilers obviously since the guy is going it through step by step (but are there really people in this community left who have never played this game?), but otherwise it’s a nice bit of nostalgia with some added illustrations by the OP:

The SA forums have always been pretty responsive to CYOAs and classic gamebooks but you don’t often see IF games. Unfortunately it’s a pay site so you won’t be able to comment unless you’re registered and the thread might get broken up with some annoying banners now and then, I believe this is their way of discouraging pubbie scum from hanging about.

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I’ve never finished it. Started it and liked it, but realized if it’s going to make me search for a key old school that it was going to be a gigantic time commitment and I’ve never gotten back to it.

Right. I’ll go stand in the corner now.

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Turn in your IF card, you are not worthy and hereby banished forever.

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Huh. That illustration is curiously cartoony given Anchorhead’s content.

It’s atmospheric, though, which is more important. Thanks a bunch - I keep hearing about this, but I guess I must be pubbie scum as I feel very discouraged from paying to read the thread.

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It’s no longer necessary pay to read the thread, as long as you don’t mind a few ads. You only need an account if you want to post.

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Many thanks for that!

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Yeah I linked it on the ADRIFT forum but there are like three people hanging out there presently so when I saw this Anchorhead thread I figured I might as well give it a mention here too.

The cartoony artstyle was something I wondered about too, but the guy has obviously played the game a couple times before so it’s not like it should come as any kind of surprise how dark it gets.

Was the thread actually blocked before? Usually it’s fine except for the ads. I used to lurk there all the time until I finally caved and got an account because it turns out I enjoy reading about games far more than actually playing them.

edit: This already has it’s own thread whoops I am dumb

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My understanding was that the subforums that are publicly readable rotate in and out over time to encourage people to get accounts?

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Bumpitty-bump.

Deja-vu! A review on Anchorhead prompts me, just as it prompted me months ago, to wonder about player’s expectations of a parser game today. Whoo-hoo!

ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=op0uw1 … view=33257

Note that it’s a long review, very detailed, explains very clearly what the reviewer didn’t like, and it’s properly spoiler-tagged. Worth a read.

I sort of cover my points in my comment to that review, but… it makes me really uncomfortable, some of that criticism. This particular player came with certain expectations that are, indeed, all around us today - make a bunch of things clearer, more obvious even - while, back in the day, the rule of thumb was to allow the player to discover a bunch of stuff. Insinuate, not tell, and let the player have fun figure it out.

Sure, we’ve all seen THAT backfire horribly so often, but it bothers me to see this directed at Anchorhead, which did it all so right, or so I thought when I played it at the time.

The review, and the reviewer, aren’t wrong, and I’m not bashing them; let me make that clear. But… but I’m uncomfortable with the bashing Anchorhead’s getting, for being a product of its time (and yet, it’s perfectly valid, in general, to look back at something old and say “Well… it’s dated. We’d do it differently today. It’s not as good as it should be”; we do it all the time when experiencing old media). And as I said in my comment, in Anchorhead’s particular case, I even felt that some of the grinding (i.e., the bits where the parser didn’t jump all the intermediate steps) helped me get into the PC’s shoes.

There is naturally a trend against old-school trappings, especially since choice-based stories started to mix in with parser IF. That’s normal; to paraphrase Jon Ingold, parser IF deals with small decisions and puzzles, whereas choice-based stories deal with big decisions that can’t really be translated to the step-by-step parser model (well, generally speaking, at least). Getting these two worlds together, of course expectations would clash, and still clash all the time. That’s normal. But having that bleed over into being frustrated by Anchorhead’s oldschool-ness…

…I’m having difficulty expressing myself. I’ll just stop. I’m finding it hard to put in words. I get why a newschool player would be frustrated by oldschoolarity. But Anchorhead was such a great game to play, such an experience, that part of me is screaming “Don’t touch it! Leave it as it is! Enjoy it for what it is, not for what you wanted it to be!”.

…“Enjoy it for what it is, not for what you wanted it to be”? Huh, I guess that sums up what I feel, and I often apply it to other things, but it’s a can of worms waiting to open…

EDIT - To play devil’s advocate for a moment, I’ve seen reviews praising old Scott Adams games and saying that that’s what adventure games should be like. That’s not lost on me.

