PaulS Reviews

Robin & Orchid

Ryan Veeder & Emily Boegheim

Inform 7

[spoiler]There is a lot to like in this game: a good-natured story, thoroughly likeable writing, PCs with personality, and a generally incredibly solid implementation which cossets the player and makes life easy. (I did manage to coax it into one of the dreaded run-time errors, but I was doing something a bit silly, so I forgive it.)

You will have sensed a “but” coming, and there is one. But first let me concentrate on a few of the things that make this so very good.

First, the writing (for which Ryan Veeder is, I think, principally responsible). All too often, descriptions in IF are relentlessly physical: we are just told how a room looks, either briefly or at great length. And if the description is lengthy, the author then has the difficulty of filling in endless object responses, and the player is left to EXAMINE masses of stuff. Ryan Veeder’s huge skill is in identifying some one or two objects. And those are not usually the obvious objects, but something a bit quirky, something interesting, something whose presence and description tells you immediately about the sort of room you are in. Consider, for instance, this description of the Youth Room:

Just two details: couches and a ping pong table. But look how the description gives them life, by making sense of their physical relationship in terms of a notional game of ping pong and (a masterful touch in a description) some things you cannot see. This is typical. Like most difficult things done well, it looks effortless, but it certainly isn’t.

Secondly, he solidity of the programming. In a game that is not without complexity, things simply work as expected. You rarely find a synonym missing, or a verb to be guessed. Though I have my reservations about the hint system, its programming is brilliant: it will always guide you from where you are to where you need to be. If you try to go somewhere you can’t (a common error on my part) the game doesn’t simply tell you that you can’t, it tells you where you can go. I know that’s a simple thing to do – but most authors don’t bother. That kind of touch tells you that you have authors who really want you to have a good time. As anyone who has ever done anything with Inform 7 knows, this sort of smoothness involves real effort on the part of the programmer (mostly, I gather, Emily Boegheim). It shows.

Thirdly, the authors have gone out of their way to implement not just one but two difficult and interesting objects: a camera with which you can take endless photographs of more or less anything, and a notebook – given to you by a friend – which provides a commentary on the things you see. The notebook is a true labour of love. It’s not, as so many IF-books are, a one-entry wonder, but a cornucopia of commentary on all manner of things. To be sure, it is completely unrealistic (how on earth would you look things up in this apparently unindexed notebook?). But that doesn’t really matter. It makes the game enormously richer. But my stars what hard work that must have been: not only must every room and object be described, but there needs to be additional commentary as well.

So all that is very positive. And yet … well, it didn’t really thrill me. It was terribly slick, but I thought it was bland. Not being a US-person, I don’t know what age these kids are supposed to be, but guess it’s about 15. At 15, as far as I recall, there was much more going on emotionally and intellectually than these kids display. There’s not really any tension, and no real pressure for resolution. Rather than looking for a ghost, or looking for an explanation of the “ghost”, I felt I was wandering round until the thing ended. Nor did it have the sort of melodramatic humour of a Scooby Doo cartoon. It was amusing, rather than funny.

The walkthrough didn’t help here, actually – or rather my use of it didn’t. Without it, I felt a bit lost: it wasn’t always obvious what I should be doing next. With it, I felt over-controlled. Not least because it insisted on me doing things to prove I had understood what was happening, even when I had. For instance, it was obvious to me as soon as I found it that the “black sphere” was a disco light used to create the eerie lights I had seen. I didn’t need to press the button to find that out. But I could make no progress till I did. I’m not sure that the more conventional style of menu-driven hints doesn’t work better, in that it is less insistent on your tackling the games offerings in the intended order.

The traditional alternative to narrative tension in IF is the puzzle, but that was somewhat lacking here too. There’s really only one puzzle mechanic in the game (how to reach things), which has one answer (by standing on things), and doesn’t give much sense of accomplishment.

