Here’s the deal: I’m not going to play or review The House on Highfield Lane. Here’s the reason: I don’t want to.
The House on Highfield Lane is a game set in an abandoned house, in a custom system. Not actually a custom system, just an unproven one: it’s apparently the newest version of Quest. This isn’t reassuring; Quest is bad. (Even though this new Quest is apparently a clean break from the past.) The blurb is breathless and desperate.
I feel like I played this game in 2019. I feel like this game gets entered every Comp. I feel like I already know what my review would be, and I feel like there’s no value in me giving it. There’s a possibility that I’m wrong, but I feel like the odds are not high enough to risk it. I feel like I want to get to At King Arthur’s Christmas Feast before the Comp ends.
Also, I feel like I have been spending a lot of time critizing custom systems for various ease-of-use failures, and I feel like that’s not necessarily very helpful when what creators of custom systems (especially parsers) often want to do is prove they can make a custom system at all. They’re not even trying to compete with Inform or TADS. But at the same time, I can’t just ignore systemic inferiority… unless I ignore the games themselves and accept that they aren’t for me. Similar reasoning may apply to some other systems with their own seperate communities: they’re just doing their own thing.
I’ve already excluded Twine games from my reviews, and I’m seriously considering limiting future Comp reviewing further, to a specific list of systems. (Yes, this list would include some choice-based systems.) This wouldn’t affect the rest of this year’s reviews much: I’ve already got to most of the custom systems. It wouldn’t have protected me from Plane Walker or Unfortunate, and it would have led to me missing Libonotus Cup and Dream Factory (Adventuron won’t make the cut). But in future Comps I need a way to ease the load of producing review after review saying “Implicit action support is poor.” (Implicit actions are really important.)
This is all fair enough, and I definitely agree At King Arthur’s Christmas Feast is worth checking out. But if you’re passing on Highfield Lane purely because it’s written in Quest, rather than because the blurb doesn’t appeal or whatever, you might want to at least briefly check it out to see whether you feel you’re able to evaluate it fairly - I’ve also always struggled with Quest games, but I found the new version night-and-day better, nearly indistinguishable from Inform or TADS (and I don’t think that’s just my weird opinion - Mathbrush’s review says he thought it was Dialog at first).
I don’t want anyone to think I’m judging the new Quest on the basis of the old Quest, to be clear, but the game seems to fall into an extremely tired subgenre of IF and just nothing about it appeals? (I was dreading it long before I realised the Quest connection.)
I’m glad to hear the new Quest is so much improved.
Sounds like an excellent reason for not doing something and is more or less the same one I give for not e.g. reading Stephen King novels, or eating polenta. It’s just not for me.
(For the record, though, Highfield is pretty good and worth a look for players who don’t really care about the niceties of implicit actions and suchlike.)
What are implicit actions? Do you mean something like automatically unlocking locked doors when opening them? Object scopes? Daemons?
Personally speaking, giving criticism is fine as long as its constructive and that you differentiate between critiquing engine and story. That being said, not everyone agrees with me on that, or even are capable of differentiating at all.
No one should play a game they don’t want to play or feel defensive about not playing it.
But as a tester of The House on Highfield Lane, my Mama Bear instincts kick in a little here, so I’m going to link @rovarsson 's review to it here so people can read about it.
Implicit actions are when the player says they want to do something and, if there’s only one possible way to do it, it’s right there in the room and not actually meant to be part of a puzzle, the program will do the intermediate step.
For example, if you typed “look under doormat” and found the key to the front door there, then typed “unlock door”, the game will automatically take the key you’ve discovered and unlock the door with it. It might even open the door for you in the same action, since that’s the logical next step - unless it’s the sort of game where there may be a reason to not open a door immediately after unlocking it, in which case it won’t.
It shouldn’t allow you to do anything (implicit or explicit) with the key if you didn’t look under the mat and thus haven’t seen it yet. Also, it should prompt for the door if there are two locked doors in that location, and if it’s possible to have brought a second method of unlocking the door to that place, the game should still ask which method you want if you weren’t specific. Implicit actions are about cutting out busywork, not making anyone think less.
Automatically unlocking doors on opening are another possible implicit action, depending on the unlock structure involved. Certainly, if you’ve already opened it once, you still have the means to open it again and nothing about the game world would reasonably result in the door becoming impassable by that method, implicit actions are good for cutting out unnecessary repetition.
This is a great explanation – I just wanted to hop in to mention the way Hadean Lands make some quite complex actions into de facto implicit actions, where late in the game typing a simple “w” can solve a half-dozen subsidiary puzzles and take hundreds of actions instantly and automatically. It’s magic stuff! Er, I guess literally since the game is about alchemy, but it’s also an awesome piece of Inform-wrangling.
