Yes, this is where. I tried every available verb on the snake, and thought I did the same to the statue, but maybe in wrong order?
Insta-death is not necessarily a deal breaker, especially when you are explicitly referencing the Good Old Days. :] The perceived unwinnable state is more vexing. The fact that it was not the game, just me, is in its favor (for the NOT MEs of the world I guess).
Blockquote Yes, this is where. I tried every available verb on the snake, and thought I did the same to the statue, but maybe in wrong order?
The first time you examine the statue you should get an extended description of it. The second time you examine it you should be able to see that it contains something that wasn’t there upon the first examination. Having this object allows you to progress beyond the corridor.
Write or Reflect? by Andrew Schultz
Played: 4/18/23
Playtime: 45min, did not finish
Man do I love how omnivorous this author is in subject matter, narrative interests, puzzle creation and platform engagement. If you’d told me ahead of time this was his next project my response would have been, “Are you kidding?? Where did THAT come from??” <pause, thinking> “Ok yeah, I see that.”
As is a my wont, a quick digression about ME. I have a long history with coding, starting from any number of BASICs, Pascal, Fortran, Intel and Motorola assembly, to C, C++, verilog, vhdl, Java, Javascript, BASH and Cshell, Tcl/Tk, TADS of course, and on… I am deeply unafraid of new languages which I condescendingly characterize as “where does the semicolon go?” Various programming languages come easier or harder, depending on how their syntax and operators align to my own thought patterns and algorithm organization. One language has long towered above all others as just GETTING ME. I speak of course of PERL, God’s Own scripting language.
As a Perl zealot, there is a special contempt for non-Perl scripting languages. Ruby, inessential. AWK, aimed at alien intellects.
Python. Sterile, pale, uncanny valley of scripting languages.
As a veteran of the Scripting Language Wars, arguably on the losing side (but the right side of history!), I have so many feels when I see Python. Boy do they surge when I need to fire it up, or worse, DOWNLOAD ADDONS TO A LANGUAGE I WOULD AS SOON PURGE FROM MY DISTRO.
Anyway, all that is inessential to this review, but was essential to my mental health.
WOR is a clever math puzzle, overlaid with a writer’s block simulator. You are given progressively more interesting rules about balancing writing and reflection, and asked to derive the variations (under the guise of ‘finishing a chapter’). Each correct variation you enter is accompanied by amusing mini-narratives about staying on task. Or not. I quickly got immersed, at first using fingers to brute force enumerate possibilities, then pencil and paper trying to math them out. This is my kinda fun! It did pull me down a rabbit hole of abstract thought, so much so that the choice to engage this right before bed was revealed to be a deep miscalculation. I found myself spinning on the same thoughts a little too frequently, blunt as my mental auger was. Reluctantly, I put it down. As I near the end of the ST game list, I think I’m going to leave it down so as not to halt my momentum. For sure though, this is the first I pick up, once complete. Holding my nose and wincing if need be.
There was either a few bugs, or a joke that went over my head. I got “New ideas form. They should be more specific, but I forgot to fill them in! This is a bug that I should fill in, in wor1[or 2].txt.” quite a few times. (Quick post mortem 4/24 - finished, was closer than I thought when bailed first time!)
Spice Girl: Sporty Spice
Vibe: Fun Math
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No. It is THAT LANGUAGE THAT SHALL NOT BE NAMED.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine? Re-implement in Perl. Obviously.
Stygian Dreams by Giorgos Menelaou
Played: 4/19/23
Playtime: 45min, finished
Maybe I should have done some preview reading at the start of the Thing. Just 12 days, not even two weeks, ago I jokingly said
5 Years? It was TWELVE DAYS!! Now I’m playing an AI-assist generated IF! Even the DARPA Grand Challenge took 2 years before self-driving cars completed the course.
The implementation is a hybrid click-select/parser set in Greek Myth. In practice I found that to be… pretty ok. It even seemed to handle my mischievous “click on link near top of page, after subsequent commands.” In practice the link acted as a ‘canned’ command for the parser, but did not preclude full parser input. My usual complaints with hopping input devices were kind of addressed here, at least addressed enough, and it was kind of… convenient.
