Having followed along with previous Iron ChIF episodes, I already expected a dazzling and informative show, but the dishes have given me even more to chew on than I expected.
I have to say, first and foremost, that choosing a winner was very hard. I was one of the judges who submitted my scores in the final hours because I hesitated so much and wanted to make sure I considered everything… sorry, Otis!
Despite the initial uncertainty, I’m ultimately confident in my decision to back the Iron Chef; I hope I’ll manage to convey why that is. But both chefs truly did an exceptional job whipping up these great works in only 5 days, and in the end I’d be happy to see either of them be crowned. They certainly both deserve their flowers, regardless of the voting outcomes! 
By the way, judges did not discuss their scores at all behind the scenes, so any interesting patterns or similarities are pure kismet. I was especially pleased to be “twinning”[1], as they say, with the venerable Mark Twang!
And I tried really, really hard to have nice transcripts I could share with you all… alas, it wasn’t meant to be! There were constant issues with the transcript system (especially with the Out of Luck game-overs, but even in A Bonded Harvester I would have random interruptions when RESTOREing or UNDOing). No one’s fault, just a surprise inconvenience. The fragments I did keep have still been very helpful for reviewing certain scenes.
One more note: even if I sound confident, it’s always possible I missed or misinterpreted or misremembered (or just forgot) something! Don’t be afraid to correct me or fill in any gaps, whether you’re on the set or in the audience. My palate is only human, and these dishes have so many layered flavours…
Now, with disclaimers out of the way, I’ll allow myself a bit of the self-importance befitting my role, and rattle off my thoughts with no regard for whether or not they’re original:
- Writing
The prose in both games is what I’d call very good.
In both cases, there’s clearly been effort put into customizing responses, maintaining a narrative voice, and crafting an engaging atmosphere. Dramatic scenes, like the showdowns in OOL or the fall and the swimming scenes in ABH, are appropriately dramatic. Environments are responsive to appropriate changes. NPCs are interesting to interact with; a small cast of them for OOL, just two very endearing ones for ABH (how can you not love the owl of disposal?!)
Details of the backstory and setting, in both games, are revealed progressively in a way that felt satisfying. Emotional beats and even philosophical themes, all executed with good impact. Both of them have somewhat convoluted explanations for why the dice work the way they do, and I was sometimes a little iffy on the details, but all in all I think they did a brilliant job of building a consistent system and working within in.
OOL has somewhat more detailed and elaborate descriptions in places, but I wouldn’t exactly call ABH’s prose terse or plain—it looked full enough to me, occasionally flexed a fun joke or pretty bit of description, and generally felt at least as characterful as it was utilitarian.
Just a couple of the responses I enjoyed:
> SWEEP
You sweep at the floor a little dispiritedly. In your experience it never looks clean.
(Out of Luck)
> TAKE SKELETON
You're already being accompanied by one who is no longer living; two would be excessive.
(A Bonded Harvester)
A few favourite moments from OOL: the conversations with Amë and Rodef, the nighttime scenes, the final showdown, the flashbacks, the ending.
A few favourite moments from ABH: the intro, Ed’s dialogue in the paint room, the owl interactions, the progression down into the sea and the rush back up, the ending.
I’d normally put a lot more focus on analyzing the thoroughness and appropriateness of responses, but both games understandably have lots of gaps here due to limited time! They each have at least a handful of responses to fun-but-nonessential commands, which is always something I look for and appreciate. ABH even has a XYZZY response!
Generally speaking, any less-than-perfect responses didn’t detract from my play experience, but a few will be relevant to the next section…
- Playability
Playability, in my opinion, is OOL’s biggest weak point, though it still earns itself a respectable score by being generally smooth and having a few thoughtful conveniences (the books each being given a distinct colour for ease of reference comes to mind, as well as the option to skip flashbacks so they don’t have to be replayed). Friction mainly comes in the form of unclear exits or underimplemented nouns/verbs, leading to the occasional moment of confusion or printing of You can't see any such thing—which in fairness is far better than You notice nothing special, so thank you for that!
I found most of the puzzles to be well-clued, but I had issues with the beginning of the game, which discourages player experimentation with a quick death. I do see the appeal of opening with a high-stakes chase! However, for me, the cost of that scene being structured the way it is felt a little too high, since it sacrifices the chance to get comfortably acquainted with our all-important dice. Also this is probably an incredibly petty quibble, but to me “a gun putting one hole in my body” does not equal “a bullet lightly grazing me”!