So I end up really admiring the craft skills here, but not being madly enthusiastic about the overall experience. It’s obviously a game that deserves to finish very well, but it’s not right at the top of my list.[/spoiler]

Solarium

Alan de Niro

Twine

[spoiler]I thought this was wonderful. The basic technique is quite a standard one for parser-IF: a gradual exploration through which a complicated back story is revealed, leading up towards a final choice. What makes this so excellent is the superb way it’s put together.

  1. The story is really interesting. It manages to be unravelled in such a way that as one mystery is solved, a new one emerges. At first one wonders what Solarium is; then one learns it’s some kind of secret project; so one wonders what sort, and gradually that is revealed; and one wonders what the PC and Annalise’s role is, and gradually that is revealed, piece by piece, until the full picture emerges. This technique is seamless, but it’s very clever: one is always sufficiently informed not to feel completely lost, but sufficiently puzzled to feel intrigued. It’s really a very good story; compelling. It’s also an important story. It shows the bizarre, self-destructive folly that a sense of self-confident destiny can produce, and the havoc it can cause. In its later stages, it presents a meditation on religion, too. These are big, serious, themes, deftly handled.

  2. The writing is excellent. I think we have had some pretty good writing this year, in general. Among those I’ve reviewed, for instance, both Porpentine and Ryan Veeder in their very different ways are really first class writers. So is Alan de Niro. It is a great pleasure to read.

  3. The use of interactivity is very clever. At first it seems rather pedestrian: effectively a series of gates. But what is clever is that these gates always allow just enough freedom (you don’t just click through) but at the same time limit it in order to ensure a more-or-less orderly recounting of the story. When I first played, I wasn’t sure that the device by which you may have to revisit and re-read whole sections in order to get to bits that have previously been closed off made sense. I still have reservations, but I generally found it worked.

For perfectly good and understandable reasons, many serious Twine games take Porpentine as their model. None of them (that I have read) has been as successful as the exemplar, but there is a set of techniques, subjects, and stylistic devices that, for better or worse, I have come to see as Twiny. Solarium is refreshing because it shows how Twine can be used, just as successfully, in quite different ways, to produce something longer, less allusive, less introspective, but no less ambitious.

Solarium is very high in my favourite games this year: one of the two or three best, and a piece I would recommend to anyone.[/spoiler]

A Wind Blown from Paradise

N C Hunter Hayden

Inform 7

[spoiler]The basic idea here – that one runs two parallel stories alongside each other, where objects in the first (the subway) give access to the second (the beach) is a good one, and could make for an interesting game. But this didn’t really hold my attention, even for the short time it takes to play, because neither world is really well fleshed out. The player is told that a memory is “cherished, haunted”, but the actual description is generic, almost empty. The writing tries too hard to make up for the lack of concrete detail with a stiff dose of adjectives, and doesn’t really convince.

So this is a good faith effort, based on the germ of an idea, but one that really needed to be worked up at greater length with the player’s experience in mind to bring that idea to fruition.[/spoiler]

Our Boys in Uniform

Megan Stevens

Twine

[spoiler]The author of this piece obviously feels strongly about war, and more particularly about the way we make stories, myths, glorifications of it. I think the Second World War is ostensibly in mind, though I didn’t find it entirely coherent historically (for instance, it’s account of the causes of the war seemed odd, to me). In any case, the essential message is broader. The most interesting thing that is being attempted here is to try to use interactivity more as a sort of footnoting device – a way of picking on particular words, and reading a commentary on them. This either moves you through the story (if the word is “true”) or back (if it’s a “lie”) or leaves you where you are (if it is “propaganda”).

It’s an interesting idea, but its execution didn’t work as well as I had hoped. In the first place, I can’t grasp this three-way distinction: propaganda, after all, can be true or false. Then again, the author’s idea of what counts as something true or false seemed questionable. I don’t think that emotional states are necessarily true (the author seems to), and in some cases where the author thought something was false, it seemed to me that she was treating a metaphor literally, or failing to make allowance for reasonable implicit qualifications. So although I got a very strong sense of the author’s anger at the bullshit that goes with myth making about war, this didn’t really work for me on the level I think it was supposed to.