The presentation was attractive, nicely evoking classical mythic art. That’s got me a little conflicted, tbh. Chokepoint Capitalism (ref. Cory Doctorow, 2023) has already transferred huge swaths of revenue from artists to rent takers/platform monopolists. Voice artists are under siege from AI audio, visual artists from AI artwork, now the extremely rarefied sector of IF?? We’re hardly a pot of gold waiting to be raided here! With that charged background I take no delight in saying: the art was pretty attractive and evocative. That’s how they getcha.
I take significantly more delight in saying the IF work shared a lot of shortfalls that beset pre-Beta human-created IF. I wish I could have transcripted it, but I understood the online interpreter to be required. There were lots of typos (a “fairly plan->plain corridor,” “later” instead of “latter” among others). There were many unimplemented nouns, including many samples of the evergreen “You are by the side of a river…” “>X RIVER” “You see nothing like that here.” There were issues with state awareness. After freeing Narcissus, the room description still had him mesmerized, but trying to X him yielded “not here.” There was some overwrought prose: a cave mouth described with fangs instead of stalactites.
Wait.
Did we feed the corpus of IF art to a machine, and it decided THESE THINGS WERE FUNDAMENTALLY PART OF THE FORM?? WHAT DOES THAT GO@^#$%#MN MACHINE THINK OF US EXACTLY???
Before I get too paranoid, I am going to attribute human agency to some key elements of SD. For one, the overarching plot is very much aligned with modern, revisionist Myth interpretations. From Broadway to video games there has been an impulse to infuse these classic stories with modern sensibilities and twists and by and large I’m for it. Why not? Cultural currency. We got a Winnie the Pooh horror movie, can’t wait to see the same thing done with Micky !@#$%^ Mouse. SD is very much in the former vein. (Not so much the latter, but I would also watch the crap out of an Achilles Slasher movie. “Andromeda, he’s not dead! Get him in the heel Andromeda, the heel!”) Don’t know that I was clamoring for a redemption arc for Narcissus but why not? On the other hand, its more generous take on Phaedra was nice. Cause man could that have gone a different way.
I think my favorite dear-god-I-have-to-believe-this-was-a-human moment came in an error statement. Instead of “You can’t do X with Y,” or “I don’t understand that,” I got “That’s -not- Greek to me.” I guffawed aloud at that, not the least of which because the piece is pretty straight drama otherwise. I swear to god if you tell me a machine produced that line I’m going to go full Kaczynski. (Minus the postal terrorism of course, Jeezuz.)
In sum, I found this to be a promising work. It suffered a lot of the issues that plague pre-release hand crafted IF, but none fatal. Its premise was neat and well executed. The story was contained and linear, but I understand that also to be a work in progress. Look forward to seeing where it goes from here.
Just keep the machine out of comedy for me.
Spice Girl: Posh Spice
Vibe: Greek Mythology
Polish: Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would institute a world wide pause on AI while we enlist our best thinkers to really plumb what it means for humanity to offload increasing amounts of cultural, technical and legal authority to inauditable, evolutionary systems. And for once, create guard rails and policies that keep technology in service of us, rather than letting clumsy, flawed systems run roughshod over the social order to keep enriching fewer and fewer. I mean, after I submitted this for a grade of course.
Hi JJ McC, I am really greatful for your kind and thorough review. I haven’t checked the forum for over a week, but I continuously share all the comments with my studens who really appreciate them. Liliane, motivated by her debut here, is actually going to try interactive author reading on a stand-up competition next month. As to Dr.John, I don’t know if I am allowed to post spoilers here, but I have no problem in passing the password to YOU. A really cool thing, this SPRING THING. Thanks again.
Kudos to you for introducing IF to a new generation, and so glad they found the experience exciting and motivating!
Lol, nuff said. <wink and secret handshake>.
Thanks much for the review … this was unfortunately a bit rushed and I thought I caught the bugs you mentioned.
The basic idea is that the auxiliary files wor1 and wor2 contain the game text, which gets shuffled quasi-randomly. So I thought I counted everything so all ideas were in place, but I didn’t quite.
Then I had tests but they overlooked things somehow.
If I find these holes, I’d like to give you credit!
Do you remember the chapter you were on when the bugs happened?
Turns out, the game output was still in my terminal window buffer! Attached as transcript. The wor1 error happened in Chapter 2. The wor2 errors happened end of Chapter 4, and Chapter 6. Because I CRUSHED Chapter 5.
jjmcc_wor23.txt (30.8 KB)
Wow, thanks, this is gold – and it’s great motivation to get some changes tested so I can get a new update up there, preferably before the weekend!