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I haven’t actually played that far into Archorhead - it’s one of those games on my ever-expanding To Be Played list - but I kind of agree with the reviewer’s comments about some of the puzzles. “Ask librarian ABOUT book” should work as well as “ask librarian FOR book”. That it doesn’t is just bad guess the verb.

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I just replayed it.

ASK LIBRARIAN ABOUT BOOK does work…

…but not until you’ve showed proof that you can take a book, period. ASK LIBRARIAN FOR/ABOUT BOOK is indeed a synonim.

…it’s this sort of casual approach to IF I’m scratching my head against, and the quick bash thereof: quick to dismiss it as guess-the-preposition when it’s nothing of the sort. I know IF has a reputation for that, but Anchorhead is one of the friendlier old-school games.

…well, apart from the last day. That section is tight and hard and I have a prejudice against the whole pin thing.

1 Like
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This person has been going through and giving low scores to quite a few old adventures, like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Aisle. Gentry couldn’t ‘fix’ the stuff he’s complaining about without ticking off a lot of other people who like many of those things.

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I can still see his point to a degree though. If ASK LIBRARIAN ABOUT BOOK only works after you’ve showed proof that you can take a book, it seems like a problem. Not a big problem in the scheme of things, and certainly not something that would put me off playing game or make me give it a negative review.

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I try not to respond to reviews (good or bad), except maybe to say “thanks” – but I’m making an exception here because, funny enough, I agree with many of this reviewer’s criticisms.

(Not all of them. There were a one or two where the reviewer clearly misread a room description, but that’s happened to me plenty of times, and when it does it’s INCREDIBLY frustrating, even after I figure out that it was my fault for missing some crucial detail.)

But a lot of them, yeah. The locked attic door is not a great puzzle. Twenty years ago it was not great because it’s the exact same keyhole-and-doormat puzzle from Zork II and about a dozen other adventure games in the day; now it’s not great because new players who weren’t weaned on those games won’t recognize the hints (the keyhole separately called out when no other door in the game has a keyhole; the space under the door) and think “Oh, right; it’s the keyhole-and-doormat puzzle from the Zork II.” And, in truth, there is no reason, logical, supernatural, or otherwise, why the key would be locked inside that particular room. So that’s my bad.

And the wine cellar puzzle – oof. I’ve always hated that puzzle. I hated it when I first wrote the game. I was never satisfied with it, but you get to a point, sometimes, when you just can’t think of anything better, and you feel locked in by all the design decisions and dependencies that you’ve constructed up to that point, and all you really want to do is get it finished so you can release . . . so I just left it in.

But yeah. If I had a chance to rewrite the whole thing from the ground up, there are definitely a few puzzles and interactions that I would completely redesign.

(But not locking the front door. Back then I was convinced everyone would hate that detail, but overwhelmingly the feedback I’ve gotten is that players liked being forced to go close and lock the front door before going to sleep. Not what I would have anticipated, but the verdict is in. The reviewer will have to chalk it up to a difference in taste, I suppose.)

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Ok, erm…

  1. I’d play it again. Probably not on an iPhone 3, though.

  2. That was part of the story, not a puzzle. It added to the tension more than many other things in the game.

So: when is the remake out?

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We may be talking at cross purposes. “ASK LIBRARIAN ABOUT BOOK” does work before you show proof that you can take the book, but it gives you a message that hints that you need to actually show that proof.

In other words, it’s a puzzle. It doesn’t work before you solve it, any more than “open door” would open until you unlocked it.

Funny thing, I don’t get the impression that you do, on a general level. :slight_smile: Let me be clearer: you single out two puzzles which, I agree, design-wise could stand to see some improvement. The keyhole thing didn’t bother me way back when, but I had a lot of context; the cellar bottles thing got me severely stumped for much longer than I was comfortable with. So yeah, I can see you, in hindsight, being unhappy with those…

…but the review has a ton more directed at other points of the game, other expectations, that I notice you didn’t touch on. :slight_smile: And it’s those points that bother me, generally speaking. The expectation, for instance, that it should be spelled out, in ten foot tall neon letters, that THE KEY YOU JUST FOUND IS USED TO OPEN , WHICH IS IN , JUST IN CASE YOU HADN’T NOTICED THERE’S A LOCKED THERE.