Apart from this technique, there was a gradually emerging story told via the links about an actual person in the war. But it was, for me, too confused and indistinct for me to get much out of it, and it didn’t seem to sit very comfortably with the truth/lie/propaganda device which seems to be the author’s main focus.

My overall impression was that this was a very serious and well-intentioned piece by someone who has something (and something interesting) to say, but hadn’t quite found a coherent way of saying it using hypertext fiction.[/spoiler]

Ollie Ollie Oxen Free

Carolyn VanEseltine

Inform 7

[spoiler]I’m disappointed to say that I didn’t finish this within the two hours allowed, even making liberal use of the hints and walkthroughs. In fact, I was a long way off finishing. I’m sorry about that because I know from other reviews that there is a twist in the tail. Well, I never got to the tail, so I never saw the twist.

A lot about this is great. The premise is that you are a teacher in an army school that has been attacked: you need to round up some students who have got left behind in the school, and lead them to safety. Perhaps it’s not a completely realistic premise (if everyone else escaped, why aren’t they saving you all), but it’s novel and interesting. The main constraint is that your extreme weakness and shakiness prevents you doing (some things) with your hands. Here the lack of realism is a bit more telling. You can wander around extensively. You can hold children by the hand. You can hug them. You can enter combinations on combination locks. But you cannot hold a paperclip!

Anyway, this constraint makes for the main mechanic, which is that instead of doing things, you get the children to do them – you guide them, and they act as your eyes and hands.

Now all of this is in many ways brilliantly done. The writing is measured and without melodrama, but the description of a school is precise and it’s easy to imagine exactly what it’s like. The kids have personalities and problems, and the PC has real depth of character too. Similarly, the interaction between children and teacher is often brilliant. Children can be “controlled” from adjacent locations. They respond in interesting ways to commands and suggestions; they sometimes react spontaneously to each other or their environment. It must have been a nightmare, but it mostly works.

However, there are flaws. The smaller and most easily forgiven flaw is that although the interaction with the children is mostly very smooth, it’s not always quite right. In particular, when something goes wrong with an attempt to tell a child to do something you always get the same response (the suggestion that something is “wrong with your strategy” and that the child didn’t “understand”) whatever the real problem. Sometimes these glitches were game-breaking. For instance, I was trying to get Samir to tell me about a vent cover. He had just told me he could see a vent cover, but when I asked him to examine the “vent cover” I was told to rethink my strategy. I got stuck and went to the walkthrough, only to be told I should have asked him to examine the “vent”. So, with respect to the parser, my strategy was spot on, and would the parser be kind enough to rethink its dictionary. This sort of thing was not common, but it was common enough to be noticeable.

That’s a niggle really, but in a game that has numerous fiddly puzzles these sort of niggles do slowly erode one’s pleasure. And that, I think, is the much bigger problem. For in the end the game – which I thought would be about relationships – rapidly became a rather old-school “find the stone to sharpen the knife to cut the lemon to put in the gin-and-tonic to ingratiate yourself with your mother-in-law who will then give you a dime that you can use to bribe the doorman who will give you the key to the safe so you can steal the diamond” sort of game. And it’s not (just) that I don’t terribly love those games, it’s more that I don’t think this should be that sort of game.

These are traumatised children who have just been through an attack. They are confronted with a bleeding, injured, teacher. And they react, most of the time, as if nothing had happened. If these kids are in danger, and urgently need rescuing, then an experienced adult does not spend hours finding ways to locate their soft toys or a clean pair of pants and a flashlight. He finds ways to coax them to come without their bunny or with their wet trousers and into the dark.

