Kidney Kwest by Eric Zinda and Luka Marceta
There’s also an artist credit, but she doesn’t deserve to get dragged into this.
Spoilery Review
I was born eight years after Infocom folded and sixteen years after Personal Software first released Zork. As a preteen, I discovered the old genre of the text adventure on a Wikipedia rabbit hole. Intrigued, I found a web-interpreted version of Zork I and dived in. But I immediately hit a problem: I couldn’t get in the house. I tried breaking the door, pulling up the boards, climbing the house: nothing worked. Finally, I gave up and went to a walkthrough. I hadn’t realised I could use directional commands to go around the house.
The point of this anecdote is that working with parser games is a learned skill. I myself had to play a number of games from walkthroughs before I was able to engage with the format on its own terms, and, in fact, that’s probably the best way to learn to play parser games in the modern day. The text adventure made most sense, honestly, in the early '80s, when typing commands was how you got anything done on a computer. The verb-noun structure was nicely analogous to the command-argument structure. That’s not how most people interact with computers today.
Enter Kidney Kwest, a game aimed at children with kidney disease which advertises itself as understanding full English sentences. In fact, the game specifically discourages using abbreviated commands, and has a system whereby I can ask full questions to get state data. So, taking the game’s self-presentation seriously, I geared up, forgot everything I knew about how parser works, and typed:
?:go over to the white door
I didn’t understand ‘over’. Try one of these to get going: ‘Where are you?’ and ‘look around’
Well, there you go. The game doesn’t understand full English sentences. “Go over to the white door”, a perfectly standard English sentence, is too much for it. Clearly, it only understands some tight subset of English sentences, just like every other parser game out there, and I will have to work out what the rules actually are. In fact, it doesn’t even understand all the sentences a game made in Inform or TADS would understand. Most parser systems would be able to handle TAKE THE PAIL AND PUT IT IN THE GIFT BOX, but it’s just too complicated for Kidney Kwest.
The response to HELP gives more guidance, but still insists that “I work best when you interact with me like you’re interacting with a human.” This is simply asinine. It is in fact a computer program and it should just get on with saying the rules for interacting with the program (which, to be fair, it does) instead of trying to pretend it’s something it isn’t. Also asinine is the way it’s so attached to its “full sentence” model it complains every time I drop an article. There is no place in the game where article-dropping could lead to ambiguity! Why do the programmers hate convenience?
I don’t know if kids would do well with this game. It doesn’t seem to escape the standard difficulties with parser, and it doesn’t have a strong tutorial voice - and, as we’ve seen, some of the tutorial advice given is actively misleading. It also depends on a rather tight hunger daemon; a player may be at immanent risk of being kicked out before even finding the healthy foods they’re supposed to eat, especially if they spent time fighting the parser. (Time still seems to progress while you’re fighting the parser.) As food is a limited resource, the whole game is on a time limit. There’s also no implicit action support, adding to the frustration. Really, if the goal is to educate kids in a fun way, I don’t see why you’d use a format which is so unfamiliar to modern kids. Should’ve just done it in Twine.
I fantasize sometimes about a game with a truly natural language parser that can understand any command, which allows the player to deal with abstractions as easily as it does solid objects. But how would one learn to play such a game, or design it; what would it even be about? In any event, Kidney Kwest isn’t it. It’s a misconceived game that’s probably not fit for purpose.
Rankings
A Paradox Between Worlds
The Last Doctor
The Song of the Mockingbird
Off-Season at the Dream Factory
Walking Into It
Sting
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
Silicon and Cells
Mermaids of Ganymede
Wabewalker
The Library
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Kidney Kwest
Second Wind
The Vaults
Unfortunate
What remains of me
Smart Theory