Mike Russo's ParserComp 2021 Reviews

Thanks for the review and transcript. In retrospect, the entire “bland and uninteresting” theme wasn’t a great choice on my part. At the time I told myself that it would come off as the aliens being mysterious, when in reality I had no idea what I was doing and no energy to come up with a more cohesive backstory. I’ll see what I can do about that in a post-comp release. (One commenter on itch even suggested that I should issue a mid-comp content expansion update, but I feel like doing that would rather over-extend the definition of “bug-fixing”.)

Yikes. The ABOUT menu has a section on “unusual verbs” that should basically provide the solution, but I guess I was bound to forget providing a ‘common’ synonym for at least one thing in the game.

I’m glad the game is not as much of a train-wreck as I feared it might be.

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Yeah, very much not a train-wreck! The game definitely has good bones, as they say – it would have just benefitted from a little more oomph here and there. And you’re completely right about the ABOUT → UNUSUAL VERBS thing – I think I often shy away from verbs lists because it can sometimes feel too much like looking up the answer to a puzzle, but here, but this is a good reminder that authors put them in for a reason! Still, if this is something the player character is meant to have internalized, maybe it’d be helpful to put in a prompt after you put the key-thing in the ignition?

Gruesome, by Robin Johnson

(I beta tested this game, so this is less a review than impressions of a version of the game no-one can currently plan, biased both positively by having personal interaction with the author and some investment in the game from doing a tiny bit of work to help it come into existence, and negatively by experiencing the game in a buggier, unfinished state. If after seeing this disclaimer, your reaction is “I don’t see the point of reading this so-called review,” you’re probably right!)

I copped to my inexperience with Zork in one of my earlier reviews for this Comp, but of course, even though I’ve never played, I know pretty much everything about it. Partially this is from reading things like the Digital Antiquarian’s series on the early days of Infocom, but largely it’s because of parodies. By my count there have been approximately… (checks IFDB) four trillion games riffing on all things Zorkian, with the violent, kleptomanic tendencies of its notional hero coming in for a kicking as early as Enchanter, and the heroic journey of progression inverted and parodied in Janitor and Zero Sum Game. Gruesome cleverly combines and re-inverts these parodic tropes, placing you in the shoes (claws?) of a noble grue trying to help a mob of violent, dull-witted adventurers complete their quests so they’ll leave the poor denizens of the dungeon alone.

This is funny, but it’s still a one-and-a-half joke premise at most, and throwing in a reimplementation of Hunt the Wumpus doesn’t do much to change things up. Yet Gruesome really works, on the back of solid puzzle-design and jokes that do the work to be funny, rather than just gesturing at something that happened in Zork and calling it a day.

Let’s start with the funny business. There’s a broad array of humor on display here, so I have to imagine at least some of the jokes will land for most players. You have your direct Zork jokes, sure – and these are good, from the opening line to “It is bright white. You are likely to be slain by an adventurer” – but also silly puns (“Handel’s Opening Number” is my favorite, because when you look at it, it’s an awful pun, but when you think about it some more, you realize there’s an additional, even worse pun hiding in plain sight!) as well as a whole bunch of physical comedy as the adventurers blunder around in the dark.

And save for the cute-as-a-button Wumpus, the adventurers are really the stars of this particular show. They each skewer a specific heroic archetype, like the mighty-thewed barbarian who “hails from the frozen wastes of the far northlands and, in accordance with Jones’s Law of Sartorial Inversion, dresses in a few leather straps and a tiny loincloth,” and they’re modeled with stunningly realistic AI: just like real adventure-game heroes, the bastards wander around at complete random and get into fights at the drop of a hat. My first time through the game, I was informed that one of the dopes had snuffed it, and I thought it must have been because the dragon had got him, but no, the pugnacious %#@#$ had picked a fight with one of his fellow hotheads and wound up pushing daisies – like a Zork-themed remake of No Exit, the dungeon in Gruesome may have monsters, but hell is other heroes.

