And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One by B.J. Best
plus Infinite Adventure by A. Scotts
I seem to remember that about ten years ago someone – not someone in the intfiction/IFDB/IFComp sphere of things, but someone in academia – made a system for producing solvable text adventures that was much like a slightly more sophisticated version of Infinite Adventure. It would produce a map of rooms, some puzzles involving certain standard types of objects, and of course it would ensure solvability. The key would always be on this side of the locked door. While this works, and could in the end be a way of generating an unlimited amount of adventure games, there would be little reason to actually play those games. They would not involve the unique voice of an author, the delightful prose, the genuinely original puzzles, the thematic exploration, and so on, that we hope each new piece of interactive fiction will give us. And so it’s unsurprising that we, the players, don’t get very far in our Infinite Adventure; and equally unsurprising that Riley soon loses interest in the version that is available to her and Emerson in ATYCtaHNUtPO, which I guess I had better abbreviate as House.
Unlike Infinite Adventure, House is a very nice game. It starts out as an exploration of some old school computer games, but quickly turns this into an exploration of Riley’s troubles and our (Emerson’s) relationship to her. It is structured as a series of fetch quests for NPCs, where giving one NPC what they want usually grants us an item we can then use with a different NPC; but it’s brought with a lot of charm, some good opportunities for showing off Emerson’s personality, and both pacing and length seem exactly right. We don’t delve very deeply in the psychology of our two main characters, and the tension that the plot was perhaps going for – stormy night, dramatic confrontation scene is a darkened bedroom – doesn’t really materialise. But the epilogue is nice (I suppose it will be less nice if you make different decisions in the bedroom scene) and the opportunity to get some extra information when you return to (our) Infinite Adventure is cool.
I enjoyed my time with this.