Now here is where I think that if I had lived through for long enough to make it to the twist in the tail, things might have become clearer – because although these are not things an adult would do, they maybe are things children might do, and if the children are really doing all this themselves (as the twist I have read about elsewhere perhaps suggests) this might make more sense. But as a player playing this without the benefit of the twist, I’m afraid it just seemed rather false and shallow. I expected children who were terrified and in need of comfort, and I wanted to relate to them humanly. But I was forced to regard them as sort-of robots, to relate to them as such, and to devote my attention to doing artificial things like getting them to pick locks so I could find a pair of pants. It didn’t seem properly balanced.

So in the end, I found this a really promising story whose flow has been unfortunately diverted into a landscape of environment-manipulation puzzles which don’t fit comfortably with the situation. As a result of this, and because of the technical glitches that remained (in what, I must emphasise, was no doubt a very difficult game to program), I’m only moderately enthusiastic about the end result.[/spoiler]

The real problem with this kind of puzzle is that only a savage would put lemon in a G&T, assuming available limes.

Final Girl

Hanon Ondricek

Story Nexus

[spoiler]I didn’t have a very good experience with this game, but that’s mostly not the author’s fault.

In the first place, the genre (slasher horror) isn’t at all my cup of tea. I almost never set out to watch a movie like this, and when I do I spend most of it with my eyes closed. But I know I’m in a small and pathetic minority; most people really like it, and I’m happy to see it represented in the Comp.

Secondly, I have never used StoryNexus, which meant that I was feeling my way with the interface and concepts while also getting the hang of the game. Grappling with a new set of conventions doesn’t make for the best experience or the most effective use of time, and I didn’t get close to finishing. It didn’t help that I found StoryNexus slow and unreliable (it killed my browser several times), and sometimes my unfamiliarity led me to think I was seeing bugs where in fact I just didn’t know what I should do.

So when I died for the second time, after playing for about an hour and a half, I gave up. I wasn’t motivated enough to continue struggling with the system.

All of which having been said, I had formed some pretty favourable impressions of the quality of the game itself. I have to say that, though it’s not my thing, I thought the game was well done – in particular, that it was well paced. There was real suspense, very similar to that in movies of this genre. I was less impressed by the voyeuristic “gore” element of the horror, which seemed rather over-the-top, though I guess that is consistent with the genre too. The mystery element (“Who is the stalker?”) seemed quite down played – I didn’t feel I could really collect much in the way of clues about it, apart from following (a footstep or two behind) the stalker’s own process of elimination!

For the most part I thought the writing was decent, which is to say that it mostly kept out of the way, which I think is how it should be in a story like this. The way it started in medias res and made use of cinematic conceits to frame the story was a nice touch. And all of this seemed like it was sustained in a work that is really quite extensive.

So – this felt like a pretty decent game in a genre I really don’t like fighting against a platform that I was unfamiliar with. And although, purely personally, I didn’t get much out of it, I still think it deserves to do pretty well.[/spoiler]

PS @maga: As for lemons in G&T, I’ll have to tell my mother in law (for the ingratiating of whom the drink is to be prepared, nb) that you think she’s a savage. Expect a visit.

Just a thought – could you pinpoint which aspects of Storynexus you found confusing or unintuitive? It might help authors figure out how to communicate platform conventions and affordances to new players.

It’s hard to communicate because it’s quite diffuse. I could grasp the way to choose different paths that were explicitly presented. But I had no idea what these “cards” were at first (and still have only a dim idea), or how I was supposed to choose between apparently identical ones; nor was the use of “equipment” clear to me (I spent some time in what seemed to me to be a loop where I thought I was choosing to re-apply by compress but in fact the story was just nagging me to “equip” myself with it). I didn’t know how the various different things that had a random or skill-based element worked, but that was less of a problem since they more or less explained themselves. I had only the vaguest idea what the various statistics (things like terror 4 - 1) meant, or whether I should really care about them. I was just blundering around for about the first 30 minutes or so. I think this is pretty much inevitable. I’m sure I’d have exactly the same experience if, as a total neophyte, I first encountered the parser.