Oh, it’s integrally tied to the design and the puzzle structure, since it only automatically solves ones you’ve already figured out. There are regular state resets, and the implicit-action thing removes some of the busywork, while introducing new complications because there are multiple solutions to most puzzles and the automatic actions just go with however you solved them last. A lot of the game winds up being developing and tweaking an algorithm to solve its biggest puzzles - it’s incredibly elegant.
Ok, I will stop threadjacking now, but I feel like Hadean Lands gets much less attention than it deserves!
The engine can handle common instances where implicit actions make sense. The first example I gave, where a hidden key being found and subsequently used in a door in the same location happens in enough games that engines can and sometimes do code that automatically. This is how Lava Ghost knows that Quest 5 doesn’t do implicit actions - relatively routine situations like what I just described do not have implicit actions.
Story-specific implicit actions are needed for elements that are rarer. If the door was unlocked through an object-facilitated puzzle rather than a key, most if not all engines don’t assume what constitutes proof that puzzle was done and still could be done because that’s game-specific. That’s when you’d need to code the additional implicit actions game-by-game. My guess is that Hadean Lands will have had at least some story-specific implicit actions coded, to get that “well that proves I solved everything I was meant to solve here” implicit action sequence.
That’s a fair question, so I’ll copy-and-paste what I said in an earlier, private discussion:
The first thing I should say is that I don’t get the same things out of parser and choice-based games in general. What I get out of parser games is the joy of exploration, of interacting with a simulated world and having it poke back, often in unexpected ways. What I get out of the choice games I like is having a sense of co-authorship and co-ownership over the narrative. (This doesn’t necessarily mean a huge amount of control over the narrative; I like Turandot .)
I tend to bounce off Twine games because:
They often don’t provide the things that make choice-based games work for me : Sometimes they’re short, and not that satisfying to direct. Sometimes they don’t provide choices frequently enough. Sometimes they try to build a simulated world to explore in hypertext. But these aren’t as satisfying to explore as simulated worlds rendered in parser, because their limits are so obvious.
The use of hypertext is offputting : Sometimes hyperlinks will get put directly in the descriptive text, and it’s often not even clear what clicking those will do (so in what sense are they really ‘choices’?). I find this blending of output and input really unmooring, as a practice. But (this is a minor thing) even if it’s just a pair of choices at the end, I don’t really like “just make the choices themselves links” as an interface. Parser games make you think and type, classic gamebooks say “to x, go to y”… removing the distance between the choice and the execution of the choice is off-putting to me.
I don’t really like browser-based play in general : I like to try to maintain a separation between recreation and the many other things I use the Internet for. Of course, Twine is far from the only system which uses HTML files for games these days, but it’s a factor.
Twine games often look cheap : This isn’t a universal; it depends on the authors’ CSS skills. But the default look with oversized serifed text and gratuitously bolded links is unappealing to me.
None of these things are true of every Twine game (except 3), and none of them are exclusive to Twine games. But the patterns are strong enough that “cut every Twine game and review the rest” seemed like a pretty valid way to make the Comp manageable for me.
So, basically, a bunch of idiosyncratic things that don’t make Twine a bad system, but do leave it the first to go. I’ll add, now that I’ve thought about it more, that its very versatility makes it hard to establish ‘best practice’ for it, and a feeling that the author has in some way committed to a set of best practices is helpful as a reviewer (which is what I was getting at above.)
A Hercules parser game is a surprisingly good idea. For all that Heracles gets painted as the prototypical brawns-over-brains type, many of his successes in the myths involve cleverness, even use of dry goods. They’re puzzle solutions. So why not take advantage of that with a puzzly take on the Twelve Labors?
Of course, when all twelve labors need to fit in the confines of a two-hour Comp deadline, the game was never going to be able to take itself that seriously. The map and puzzle structure are by necessity compressed. With the epic unavailable to the game, it turns to comedy, and first off it makes the decision that becomes its primary hook… instead of just de-emphasizing Hercules’s status as a strongman, it erases it altogether. Its Hercules is a nerd and a wimp who needs to use his brain to complete the Labors because it’s all he has.
I was pleased to find that Hercules was characterised as good-natured and optimistic. He’s not jealous or self-loathing although he’s candidly aware of his frailties, and he doesn’t go around sneering at what’s around him. The narrative also doesn’t hate him: his successes are real. The tone of the game is pleasant, and that goes a long way. Yes, it’s just the typical nerdy power fantasy of getting some respect already, but it’s the most benign version of that fantasy.