There is an alternate path through the game, with a branching point around the bar fight scene. The bloodier of the paths felt somewhat underdeveloped to me, lacking the clear throughline and logical consistency of the other branch; Amë’s saloon makes much more sense as a sleeping spot than the warden’s office, and the lock puzzle (as far as I could tell) lacks any of the direct questions which are supposed to serve as anchors for the Oracles. Considering how easy it is to get killed a the beginning of that branch, I also wonder how many players even naturally pushed through to actually see the rest of it, without being directed there by the walkthrough. I can’t help but admire the ambition to create a branching story, and it does work surprisingly well all things considered, but I question how much value it really added to the game, and whether that time and energy might have been better spent on polishing a single branch to even greater excellence.
(I will say that the non-bloody path, though my preferred one overall, has a character whose insanely stubborn disbelief in the magic of the dice felt pretty far-fetched to me!)
The conversation system deserves praise for its clear and convenient topic lists, but I unfortunately found the feature inconsistent, sometimes omitting important options or quietly dropping them in-between turns. Another small point of confusion was being blocked from repeating any conversation segments, including the simple TALK TO, until I leave the room and come back.
The inclusion of the aforementioned walkthrough, which separates game segments into handy command lists, was great and really helped me get unstuck at the start. I personally would have loved to see another version with hints instead of bare commands, but this version did its job perfectly well.
The same can’t quite be said of ABH’s hint system, which is entirely baked into the game itself. Don’t get me wrong, in-game hint systems are brilliant! But one massive downside is that if something goes wrong with in-game hints, and there’s no external walkthrough to fall back on, the player can get very badly stuck.
In my case, I decided to try the QUEST command soon after my unfortunate grabbing of the un-grabbable dice, and was told:
You need to find and pick up your necklace before you can do anything else.
OK, that’s a clear goal! I focused on searching the room, the herbs, etc… but the search options were limited, and there was no necklace in sight. I asked my mentor for advice, and he repeatedly asked whether I’d tried rolling the dice (yes, so many times)!
It turned out that the necklace could only be “found” by being accidentally dislodged by the dice, which did not feel like a sensible solution or a logical progression of the hints I’d been receiving. Thankfully, this was the one and only point of frustration in my entire playthrough, as the rest of the game was a joy and a breeze. I normally like to tough it out and try to beat games without hints, but when playing under a time limit I tend to seek them out more liberally, and I used them in quite a few areas of ABH (though not everywhere). I was pleasantly surprised by how natural it felt to ask Edward for advice, less like “cheating” and more like just working as a team with a wiser character, still often connecting the dots myself but with some guidance regarding which areas are still solvable. And seeing Edward’s ghostly-yet-friendly portrait pop up on the screen, or catching him lounging leisurely on a bench, was such a joy every time! Being able to refer to him as “Ed” was also a great touch.
(As a side note, one of my all-time favourite NPCs, from Christminster, is also named Edward!)
In contrast to OOL’s occasional issues with room implementations, ABH felt solid and stable. Exits (plus characters or notable items) are clearly highlighted in every room description. Every noun I’ve tried to interact with had been implemented at least on a basic level.
All in all, OOL gives me the impression of a very tasty but slightly undercooked 5-course meal, which could perhaps have been a just-perfectly-done 4-course meal instead. ABH’s scope and complexity, while still very impressive for speed-IF, feel nicely restrained and carefully measured by comparison. Where OOL had higher highs and lower lows, ABH felt more consistently nice, with fewer particularly notable bits because everything just flowed together so well (at least post-necklace!)
- Design
I’ve already harped on the design of the dishes’ opening bits, but in both cases I thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the game after getting unstuck from the beginning section.
One thing that’s worth noting is that I lucked out, in OOL, by picking the correct option to set me up for a successful endgame, which gave me possibly the best experience I could have had on my first playthrough. I went back to test the wrong option, and the game-over text does seem fairly good at pointing out what went wrong, potentially making for a cool puzzle as the player goes back to make things right. On paper, I really dig the concept, especially since the game is short enough that replaying that part isn’t a big commitment (and the ABOUT text does allude to potential unwinnable states). Adventuron does make it a little tricky in my opinion, as it’s not the smoothest system for this kind of thing, but the concept itself seems like a valid design approach. However I think I’d prefer to have some possibility of organically finding the right answer to the prophet’s weakness beforehand, so that a clever player could avoid the trial-and-error!
In terms of game design, ABH seems to follow more traditional puzzle-game tropes, but it does so effectively and with nice thematic twists—and thanks to the generally excellent baked-in hint system, it’s all very pleasant to navigate. I especially enjoyed the owl puzzle, which felt like a cool “a-ha” moment!
Going back to Adventuron, each chef made use of the system’s capabilities in wholly different but very successful ways. The challenger went all-in on the audio aspect, endowing OOL with a stunningly varied and high-quality soundtrack which really does a lot to enhance mood, story and gameplay. Extremely impressive! The iron chef opted for a strong focus on graphics with only very minimal sound effects, illustrating every room of the game in a way that’s 1) charming, 2) helpful, 3) properly reflects changes to the game world, and 4) actually includes the dynamic support NPC. Also very impressive given how many rooms there were to illustrate, as even simplified art can be quite a commitment!