I suspect that Final Girl is not an ideal way to learn StoryNexus, because it’s trying to do some fairly unusual things with the default system. The card mechanic, in particular, is a lot clearer when it’s being used for the things that it was originally designed for.

Dream Pieces

Iam Curio

Quest

As Alex Pope wrote in the Dunciad,
an awful lot of poetry is bad,
'twas ever thus, and bad has turned to worse:
an interactive fiction done in verse.
Prose takes some work, but poetry is tough
and, to my ears, a little is enough.
It’s not so much the jangle of the rhyme
as much as lack of metre – half the time
the sense and rhythm’s mangled – that I take
exception to. And yet, I shouldn’t make
too much of this: it’s meant to be a bit
of simple fun – and though it’s shit
(speaking poetically) there is no point
in getting all our noses out of joint.
A literary failure might succeed
as game or puzzle. And I think we need
to give this game some credit here. You must
“escape the room”. And to do that you just
break words up into letters, which you mix
to make new things, with which to fix
yourself an exit via an unlocked door.
But, disappointingly, the breaks are poor:
the words end up being split in random ways
with letters missing. Even so it stays
reasonably fun, because it is so short.
And so, in summary: a mixed report;
on viewless wings this poem doesn’t soar
and, overall, deserves a somewhat modest score.

Hooray. (Man, what happened to that comp reviewer who did sonnet reviews? She was awesome.)

Here’s her blog. She’s not doing the comp this year, I guess. The description for her book suggests that the comp reviews were part of a sonnet-a-day project.

PS: And great review. Not just for the rhymes, but bang-on about the game too.

Awesome.

Coloratura

Lynnea Glasser

Inform 7

[spoiler]This is really very good indeed. It’s been fascinating to see Lynnea Glasser’s development over the years – from a promisingly competent but essentially formulaic zombie-hospital (Divis Mortis, 2010), through an experimental piece (Tenth Plague, 2011) which I really liked – though I thought it didn’t quite work – and quite a few people didn’t really like much, to this. It really shows the value of sticking at what you are interested in. Tenth Plague invited the player to look at horror from the “monster’s” perspective, to see how, as perspective shifts, what looks like an atrocity from one point of view can seem quite different from another. It didn’t quite work then, I think because one never built up any sort of emotional connection with “the monster”, and it seemed almost perfunctory – as well as having an (anti-) religious overtone that some found troublesome.

Well, the idea is back, but in a quite different and far more effective form. It’s effective in a variety of ways. First off, it manages to be both distancing and engaging at the same time: distancing not just because the PC (=Player Creature) is otherworldly and expected to do things we normally resist (killing people), but because the way it relates to the world is so far outside ordinary IF conventions. It’s engaging because the game manages to encourage the player to inhabit the creature’s perspective, so that we really come to think – or at least I did – that it is important that the PC returns to the cellarium, and gets back. All this is done in so many subtle ways – through the choice of language, the way things are described, the main plot elements – that it is seamless. The puzzles work with the story, and they mesh together well. It is a thoroughly well-made game.

For those who are currently worrying about the parser, here is a game that shows off what the parser can do. There’s an emotional difference between clicking and typing, and typing creates a sort of bond, a sort of identification between player and PC, that the mouse would be hard to emulate. The openness of the exploration that is possible – the particular combination of apparent freedom and teasing constraint – is also dependent on the parser. All of this powers an engaging story which involves real horror, and in a sense real tragedy too (this is something that, as with any tragedy, simply cannot end well).

Secondly, it manages to work both as story (on a purely narrative level) and as parable. It’s a good and interesting story, which keeps you engrossed, but it also makes you think. In other words, it is doing what a properly made piece of literature should do. It’s not a philosophy essay, it’s a story. But it’s not just a collection of cliches, or even of things that might be amusing: it’s a story that has a “push” behind it that has been thought through and felt through.