Speaking of my first playthrough, it ended with all the adventurers save one dead in a ditch. That’s all right though, not because they deserved it (though they did) but because the game’s a giant optimization puzzle that’s meant to be played more than once. As you do your initial round of exploration, you’ll slowly work out the rules of the game and solve some of the component puzzles. Mostly these involve creating and extinguishing light, as the surface-dwellers unsurprisingly flee the dark and seek out rooms where they can see, which allows you to manipulate their movements. Invariably, solving the individual puzzles – which are a pleasing mix of simple object manipulation, maze traversal, and lateral thinking – will lead to an adventurer going somewhere they oughtn’t, and my initial impression of the game was a bit overwhelming, with chaos breaking out everywhere. But once you get your oar in and start considering how to sequence your actions and fit the pieces together, the meta-puzzle isn’t actually too hard to crack, though it’s very satisfying to come up with the final resolution.

Is there room for improvement in Gruesome? Sure – the climax and denouement aren’t quite as compelling as the main body of the game, for one thing, and there are some puzzles, like the one involving the dwarven foreman, that can feel a little perfunctory. And the lack of grue puns beyond the title is a real missed opportunity – like, your protagonist should feel grueful after allowing one of the adventurers in their charge to perish, or let out a self-congratulatory “gruevy” upon accomplishing a task. Or if you play your cards right in the attic, perhaps you could have finished the game as a bride-gruem. Come on, these were lying right there! (Perhaps the author considered them, but found them egruegiously bad).

Don’t let this significant flaw keep you from enjoying Gruesome, though. It’s a fun, funny farce whose jaundiced view of the typical IF protagonist doesn’t make its parody too acidic (I kind of want the slice-of-life sequel where you just hang out with Jessica the orc and the Wumpus), and it’s got some of the best puzzling of the Comp – plus the implementation seems quite smooth, though of course given I’m not playing with fresh eyes, I’m not best suited to make that judgment. If all Zork parodies hit this level of quality, keep ‘em coming!

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Have you tried singing? :slight_smile:

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Ah, now I have. Complaint partially retracted :slight_smile:

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Playing the organ also has a whole battery of gruevy puns. Edit: Seems to be the same ones on a quick check.

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Foreign Soil, by Olaf Nowacki

(I beta tested this game, so the caveat in my Gruesome review above continues to apply)

There’s an undeniable romance about making a new home after being shipwrecked, pushing civilization’s light into a heretofore-unlit corner and staking a claim: it’s a heady mélange of self-reliance and creativity, of being tested by a hostile and untamed wilderness without the support of society, and then constituting that society anew. Of course, the historical reality at the root of these fantasies is something else entirely, as it’s not possible to separate them from settler colonialism, given the common tropes they invoke – genocide, land-theft, and the exploitation of indigenous bodies for labor and worse belie the sunny Swiss Family Robinson image (points to Defoe for including the character of Friday in his original novel, making clear exactly how the trick works).

Displacing these fantasies into a science-fictional setting makes a lot of sense, then, as you get to invoke the tropes while starting from a place of relative innocence – with our scene laid at a completely uninhabited planetoid, it’s possible to simply enjoy watching a plucky hero (or in this case, heroine, as yes, I’m finally starting to come around to the game) carve out a settlement. Foreign Soil does have its moments of darkness – given that the protagonist first wakes up alone in a colony ship on the fritz, it’s clear that the life she left behind wasn’t great, and it’s quickly confirmed that we’re in a Botany Bay type situation – but it’s mostly an uncomplicated good time, as you solve some puzzles to wrest power and sustenance out of an unwelcoming hunk of rock.

That wake-up scene is probably the high point of the game, not because Foreign Soil goes downhill sharply, but because it’s a really compelling opening. The main character comes to amidst sleeping coffins, shivering with hibernation sickness and her mind and perceptions disordered. It’s hard to write a scene like this in IF, since you need to convey the character’s disorientation while still giving the player enough concrete information to figure out how to act. The sequence walks this tightrope very well, as the player is kept off-balance and doesn’t have a full sense of what’s going in the scene, but is always told about one salient detail or recent change that should be investigated, giving them a thread to pull to keep moving ahead. The game was an entrant in 2020’s IntroComp, and even though it’d been about a year since I’d last played this bit, I still remembered almost every detail, since it’s so strong.

