Victor's IFComp 2020 reviews

My competition reviews will appear below. I’ll put all of them behind spoiler tags, because they will contain spoilers. Once some reviews have been posted, I will use this first post to make a useful index for them.

Feel free to react, but please mention the name of the game in your post! (Like this: “RE: Name of Game”.) Also, if you’re an author, I would be very pleased to talk about the reviews/games either in the topic itself or through private message, so feel free to drop me a line!

(O, and let met add a note for authors about the prizes I’ve entered – a sonnet about your game. Even if my review about your game is less than positive, I’d still be happy to write a sonnet about it and I’ll make it a fun poem! Please keep Victor the reviewer totally separated from Victor the sonnet-writer: I’ll be wearing different hats. :slight_smile: Although if it’s Under They Thunder, I’m not sure what I’m going to onnet say. And if it’s Limerick Quest, I might go for a different verse form.)

  1. Doppeljobs
  2. Quintessence
  3. The Place
  4. Radicofani
  5. Savor
  6. Quest for the Sword of Justice
  7. Seasonal Apocalypse Disorder
  8. Sense of Harmony
  9. Amazing Quest
  10. Move On
  11. Under They Thunder
  12. The Cave
  13. Little Girl in Monsterland
  14. The Moon Wed Saturn
  15. The Wayward Story
  16. Chorus
  17. The Eidolon’s Escape
  18. Academic Pursuits (As Opposed to Regular Pursuits)
  19. You Will Thank Me as Fast as You Thank a Werewolf
  20. Flattened London
  21. Desolation
  22. The Shadow in the Snow
  23. The Impossible Bottle
  24. Sheep Crossing
  25. Last House on the Block
  26. Vampire Ltd
  27. Elsegar I
  28. #VanLife
  29. Adventures in the Tomb of Ilfane
  30. Incident! Aliens on the Teresten!
  31. Terror in the Immortal’s Atelier
  32. INFINITUBE
  33. Equal-ibrium
  34. Lovely Assistant: Magical Girl
  35. Sage Sanctum Scramble
  36. How the Elephant’s CHild…
  37. Stand Up / Stay Silent
  38. Congee
  39. A Rope of Chalk
  40. Deus Ex Ceviche
  41. Creatures
  42. Stoned Ape Hypothesis
  43. Saint Simon’s Saw
  44. Minor Arcana
  45. Captain Graybeard’s Plunder
  46. Sonder Snippets
  47. Tavern Crawler
6 Likes

Doppeljobs by Lei

Last year’s For the Cats was a pleasant surprise. I expected it to be a perhaps slightly nauseating game about how cute cats are, but it turned out to be a brief but intriguing exploration of a strange society. Lei had clearly understood the technique of painting such a society through small details and brief hints, which I massively prefer over huge chunks of exposition.

This strength of Lei’s writing is once again shown off, perhaps to even greater effect, by Doppeljobs. The basic idea – a doppelgänger taking on human form so they can perform boring or humiliating tasks for their clients – is already kind of ‘out there’, but as we play we slowly start to realise that this is not our society. Instead, it’s a city built on an infinite fountain of sand probably connected to a mythical serpent; farm animals are made of stone; people watch snake races; and so on. The intriguing game world is one of the two strengths of the game.

The other strength is the tone of the writing. The basic premise is in some ways problematic: how could anyone volunteer to go through boring or humiliating experiences? And if they get paid for it, isn’t it just exploitation? So Lei made a shrewd choice in making our protagonist somebody who, first, doesn’t need money (as he comes from a non-capitalist society that he can always return to) and, second, just infatuated with experiencing all around him. This comes out in the tone of the writing, which is full of an overenthusiastic but disarming appreciation of everything that human life has to offer.

Perhaps the most obvious weakness of the piece is the sloppy editing: the prose is marred by numerous small mistakes, which I found distracting. I hope the author manages to fix this, possibly already during the competition. The choice structure of the game is also somewhat obscure. Your stats change as you perform different jobs, but sometimes there are so many stat changes that it is hard to keep track of them. And I found it hard to understand how to get to different endings. I played pretty cautious the first time and got an ending called “Humanologist”, or something; then I played with wild abandon the second time, exploring everything and attempting to find the sand serpent… and got the same ending.

Overall, though, I found this very enjoyable.

