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]