Ghosts Within by Kyriakos Athanasopoulos
Spoilery review
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