Once you’ve got your colonist sorted, it’s time to get to the colonizing, and the challenges and puzzles are usually logical and fun to work through. As in the opening, you don’t usually have a complete understanding of what you’re doing – it appears the government that sent you out here isn’t big on briefings or instruction manuals – but the game is usually good at signposting what you should be paying attention to, and progress is typically possible with a little bit of prodding and poking. There are places where the implementation could be a little more robust, though, as a few puzzles flirt with guess-the-verb issues (when I replayed today, less than a month after doing my beta playthrough, it still took me forever to figure out how to fill the water bottle the second time), and there are a few errant typos – stray line breaks, missing spaces, that sort of thing – which is I suppose is primarily an indictment of how well I did my job as a tester.

The prose strikes an engaging tone throughout. I’m having a hard time nailing it down precisely, but I want to call it jauntily cynical, or maybe cynically jaunty? The main character definitely has a personality—I got a good sense of her as brash and determined – and her voice lends color to what could otherwise be a dull environment made of rocky landscapes and generic corridors. Here’s her take on an empty bit of crater, for example:

This rough-edged but inviting narration also takes the edge off of death when it arrives, as it is possible to perish from a variety of missteps. It also helps that these deaths aren’t permanent, as they’re considerately rewound as soon as they happen (for a reason that makes sense once it’s ultimately revealed). And indeed, the plot winds up in a surprisingly sweet place that, much like the game overall, worked really well for me. Foreign Soil has room for more polish, it’s relatively slight, and it never manages to top its bravura opening, but if you want to play out an unproblematic colony-seeding narrative, it certainly meets the need.

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The Faeries of Haelstowne

(Again, I was a beta tester on this one, and as the below review will hopefully quickly make clear, you might want to take my opinion with an even bigger grain of salt than usual).

There are some things that as soon as you encounter them, you realize that they’re for you (where by you I mean one, though I certainly hope that you, the person reading this review, have found some of these things for yourself!) Ideally you fall head-over-heels without losing the ability to understand why others might not be as into this thing as you are – it isn’t so much a matter of retaining a critical perspective, because of course you have none, but of preventing yourself from becoming a spittle-flecked evangelist, a John the Baptist who won’t take no for an answer until some kindly dancer-with-veils sticks your head on a plate. Look, the metaphor’s getting away from me: all I’m trying to say is that I have hopefully gotten to the point in life where I understand that e.g. some people think early Tori Amos is overly precious, or can’t stand the way Tristram Shandy never gets to the point. I can walk my brain along the paths that lead to those conclusions, and through force of intellection sometimes even see that the complaints proceed from real flaws in the works at issue. But none of this can shake my unbreakable adoration for these things that feel like someone made them just for me.

I have to confess that I haven’t fully replayed The Faeries of Haelstowne since I tested it a month or so back. Partially this is because it’s a very big game, and after the past week-and-a-bit of playing and reviewing, I really need to get back to my IFComp work-in-progress. Partially this is because the thought of having to solve the darkroom puzzle again intimidates me. But mostly it’s because I enjoyed my first playthrough so so much that it’d feel ungrateful to replay it, like I was asking for even more joy than it had already given me.

I can recite the issues a player might have with the game chapter and verse: it’s so big it can be hard to get and stay oriented; the Adventuron parser struggles to keep up with this ambitious a level of detail and interactivity; the Merrie Olde English milieu is twee and more literary than historical; it’s hard to figure out how to make immediate progress on the missing-vicar case the policeman protagonist is notionally investigating, so progression requires solving seemingly-unrelated problems just because they’re there; and the puzzles require a precision that can veer into pixelbitchery (I know the author did yeoman’s work smoothing out issues since I did my testing, but from a quick glance at the forum traffic and itch.io comment threads, it seems like some of these issues remain). It’s not too hard for me to imagine the review that gives it a right old kicking for all this.

But look, I am here to tell you none of this matters in the slightest, or at least I am here to tell you none of this matters in the slightest to me (let me reassure you that, as I write these words, my garments are not made from camel’s hair, and I have not lately fed on locusts and honey). It’s a commonplace to say that the best works of IF are worlds you can get lost in, and part of what makes Faeries of Haelstowne so lovely is that you can and will get lost in it. It conjures a completely and idyllically realized interwar milieu for your immersive pleasure, but part of the trick is that the map is too big and awkwardly laid out; that you’ll need to look carefully at every single patch of vegetation and confusingly-labeled bottle of photographic fluid; that you’ll have to get the match out of the matchbox, and light the match, and realize you didn’t put the candle on the candleholder, but then by the time you’ve done that the match has gone out, so you need to start the whole process over again; that you’ll hang on every word every NPC says, not because they’re finely characterized (though they are) but because you’re desperate for some guidance. To play this game is to be a well-meaning bumbler who eventually succeeds through a bit of cleverness, sure, but mostly through perseverance, luck, and aid from some more-competent allies – and that’s as true for the player as for the protagonist.