3 Likes

Quintessence by Andrea M. Pawley

Is community inherently preferable to a solitary existence? Do we have a duty to build towards a future rather than remain in an eternal sequence of presents? These are the questions asked by Andrea M. Pawley’s Quintessence. The game takes Big Bang / Big Crunch cosmology and uses it as a metaphor for a life that is both carefree and careless because it does not care for either past or future. This is a bold move, accentuated by the fact that the player gets to play an elementary particle and that every game turn takes one milliard years. And then the game adds dogs and cats as metaphors for two different ways of life, dogs and cats that appear, sometimes, as innerworldly creatures, but more prominently as metaphysical forces that determine the fate of universes. Can cats feel love? becomes here a question of transcendent importance.

The audacity of this artistic vision is stunning. But is it possible to make it work? And in the space of a very short piece of fiction? The evidence seems to be against it. Quintessence is often more confusing than enlightening. We have a hard time understanding what is happening or how we can steer the story one way or another; and we are at such a high level of abstraction that we readers may not particularly care about what happens anyway. So I came out of this more appreciative of the author’s intentions than of the piece itself.

(Side note: I wonder why the title of the game is a term from Aristotelian cosmology, which is clearly not the cosmology used by the game? Quintessence is the fifth essence, more perfect than Earth, Air, Fire and Water, of which the heavens are supposed to be made.)

2 Likes

The Place by Ima

This piece has a strange blurb which apologises for the fact that your choices do NOT matter. It then goes on to say: “I am a believer of absurdity, that our actions in the end have no meaninging in the interacting force between humans and universe.” Well, that’s bleak. Normally I would say to an author that there is an important difference between choices that do not affect the outcome of a game and choices that do not matter: even if they lead to the same destination, choices can be meaningful! But Ima is clearly telling us that choices are not even meaningful. Why then write a piece of interactive fiction? Why write at all, given that writing is a process of making choices in an attempt to build up meaning?

But in fact, these questions do not seem particularly important when we play The Place itself. It’s the story of how we meet a young woman, who then returns (the reasons are unclear) to her abusive parental home, where she locks herself in her room and dreams about travelling. This story seems to have little direction; it’s not really going anywhere. But maybe that is precisely the point? For the moral drawn at the end of the piece is “that best place to be, to escape to, is our inner space.” And so perhaps we should read the story as descent into inner space – although it hardly succeeds at making the point that this takes us to the best place, given that the game gets progressively bleaker as it goes inward.

(By the way, the fact that the game has a moral is clearly in tension with the nihilism of the blurb. Perhaps this too is an ironic move – but I’m failing to see much evidence to support such conjectures.)

A key mechanics of The Place is that it asks you to enter elements of your own life: your favourite song, your favourite colour, something that made you happy this week. I was unsure what this was intended to accomplish. A feeling of connection with the main character? The main effect it had on my own story is that it made it fairly ridiculous. Something that made me happy last week was winning two Xyzzy Awards… but this turned up in the game text like this:

At the end of the game, you are asked “Where is the ideal place?” I answered: “in our imagination”. And so the final moral came out like this:

Which doesn’t work at all!

The work is also marred by writing that is hard to understand. The quoted sentence from the blurb is an example – I understand what it is fro actions to have no meaning, but what is it to “have no meaning in the interacting force between humans and universe”? What is an “interacting force” anyway? Aren’t forces rather the means by which things interact? Sometimes the unclarity is so great that I fail to understand the meaning of the phrase at all, with this being a particularly egregious example:

All in all, I can’t say I got much out of the game.Things could be markedly improved by rethinking the approach to entered text, and by doing some further thorough editing of the prose.

2 Likes

Radicofani by Rob

This is a parser game in what I think is a home-brew system. It certainly lacks many of the quality-of-life features that we players have become accustomed to: you have to type out two-word objects names like ‘remote control’ in full; you can’t use the up arrow to repeat commands; the word ‘it’ is not supported. The game also lacks many common verbs and synonyms, and the error messages are often less than helpful. On top of that, the game is a Windows executable, and the colours and fonts are far from ideal. So there’s a lot here that would have been better if the game had been implemented in a language like Inform or TADS.

On the other hand, Radicofani does some interesting things with pop-up windows, images and sounds that remind me of last year’s ALICE BLUE. Many actions generate sounds. When you look at some vinyl albums, you actually see some pictures, and one of those pictures contains a vital clue. (The albums are not mentioned in the room description, unfortunately, and I only learned about them through use of the HELP command.) Using the phone brings up a phone in which you have to type the phone number. You will get intermittent pop-ups with the face of your girlfriend asking you to hurry up and help her. Quite some attention and creativity has gone into this.