The puzzles move along briskly if linearly. I do have some issues with the simulation; for example, I had trouble buying that a flag which fit in a trick gun could be used as a hammock. And having established that Hercules has no sort of supernatural strength, it’s a bit much to declare that a chunk of ice he carried all the way down a mountain contains enough water to wash out an entire stables. The need for a constrained structure in general leads to some forced solutions, and I want to call out the business with the ‘monstrous’ receipt as being absolutely awful, at least in the version I played (it’s possible the update fixes things.)
Also, since we’ve been talking in this thread about implicit actions, here’s a good object lesson: If the game wants me to PUT a pendant on each of four individual action figures in turn so I can TAKE them, the least it could do is to assume I’m taking the pendant from the figure it’s already on before putting it elsewhere.
But in spite of these flaws Hercules! is an easy game to like. I’m glad I played it, and I’m glad it’s in the comp.
Rankings
A Paradox Between Worlds
The Song of the Mockingbird
How it was then and how it is now
The Last Doctor
Off-Season at the Dream Factory
Walking Into It
Sting
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
Hercules!
Silicon and Cells
Mermaids of Ganymede
I Contain Multitudes
Wabewalker
The Library
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Kidney Kwest
Second Wind
The Vaults
What remains of me
Unfortunate
Smart Theory
My plan is to play the games in reverse alphabetical order, skipping Twines (I’ll play other choice games.)
Don’t feel obligated, but please consider checking out my entry (“Cygnet Committee”) if you have time.
Even though it was made in Twine, there is a pretty heavy custom Javascript system built on top of it. It has a world model that responds to you in a unique way — it isn’t just a ‘read to the end’ game, but it also does things you (probably) can’t do in a parser.
It’s also ‘appified’ rather than browser-based, and the audio/visual design is a big part of the game. It’s similar to Silicon and Cells in terms of presentation.
Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg by Arthur DiBianca
Spoilery Review
Arthur DiBianca has become known for limited-verb parser games which involve mastery of a system. These games generally escalate such that a straightforward set of initial rules become used as the basis for fiendishly complex challeges near the end.
Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg is a little different. It’s in the same tradition of ‘master the system’; it even has a sort of ‘complile your system understanding’ endgame to get to the “Hundred Percenter” achievement. However, there are a couple of big shifts.
One is a new approach to the verbset. In Remarkable Egg, all but a few commands are interpreted as instructions to the voice-controlled egg of the title. More verbs are revealed along the course of the game, and there are some commands which are never revealed but can be intuited. Some of these have obvious connections to revealed commands (because they fit the same set, like colors or zodiac signs) but others are not obvious at all; the example I found was RAMP. So instead of a clearly defined verbset, Remarkable Egg goes in the other direction and embraces radical uncertainty.
The other is a game structure. DiBianca’s games (that I’ve played) sometimes have a split structure in which there is a ‘good enough’ ending you can reach within, say, a two-hour deadline, but also hidden content which the player may explore if they wish to truly beat the game. Remarkable Egg is something like this, but all you really have to do to reach the ‘good enough’ ending is solve a couple of easy logic puzzles while waiting for the egg to repair itself sufficiently that the ACCOMPLISH THE STATED OBJECTIVE option comes online. (Technology, amirite?)
And as for the extra content, it consists effectively of a list of achievements: interesting things you can do by using the right combinations of Egg commands. There’s no particular objective beyond the handcuff thing: nothing obvious, and, I think, nothing that eventuates. The achievement list is just a list of ambiguous phrases, not a concrete list of ‘try and achieve these things’. Even ‘Hundred Percenter’ just unlocks a naff survey. In fact, I’d argue that Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg, unlike most of DiBianca’s other work, isn’t really a game at all: it’s a toy. The joy is simply in discovering all the interesting things the toy can do. The system becomes a goal in its own right, without the need to ‘win’.
It’s very good. I don’t feel the need to elaborate much further, as this game already has tons of reviews. I just wanted to point out how wonderful it is that Arthur DiBianca never stops surprising.
Rankings
A Paradox Between Worlds
Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg
The Song of the Mockingbird
How it was then and how it is now
The Last Doctor
Off-Season at the Dream Factory
Walking Into It
Sting
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
Hercules!