The reason I call it a trick is that this kind of thing doesn’t always work – I’ve given up on games with far fewer frustrations, and my closing thoughts were not of how immersed I was in the fictional world.
Here, it’s the writing that’s the secret ingredient and makes the magic come off. There are a lot of words in this game, and pretty much all of them are perfect, calling out just the right details to delight the player while communicating exactly what kind of place Haelstowne is. Like, here’s the kitchen of the vicarage where Arthur, the protagonist, is staying – there’s nothing at all special or concealed here, this is a simple quotidian description:

Yes, this is what this kitchen would be like!

Or a small strange occurrence, from when Arthur has started to attract the attention of the eponymous fair folk:

It’s all very homey and exactly right, and even when other characters are getting snippy with Arthur or there’s real danger in the air, I still found myself grinning as I read, so pleasing is the prose.

There’s much more to do than soak up the atmosphere, though: there are puzzles here, and some of them are pretty hard. Partially this is due to how large the map is – while much of it is initially locked off, there’s still quite a lot of real estate over which to range, all the more so once Arthur is able to find transportation to the village. Partially it’s because the author’s hit a nice balance between open-ended sandbox and time-gated progression and there are a whole host of puzzles that can be solved before it’s strictly necessary to do so, which means there are a lot of objects and a lot of sub-objectives at play at any given time. And partially it’s because, admittedly, the parser’s foibles can make it hard to know whether the problem is with your thinking, or with how you’re typing your actions in. Once I realized that if the game gave me the kind of unhelpful response that I’d understand as telling me I was barking up the wrong tree were I playing an Inform game, here I might want to persevere with some synonyms or alternate syntax a little longer, I had a much easier time. And there are two levels of hints available to help get players unstuck. Still – it’s likely you’ll need them at some point!

This review is already far too long and I suppose I should start trying to bring it in for a landing. There’s so much more I’d love to highlight – like Ottoline, Arthur’s eventual partner in faerie-fighting, who quickly became one of my favorite IF allies ever. Or the climactic puzzle, which involves one of the best, most satisfying figure-out-the-ritual puzzles I’ve played. And I’ve barely mentioned how drily, understatedly funny it is. I’ll simply have to have faith that these things will all be discovered and appreciated as they deserve.

Maybe all this has put you off, and as you’ve read this review you’ve weighed the positives I’ve mentioned against the negatives I’ve acknowledged, and decided that the balance doesn’t come right for you, which is completely fair. But if your interest is piqued, and you have the time and space for it, I really encourage you to block out a few hours, pour yourself a big mug of tea, resolve not to look at hints until you really need them (and then to consult them posthaste), and jump into Faeries of Haelstowne – I can guarantee (I can’t actually guarantee) you’ll love it.

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And that is the lot! Lots of thanks to all the authors for making such great games – this was a varied crop of entries, spanning a wide range of genres, design ethoi, and length, so it was a real treat to work through the full list, and I feel like I got something out of every one, even those that didn’t ultimately work as well for me. Big kudos as well to Adam for reviving the Comp from its frozen state of limbo!

I’m turning back to my IF Comp entry now, and playing all these games has been a source of great motivation and inspiration for me – so one more round of thanks to y’all for that, too. Cheers!

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Thanks Mike for such a thorough, constructive and insightful set of reviews. I know all the authors really appreciate the feedback on their games. You deserve a medal for having got through them all!

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Thanks for the review of The Faeries of Haelstowne. You’re exactly right. Experience shows that you can’t please all of the people. In fact, you can barely please any of the people. But if I succeed in amusing one or two people for a little while then that’s enough for me.

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Congrats on another wonderful review thread! Your industrious pace is truly admirable. I particularly enjoyed this quote:

This really reminds me of how David Lynch packs into a sequence all these details that should feel like clutter but somehow feel almost more crucial than the salient focals. Thanks for the thought, I’ve had some fun considering it recently.