And of course the frustration with the bum. I mean, that’s when the game came completely alive for me. It forced me to piece things together and act on my findings… it was a very, very big part of my enjoyment, and removing that would… well, sure, it would make the game more accessible, more casual, but it would lose a big part of what makes it special.

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Oh, I picked out those two puzzles as examples. If you want to be more precise about it, five of his criticisms address parts of the game with which I am personally dissatisfied; three more of his criticisms involve places where I concede the writing could have been clearer or the parser could have been smoother; the rest I think stem from the reviewer either misreading or misunderstanding the text, or else represent a mere difference in aesthetic opinion.

Don’t get me wrong – I am proud of Anchorhead and I personally would rate it at least three stars. :slight_smile: Also, the reviewer’s tone is a bit too much ragequit to be very constructive. But it was interesting (and instructive!) to see someone calling out precisely those aspects of the game that I think are weakest. Sort a reassurance that I’m not just being hard on myself. In short, I’m glad he reviewed the game and I appreciate his extensive (if unnecessarily ranty) analysis of what didn’t work for him.

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It begs the question, then… which I have to ask knowing that you’ll probably decline to answer at this stage. :slight_smile: Since you’re working on it again, will you be considering revamping those bits of the game you are the least pleased with?

As for the reviewer calling you out on those aspects, I’d probably feel better if he hadn’t called you out on the others too - sort of like, he shot everything and happened to hit occasionally - but I won’t belabour it. Maybe I was confusing “one player’s expectations” with “today’s player’s expectations”, and if so, there’s little to add. If he was useful to you, the author - hey, what better praise!

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I guess it makes sense for the “bar” to be raised over time, and for the reviews to reflect how fun it is now.

I’ve played Anchorhead for the first time recently. I was surprised to find out how old it is, since it mostly seems like it follows a lot of the modern design “rules”… except for the fact that it can be made unwinnable. That’s kind of a bummer. I feel like that’s a justifiable design decision in some very rare cases, but this doesn’t really seem like the right kind of game for it.

I got stuck in the game, and I think I’m in an unwinnable situation, but it could also be that I’m just failing at the puzzle. (The solutions on IFDB don’t work, but possibly another option works.) Well, my save/restore messed up anyway.

But I did find it interesting how this part of the review contrasted with my own experience:

I guess I was in more of a “mimesis” mindset for some reason (kind of), because when I encountered that puzzle…

[spoiler]Interacting with the trash can seemed totally reasonable and obvious to me. Rather, my main hurdle with getting into the real estate office was deciding that I even should go through the window at all–isn’t that illegal?!

I actually >WAITed out in front of the office a few turns.

I think my whole train of logic was:

Waiting doesn’t work, I guess the game wants me to do something else.
That alley seems like a good place to start.
The window is very conspicuous and described in great detail; it’s clearly an entrance.
Going in the window seems like a wrong thing to do (not even 100% sure it’s an entrance to the relevant office as opposed to a neighboring building), but “video game logic” is telling me to enter the window.
I think it’s too high, but I will try opening.
Yep, it’s too high. Is there anything I can stand on?
I pictured the trash cans being open, but maybe they have lids (or really solid trash). I’ll try standing on a trash can.
I’m now high enough but too far away from the window?! That’s silly.
Get off the trash can and push it.
Under the window obviously. Duh. Where else would I push it.
Get back on the trash can, open the window, enter the window.
Success! Hopefully the real estate agent doesn’t press charges.

I noticed when checking a walkthrough, it’s possible to do another story event before that, which causes an NPC to start following you. Maybe the dialogue at that point gives a better “excuse” for entering the window, and the game just gives you an option (which I took) to be a trespassing whackjob.

I had trouble figuring out what to do after getting the house keys–if the intro mentioned where the husband was, I missed it or forgot it.[/spoiler]
(spoilers for a very early puzzle of Anchorhead)

OR could this difference in thought process have something to do with the fact that I am physically a bit short?! “It’s too high” is a “puzzle” I encounter all the time in real life. The game used the first solution on my personal checklist for handling this situation.

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You’re not the first person to mention feeling that way. In fact, I recall one reviewer got pretty angry about it. Not a reaction I was expecting, but I kind of like it. It should feel out of character. The whole game, really, is about dreadful circumstance forcing you to do things you would never otherwise do.