Silicon and Cells
Mermaids of Ganymede
I Contain Multitudes
Wabewalker
The Library
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Kidney Kwest
Second Wind
The Vaults
What remains of me
Unfortunate
Smart Theory
The Golden Heist by George Lockett and Rob Thorman
Spoilery Review
The Golden Heist is a very solid Ink game about raiding the greedy bloated parasites who exploit the common man for wealth and then leave him to die when he’s no longer useful. By which I mean to say it’s about infiltrating the famously ‘a bit much’ Domus Aurea, constructed AD 64-68, and stealing from the Emperor Nero. (I’m not actually that commited to anti-capitalism, but the intro was too good to pass up. I see what they’re doing.)
The Golden Heist is a pretty good choice narrative. You get to choose one of three companions to take with you on your heist, which wil certainly add to the replay value and must have taken a lot of work. The twist that the Domus’s vault is pretty much empty because Nero poured all the Empire’s wealth into the Domus itself perfectly capitulates the theme. And the game’s refusal to embrace the more sensational and sexualized, but less plausible, accusations against Nero is well taken.
It seems pretty difficult to lose this game, but it has one real puzzle. I think the puzzle should have been reconsidered; it somewhat damages the tone and setting as well as rudely forcing the player into a different mode of play for one chapter. At one point a character who was established as a woman suddenly switched to being referred to as male; a confusing glitch.
One of the things I appreciated most about The Golden Heist was its approach to the historical setting. The Golden Heist is pitched as a comedy, and the humor feels crisp and modern. I especially liked the long sequence about how one would get past Cerberus. Yet for all that the setting is domesticized (my talking about the Domus Aurea in this review is an affectation I picked up from Wikipedia: in the game, it’s the Golden House), it’s always treated with integrity. There’s no cheeky anachronisms or references (a possible exception is Felix selling literal snake oil). It’s a comedy about humans acting like humans in first-century Rome.
Rankings
A Paradox Between Worlds
Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg
The Song of the Mockingbird
How it was then and how it is now
The Last Doctor
Off-Season at the Dream Factory
Walking Into It
Sting
The Golden Heist
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
Hercules!
Silicon and Cells
Mermaids of Ganymede
I Contain Multitudes
Wabewalker
The Library
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Kidney Kwest
Second Wind
The Vaults
What remains of me
Unfortunate
Smart Theory
Ghosts Within is a large, ambitious game in TADS 3. It makes effortless use of TADS’s power and versatility. I’m thankful for any new TADS game, and this one is large with multiple paths through it. However, I wan’t really feeling this one.
There’s not a strong hook in this game. Well, there are three hooks, but the one I found wasn’t strong. I’m amnesiac and my initial objective turned out to be ‘look over the entire game world trying to find a light so I can see something three rooms from the start’. Even once I got the light and cracked the game open, most of the puzzle structure that I saw turned out to be basically fetch quests. I had to enlist the help of NPCs to do things, and it often wasn’t obvious who to talk to. There’s a young woman who is utterly infantilised despite being described as around 20, and it’s the creepiest thing ever. I was held up in my progress more than once by my extreme reluctance to engage with her.
I didn’t feel like the use of TADS’s quite powerful conversation system was the most effective. I guess the author has read “Choosing a Conversation System” in the TADS 3 Technical Manual, which recommends writing the actual questions the PC asks. But the thing is, that’s intended as a strategy for characterizing the PC, and this PC is not strongly characterized in any event. Instead it simply feels like the PC is rattling down a list of questions, which are not necessarily sorted by salience. The author also makes dutiful use of HelloTopics and ByeTopics, but in practice these are often overspecified. The unique aspects of the TADS 3 conversation system are intended to make conversation feel more natural, but their execution here makes the NPCs feel more like automatons and the conversations feel more like interrogations. ("“Are there any problems in your father-daughter relationship?”, you wonder.") And also, many plausible discussion topics have not been implemented. (I recall Eric Eve’s Blighted Isle making good use of the conversation system, but it’s been a long time since I played.)
Anyway, upon being asked to go and find three different flowers for pretty arbitrary reasons, I said to myself, “You know, I think I’ve seen enough of the game to make a judgement now.” I had thirty minutes left, but who knows how long it would have taken me to advance again. Will I return once I don’t have a time limit? Not sure. I respect the amount of work that goes into a game of this size and complexity, and I’m always glad to see work being done in TADS, but I’m not sure this type of item hunt is that rewarding.
Rankings
A Paradox Between Worlds
Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg
The Song of the Mockingbird
How it was then and how it is now
The Last Doctor
Off-Season at the Dream Factory
Walking Into It
Sting
The Golden Heist
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
Hercules!
Silicon and Cells
Mermaids of Ganymede
Ghosts Within
I Contain Multitudes
Wabewalker
The Library
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Kidney Kwest
Second Wind
The Vaults
What remains of me
Unfortunate
Smart Theory