I came onto the show hungry for some multimedia goodness, and I was absolutely not disappointed! I was a little surprised that neither chef attempted a balanced approach with a little bit of graphics and a little bit of music, but in retrospect that does seem like it would have been much harder to execute well (I’m not sure how much you could really get away with illustrating only half of the rooms in a game, for example, which would make game scope an even more complicated issue).
In terms of overall presentation, OOL borrows from Inform aesthetics and even some of the default Inform responses, as seen above with You can't see any such thing; meanwhile ABH sticks much more closely to the system’s retro roots. The challenger uses themes as a way to trigger style changes internally (very clever and effective), while the iron chef leaves them open and accessible for players to customize their experience (to be honest I dislike most of the default Adventuron themes so I chose to stick with the author’s pick anyway, but it’s always nice to have the option)!
There was a question earlier of whether retro stylings could cause players to be more lenient with a game’s implementation; I think that actually did happen for me, causing me to subconsciously judge OOL just a tiiiny bit more harshly for implementation flaws than ABH (though the latter truly was just more solidly rounded out to begin with, in my experience, so maybe it’s a moot point). Ultimately I genuinely appreciated both approaches: the experimental peek at the kinds of shockingly modern-styled games Adventuron is capable of producing, and the more classically old-school style polished up for modern audiences.
The major thing that sticks out to me, through it all, is that OOL feels more ambitious and experimental—but in achieving those more flashy goals, the challenger may have run out of time for that last coat of polish, in addition to letting a few important IF conventions and foundations fall by the wayside, impacting player communication. It should be mentioned that I was still impressed by the amount of polish in specific segments and descriptions, and consider OOL to be very successful and high-quality in general!
The question of boundary-pushing vs. the tried-and-true is one that’s close to my heart, because in my own work I tend to feel an extremely strong pull towards everything experimental or novel. And when I’m writing to a deadline, I often do end up having to skip some of that polish myself in pursuit of my boundary-pushing goals! Still, I believe the two sides can coexist harmoniously even under time pressure, and I think a big part of that is careful scoping; which seems to have been a particular strength of the iron chef in this episode.
- Inventiveness
Now it’s OOL’s turn to shine! It undoubtedly has the “wow factor”, with a concept that feels very fresh and intriguing and several high-stakes action scenes. It’s really outstanding in its engaging and rich execution of unconventional ideas, with a depth of layers that surprised me given the very limited development timeframe.
I admit I haven’t had time to finish it yet, but I did take a look at the challenger’s warm-up game, Escape from the MV Capricorn. It also comes across to me as being especially novel and inventive in its choice of setting, protagonist, objects and themes, though with a touch of clunkiness in the object manipulation which I wasn’t sure I could fully get on board with (no pun intended!)
To be clear, ABH did also feel nicely inventive—the unconventional dice faces, the use of said dice’s determination to chase the player as a puzzle-solving mechanic, tying the roll total to turns, the magical rigging of pips by the player, the village’s intriguing history and rituals… the owl of disposal (my beloved)… all truly great stuff! It just didn’t distinguish itself as much as the challenger’s game, in my eyes, feeling less “experimental and boundary-pushing” and more “comfortably familiar with some really nice surprises sprinkled in”.
- Challenge Ingredient
Both chefs knocked it out of the park here!
I gave the challenger a perfect score because the dish seemed to fit every criterion I could think of. A pair of dice fixed to 1 or 6, used to resolve unique number-based situations, with a significance baked into the way in-game societies function…
In particular, I think the challenger’s choice not to involve randomness after all was a great one, and kept the core idea nice and tight. My one complaint with ABH’s dice is that they didn’t really seem weighted to me, and felt a little too random! But ABH does have a satisfyingly different interpretation of the dice’s properties, with all the cool points mentioned above.
One small point of interest is the opposite approaches the contestants took to implementing the dice as basic objects. In OOL, the dice can never really be referred to as a pair, even just to examine them, as that just triggers a disambiguation prompt. Rolling happens one at a time—you can make the game roll them both by using AND, but it technically happens sequentially and not simultaneously. In ABH, they’re only interacted with and rolled as a pair (though they can be examined separately), and individual handling is a specific plot point that has to be solved via puzzle. I actually preferred ABH’s approach here, at least in terms of LOOK interactions, as it felt like a great balance of the dice forming an examinable set but still retaining their individual properties and descriptions.
Ultimately, two brilliant takes on the concept. I think we can safely declare our first compound-ingredient episode a success!
—— Verdict ——
What we have here are two excellent examples of speed-IF, surprisingly different despite the specificity of their shared ingredient, and both delicious; the advantage goes to Iron Chef Dee Cooke mainly for her judicious application of IF best practices.
twanging? ↩︎