I had a PM that touched on some other things worth fixing, and between testing the fixes for regressions and just finding what’s going on in my data files, I’ll need to shift gears a bit but they should be interesting challenges.
Perl conversion won’t be THAT challenging… 
- an oyster feeling some sand in its mouth
Secret of the Black Walrus by spaceflounder
Played: 4/19/23
Playtime: 25min
A lifetime ago, I began my fascination with the pulp magazines of the 30s and 40s, and to a lesser extent the dime novels and serials of the 00’s and 10’s (the last ones). Of course Sherlock Holmes played in that space, he practically loomed over it. There are a lot of qualified charms to those stories that still appeal to me. Not the least of which is the purple prose that was a hallmark of so much of it, at least until John D MacDonald and his peers entered the scene.
In a handful of reviews, I have complained about what I called ‘poetic verse.’ I have NOT called it Purple Prose. This is deliberate on my part. While the majority of the world may not see a difference between the two I very much do, no doubt due to my formative fascination with pre-war low culture. My personal distinction between Overwrought Poetry and Purple Prose is that I really like the latter in an only semi-ironic way, while the former pushes me away. What’s the difference? I couldn’t really articulate a grammatical definition, but in application it seems to be one of stakes. If you scale a mountain to leap for the heart of a universal truth… and then fall short it is heartbreaking and hubris-revealing. If you bend over with dramatic flourish to brush lint off your shoes and stumble, that’s kind of funny. The contrast of high language and low stakes is near irresistible.
Secret of the Black Walrus feeds that beast. It apes the tropes and the vibe of Victorian mystery stories in creating an Asian super sleuth, then aiming her squarely at a locked room murder. The language does a lot to settle us in with bangers like:
"the freshest in our bloodthirsty city’s contemptible compendium of heinous crime."
"Bixby had a mind like a lightless cellar."
among others. If anything, I wanted MORE of that! No, it’s not realistic dialogue. Yes it goes out of its way to make its point. That IS the point! That overwrought energy is as much a hallmark of the genre as the Deerstalker hat. I fist pumped in delight whenever it showed up, and was sad when too many screens went by without. Shout out to the pastiche language of the thing in general. Even when too restrained for my taste it ably carried the vibe of its inspiration.
The mystery itself is nicely fit to its conceit, plenty of a->b clue following and twists and peril. It’s not particularly revolutionary but is a nice representation. Mysteries are tough in IF, particularly when your protagonist is a superhuman detective and the player is very much not. Walrus takes the tack of letting you point the protag in an investigative direction, but then letting her do the heavy deductive lifting. Nothing wrong with that, but in providing limited options that can be exhaustively selected it can take on the feel of a wind up toy. Yes, I periodically give it a twist, but all the motive energy is its own doing. I’m not saying I know a better way to do it, I’m saying these kinds of characters are uniquely challenging in IF (see also Lady Thalia).
I wish that those were my only lingering impressions of the work, but there is another heavier impression I carry. Pre-war pulps were deeply racist. There is an entire sub-genre called “Yellow Peril.” When I first engaged these stories, fandom approached this artifact as “awful of course, and kind of quaint in its ignorant hate.” That take itself has not aged well, and my (and society’s) tolerance has shifted significantly. There is an impulse when doing pastiches of pulp stories to underline the racism, as a way to show you are not blind to the faults of the form. This comment comes not from a place of condescending judgement, but of lived experience. I wrote some pulp pastiches decades ago that have aged REALLY BADLY. (I took it even further than Walrus. In a pre-post-satire world I thought the perfect takedown was to exaggerate for satirical effect, to drive home how awful it was. When all I was doing was creating more of it in the world. What was I even doing wading into that anyway? Was my big insight “Hey guys. Hey guys. Racism is BAD ACTUALLY.”??)