So I really liked it. This is not to say that it’s perfect. My biggest gripe was that I thought it didn’t clearly and slowly “coach” me on my constraints and abilities, and some I only learned from the hints – though I daresay that if I had been playing in a more leisurely way, without the pressure of the Comp – I might have got there on my own. I also thought that some of the apparatus (hints, walkthroughs, notes and so forth) was perhaps over done, though obviously designed to be friendly. But these are really tiny quibbles. For me this is unequivocally and excellent piece of work, and a worthwhile result of the author’s persistence in continuing to work at ways to use the medium to present an idea that interests her.[/spoiler]

A man after my own heart. [emote]:)[/emote] I’ve always felt that exact same thing. Typing is communicating; we are actually talking with the game, and there’s a lot more meaning in typing out a command than in point-and-clicking it. I dwelled on this in my “Colder Light” review and it’s great to see other people feel the same way about it.

[b]Mrs Wobbles & The Tangerine House

The Mysterious Floor[/b]

Mark Marino

Undum

[spoiler]I’m quite willing to give this the benefit of the doubt for being “incomplete”: I think it’s a complete story, albeit only one of what are planned to be a number of stories. But I’m sorry to say, I didn’t really care for it. Sorry to say that, because it’s nicely written, it has some attractive illustrations (which I thought really added to it), and I think it looks good. (Indeed, generally I really like how Undum looks, except that it kept scrolling text off the top of the window in my browser so I have to go and retrieve it, which was a pain.)

So what’s not to like? Well, I suppose I’m not the audience. I’m not a 6-12 year old child. But more than that, I’m really not sure I’d have liked this when I was a 6-12 year old child. It seemed too sweet, slightly patronising. I want some edge: some real menace, or some real cleverness with words, or something more than what seems like a very controlled, officially sanctioned, sort of imagination. Apart from the occasional fart joke (which I didn’t much enjoy either, but I can see a six year old child would) there was nothing remotely “transgressive” about this: it feels like the sort of story a right-thinking adult would highly approve of.

In a pretty linear piece like this (most links are just pacing control), you have to really enjoy the story – and, perhaps since I’m not in the target demographic, I didn’t really.[/spoiler]

Who Among Us?

Tia Orisney

Twine

[spoiler]Tia Orisney has two stories in this year’s comp: Who Among Us? and Blood on the Heather. I’m not going to review both of them, but I’m going to concentrate on WAU?, not because it’s necessarily better than BOTH, but because its genre (murder mystery) appeals to me more than the vampires of BOTH.

This is a substantial piece: there’s a lot going on: a lot of text to read, an extensive story to discover. The premise of WAU? – borrowed, as the game tells us, from a novel by Agatha Christie – is that a number of apparently unrelated characters thrown together in a remote location turn out to have dark secrets and hidden inter-connections, which the game gradually reveals as the bodies mount up. In principle it’s a decent hook on which to hang a story, and Tia Orisney makes good use of it and of the location, which is a nicely imagined (if vastly improbable) abandoned observatory and planetarium somewhere in Russia, and of the suitably grotesque characters assembled there. I should say at once that I had a good time with it, as I think the author intended.

The game seems pretty linear. So far as I can see, choices you make may affect which of one of a number of slight meanders the plot follows – but the key events are hard-baked into it, right up to the end. I didn’t mind that, really. In a plot this complex the author needs to keep a reasonably firm hand on the tiller, or things would become unmanageably complex.

But, as with all design decisions, there’s a price to be paid. And in this case the price is that as a player I didn’t really feel that I had any opportunity to plan or act strategically. It would have been nice to be able to formulate goals of my own. Will my character give priority to retrieving his stashed money, or to securing his physical safety, or to destroying a potential obstacle to his future happiness, or to unmasking the killer? And how will he achieve his goal? Should he attempt to hide, and keep out of the way? Or to escape? Should he try to trap other characters? Should he spend time looking for evidence? With a number of mysteries to pursue, what is most likely to get me closer to my goal?