And thanks for the transcripts, they’re great!

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@DeusIrae Mike, just want to thank you publicly for your excellent review of The Time Machine and your reply to my DM with your additional suggestions.

I also want to thank my beta testers (who I forgot to call out in-game but will rectify in a future version):

  • Phil Halprin
  • Christopher Merriner
  • Grueslayer
  • Mike Carletta
  • Javier Garza
  • Brian Rushton
  • David White

Guys, without your help the game would not have been as “good” as it is (the remaining “bad” and “ugly” are my fault). Many thanks.

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Tagging: @DeusIrae @Edo and anyone curious about the safes…

Spoiler:

So, you see, the reason why I used Locked safes was because I needed a place to put all restricted items, such as: Quarter 3, Raphael’s Sai, the Krabby Patty, and more. But for my next game, I’ll try to use less safes if you want. :slight_smile:

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Daddy Spoiler:

I shall continue to coach him in the Jedi art of storing spent items in the nowhere space. I suspect he takes a little pleasure in knowing that people will be obsessing about what all those super secret looking safes are for, assuming there is some sort of fabulous solution to opening them…

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Clearly a double bluff. I’m sure there is something else behind those locked doors. Could you hurry up with the sequel so we can find out?

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Ha, that’s great!

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(Very belated) thanks for taking the time to slug through! I assumed it would take you longer to get through everything, so I didn’t really check up here. Shame on me. I’m also enjoying what you have to say about the games I have looked at and will enjoy your writing about those I haven’t.

Yes, I was pleased to find the title. I’d like to think it was a jump up from the original “Knight’s Errand.” I got it from one of the Asterix comics where a lawyer prosecuting Asterix yells “Carthago Delenda Est” and then Asterix’s lawyer looks shocked and says “But … I was going to start that way.” It’s not the only Asterix moment that stayed with me.

I had trouble balancing “make it so the puzzles don’t repeat, so wiseguys who know their endgames can’t make a joke of it/complain it repeats” versus “don’t be mean to the player by rejecting a solution they worked hard for, and let people reuse concepts a bit.” I’m convinced there’s a way and I just didn’t look at things well enough. The details belong in a postmortem, but your reviews and others have convinced me one is worthwhile.

I’m not really sure how to do clue the player better, but yes, it’s the sort of thing I want to prioritize for a post-comp release, so the player isn’t blindsided by a semi-arbitrary rule. (I want to try to keep in-comp changes to bug fixes.)

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Ah, Asterix! I loved those comics, plus they helped me bluff my way through more Roman history than I care to admit…

On the telegraphing, I think the can’t-get-too-close constraint wouldn’t be too hard to establish from the jump. The other one (“this solution is too good, let’s keep it in reserve”) is a little harder to figure out how to name with enough specificity without giving the game away, though – or at least it’s currently beyond me!

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I agree with this, but unlike you I found it a strength, not a flaw. After thinking on it, I think I’ve found out why I liked it: The ending sequence is not the climax, it’s the calm after the climax.

The opening sequence pretty much bludgeons into the player that the battle with the dragon is not the real conflict. So what’s the real conflict?

Well, what keeps the player (if the player is me, anyway) unsettled, full of creeping dread, and running headlong into disaster? It’s not the sinister magical war: it’s the tension between the wholesome happy park and that war. Resolving the tension either way comes as a relief.

When preparing for and fighting the final battle, Lily has no reason to be afraid: she’s a queen, she has overpowered weapons and guidance, she knows perfectly well she can’t lose, in the same way that the player knows that the game is Merciful. Lily and the player know what will happen, because they’ve been told in so many words. So there’s no tension in the scene, any more than in the ship epilogue of Counterfeit Monkey.

The climax is before that, at the card machine. It’s where the tension is resolved, and where answers are found. And real loss: you can’t lose, but you can’t get all the answers. The emotional peak of the story is when the machine explodes.

Admittedly “huh, that was the climax? we’re done?” is less nice a reaction than “wow, this the climax! onwards into the epilogue!”, but I’m unclear what the author could do to help it. What made it click for me (emotionally, I mean; I only understood why it worked later) were the dragon theme and the brutal change of scenery.

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