Thankfully, Walrus didn’t follow me down that ruinous path, but it did belligerently embrace the ‘don’t forget the racism’ impulse. At this point in my life, I am pretty convinced that just starkly OBSERVING racism (or sexism or sexual abuse or any number of awful things), without having anything to say ABOUT them weighs a work down. Especially when looking back from a different (and hopefully better) cultural context. If the narrative is a light lark meant to thrill or amuse, it is particularly defeating. I think there are defter ways make the protagonist uncomfortable that don’t unintentionally make the reader uncomfortable. Some complain about “woke culture” ahistorical racial diversity and acceptance in fiction like say Bridgerton. Those snowflake whiners somehow don’t care that the practical effect of what they champion is that wish fulfillment fantasy becomes only pleasant to the historically privileged. What are they defending here, the ongoing right to exclude people from WISH FULFILLMENT FANTASY??? If you’re not making historical documentary or pointed polemic, let everyone play! I am swayed by the idea that realistic racism has no place in a light, high society romance.
I am kinda done with “historically accurate racism” in pulpy detective adventures is what I’m saying. Didn’t mean to take this all out on you Walrus, but you stirred up some Stuff for me. I guess its good to know I can get spirited over things other than cats, broccoli and python.
Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: Victorian Whodunit
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would cut out most or all of the racial stuff, and replace it with MOAR PURPLE PROSE!!!1!!1!!
Thank you for your very kind review! I have a lot of thoughts about this (as I’m certain most of the readers here do) about discrimination in the subject matter.
Let me first say I agree with what you say: there’s a time and a place to discuss real-world problems, and Black Walrus is a silly fantasy mystery game.
I see your point and I largely agree. Most of us are allergic to heavy-handedness, even if we wholeheartedly agree with the point being made. That said, I think it can be very hard for authors to write about a real-world setting without also ending up with some of the baggage. I tried very hard to make Black Walrus fun and respectful at the same time. After the attempt, I’ll say this: it’s a tightrope walk, for sure.
Part of my reason for writing Black Walrus came from reading pulps from the era and thinking about a detective character who was the exact opposite of this. What if a character from that genre turned out to be the hero? I thought this would make a pretty interesting twist; not only does she have a baffling mystery to solve, but she deals with the challenges of being an ethnic minority—and a woman—in Victorian London.
My hope here is that this silly little game spurs some respectful discourse about the real people from this era nobody talks about. There really was a Chinatown in eastern London, before WWII when it was bombed to bits. A lot of the details of that story of have been lost, and that is a tragedy.
Thanks for taking the feedback in the spirit offered. I struggled with my framing of that for a long time, as the dialogue around race and art can get pretty fraught. My intent was definitely to grapple with the issue, and not point fingers.
Fwiw, your intention was never really in doubt in my reading. Certainly you walked the tightrope much better than I did!
I appreciate that, and thank you for playing my game! I have a sequel in mind, and I think your feedback (and the other reviews as well) will be immensely beneficial.
I checked the Review Sheet and saw that you had reviewed all the SpringThing entry already 
So… how did the Spice Girl Group ended up looking like ?? 
Lol, I am readying a wrapup post to unveil all that! Will probably wait to post until closer to closing time though. Suspense! :]
The games were top to bottom fun this year, that made it easy to blaze through!
And your reviews were also top to bottom fun 
I’d like to add my congratulations here on getting through and edutaining us. It’s sad when I don’t have the chance to get through everything or, well, barely anything. But it’s great I can have something relatively close to the experience!
Also, the bugs you found? Yeah, they would’ve probably gotten zapped a lot quicker by use strict; in Perl. (For whatever reason, I didn’t implement some tests I considered writing which would not have taken too long. They would have caught things.)
But on the other hand, I’ve felt so much more comfortable exploring new packages in Python. Perhaps a lot of t his is due to me, well, being more comfortable looking up knowledge than I was when starting Perl (or even just knowing about Stack Overflow.)
Hey, thanks for the comprehensive review! No, the greek to me part was a tongue in cheek change of the typical parser-doesn’t-recognise error, but that was listed in the AI’s ought-to-change improvements in a released IF game so… maybe it knows 
Your entire review echoes my exact intent; Blurring the line between prose and AI assisted “sauce”.
The rough state of the game is primarily due to it being typed out in a week-and-a-half frenzy, so a lot of these overlooked things (like the river, how did i miss adding descriptions of the rivers in a game about the rivers of the underworld?) are going to be ironed out. Hoping to have a more comprehensive experience out for the next ifcomp… or the one after that, i’m not putting artificial grade-hungry time limits to myself this time.
Thanks again for the review!