I can imagine a game which would allow me to make (or at least feel I was making) decisions about this – where I could, for instance, decide to spend a large amount of time investigating physical evidence in detail, or where I could devote myself to talking to other characters in order to find out their stories, or where I could spend time trying to trap and even kill them. This might or might not actually affect the outcome of the tale. But even if events unfolded regardless, my experience would be different: I would experience those events more as a participant and less as a passive observer. But this is not really that game. (I’m not sure, in fact, that hypertext is the ideal vehicle for a game that invites such strategic play, since it always makes explicit the degree of freedom (and therefore of constraint) that is permitted, where the parser allows the illusion at least – and perhaps the reality – of greater freedom. But that is a different debate.)

Now in one sense it is unfair to criticise a game for not being something that it is not trying to be. But in this case, I feel more justified than usual. For a big part of the mystery game is that it is not simply a mystery story. You don’t simply wait for the next twist to be revealed, but you can set about untwisting it yourself – or at least you have the illusion of being able to do so. I missed that here; or, rather, I felt I was being seduced by the promise of this sort of relationship with the story, but deprived of the ability to form it. So the lack of agency (or, more precisely, the evident lack of agency, the absence of any real illusion of agency) was frustrating.

This is, I think, related to the second problem with WAU?: it’s too short. That may seem an odd sort of complaint for a game that is, by Comp standards, conspicuously long. But relative to the amount of material it’s covering, that’s not the case. Effectively, the author is trying to cram a novel’s worth of material and action into a short story. As Sam Kabo Ashwell has pointed out in his review this leads to breathless writing. It also leads to a feeling of being cramped, rushed through, prevented from exploring. It also showed, I think, in rough edges: links that looked odd, errors of punctuation, typos. (For the record, also, I find the default Twine theme terribly trying on the eyes for such large amounts of text.) Perhaps the desire to produce two long stories (BOTH is even bigger, I think) meant that some time that could usefully have gone into testing and polishing was lost.

I suppose what this comes down to is that it seems that the work bites off more than it can chew. A story this big needs more space, more words, more tightly edited and proofread words, more complexity than the Comp can allow. It’s a great thing that Tia Orisney has set out to write something as big and ambitious as this. It’s produced a game that is not at all a chore to play – but I think I would really love the bigger, more technically accomplished, more tightly edited and playtested work that would really do justice to that ambition. Such a game really wouldn’t be capable of being completed in anything like two hours. It would no doubt be a nightmare to write, in hypertext or not. But it could be very good to read.[/spoiler]

Unfortunately, that goes for most games in the current comp.

The Wizard’s Apprentice

Alex Freeman

TADS

[spoiler]In an already over-crowded field (casual/jokey fantasy), and in an already over-crowded corner of that over-crowded field (wizards’ apprentices), and in a positively sardine-packed cranny of that over-crowded corner (wizards’ apprentices in dungeons) you have to do something utterly remarkable to stand out, and this doesn’t.

It’s nice to see someone using TADS. And I can see how, looking at his walkthrough and imagining the world, the author thought the game would be pretty fun. The trouble is that unless we actually read the walkthrough (as I had to) – which rather misses the point – this doesn’t make much sense. The world is not described in a way that effectively cues or clues the necessary actions. As I worked through the walkthrough, I kept having HTF moments: How The Fuck was I supposed to know to do that? Why should it occur to me to make a paper plane out of a piece of paper? Why should I suddenly wave my wand at a mirror? Why should I freeze a lake when, if I look into it, I’m told that there is nothing there?

It’s mildly frustrating that probably there is a moderately fun, though unoriginal, game trying to get out here. It just needed much more attention to detail, much more effort to see things as the player would see them and to guide the player – to give gentle pushes in the right direction. It’s never going to hang together as a really coherent whole, but at least the process would be more rewarding. This is really a half-finished game: it’s winnable, but it’s not yet really playable. Alex Freemans is clearly competent enough with TADS to write a game that can be finished, in purely computational terms. That’s great, but that’s not enough: he needs to take that competence, and write a game that a player can work out how to finish, and enjoy while that is happening.[/spoiler]