I couldn’t really enjoy the game, though. I had to use the help extensively to get through the apartment, not least because the spotty implementation often left me unsure what to do and whether the game had really understood me and I it. The frequently sub-optimal English didn’t help either. Then, when I got to Radicofani, I got stuck on going upstairs in the hostel – even after giving the manager a coffee, I just didn’t seem to be able to type a command that made me go upstairs. Here a real walkthrough would have been very helpful. Then I entered the church, got killed, and the game told me: “I hope you have an earlier save, Victor.” I didn’t, and I didn’t really feel like going back and trying this again.

In some ways an interesting effort, but it needs a lot of polish before I will be able to enjoy it.

3 Likes

Savor by Ed Nobody

Useful message: this game has functionality that is only accessible through the keyboard, and not through the mouse. In particular, you may want to use space (to skip timed text), escape (to go to the menu) and L (to load, but I think also to save, games). This is explained behind one of the initial menu options, but it is easy to miss and is rather unexpected for a choice-based game. But not knowing it will make it impossible to get to the more successful endings.

I have very mixed feelings about Savor, both where it comes to its presentation and where it comes to the story. So let me try to explain that, and let me start with the implementation. And then… well, I don’t think we can avoid talking about that most dreaded of all things: timed text. Savor can serve as a kind of case study of why timed text just doesn’t work. One might think that really fast timed text – text that appears much faster than you can read – isn’t much of a problem, because you can just start reading the text that has already appeared. But in fact, as you start reading the text served up by Savor, it turns out to be extremely distracting that somewhere below your focus new text is appearing. And when you replay the game – and given its overall structure, you will probably replay quite a bit – even this fast appearing text is still appearing frustratingly slow. So you’ll probably use the space bar button to skip through the timed text… but, one, this still puts the burden on the player, and, two, the space bar also chooses options, so you have to be extremely careful not to press it one time too many. So please, please, please designers, listen to what the IF Comp judges tell you every year, and do not use timed text.

So while that is very distracting, there are other elements of the presentation that are very effective. Savor makes use of some nice ambient sounds, but especially worthy of mentioning are the frequent background images. It is quite hard to make text-on-background-image work, but Savor manages the trick; and at the same time, the images are atmospheric, appropriate, and add something to the game. So I think this is very well done.

Then, the story, writing and theme. Savor tackles a very serious topic indeed: chronic pain, indeed a chronic pain so debilitating that it utterly poisons the lives of the PC and the main NPC. It handles this theme with some care; the writing is up to the job; and I found the entire situation, two taciturn men on what I think is an American maize farm, both well presented and suitable to the exploration of the theme. Sometimes the prose tries to do a bit too much in terms of artful metaphor, but most of the time reading Savor is a pleasure.

I’m less sold on the overall structure of the game. It is easy to reach a premature ending (more about that in a moment), and also easy to reach an ending that is rather unsatisfying. Reaching a more satisfying ending requires a very specific sequence of choices, which you can only find by either replaying a lot or by consulting the walkthrough. My main problem with this is probably that, on the one hand, the game clearly has a preferred route (and other routes may even lead to the game telling you to try and do better next time), but, on the other hand, the preferred route is highly unmotivated in the fiction. It requires you to find specific items, receive ‘rewind tokens’, make choices in particular orders… and none of that makes a lot of sense to the player. You don’t find the optimal route just by some careful thinking. (Unfortunately, I haven’t reached the optimal end myself. After two premature endings I started following the walkthrough, but then, after clicking on a fragment in the game menu, I got stuck at an error message saying “Error: the passage “fragmentRain” does not exist” and there was no way to get back to the game proper. Having gone through all of it thrice already, I decided to call it quits.)

Finally, and somewhat lamentably, I must admit that I was very much put off by the game’s handling of suicide. It takes its theme of chronic pain otherwise quite seriously, but if you decide to join the NPC in his suicide early on in the game – deciding in effect that you can’t take the pain any more – you get the following message:

That is perhaps the single most flippant, insensitive thing you could write about somebody who was desperate enough to commit suicide. Can you imagine meeting someone who is dying, and saying this to them? Now I’m sure the author doesn’t mean it this way, but… the text is there, and it really struck me the wrong way.

The other suicide end is slightly better but still quite problematic:

Here the problem is not so much moral as aesthetic: yes, of course a game can have a mechanic of finding in game items as a means of overcoming a desperate problem; but to juxtapose so crudely the emotional state of despairing suicide to the game mechanics of finding items makes it far too easy to see that the mechanic is, at bottom, ridiculous. (Most mechanics are! Good game design often consists of making the player not think about that.)

So… yeah. I can’t really recommend Savor as it is, though I can certainly conceive of an updated version that would be well worth playing.

2 Likes

Quest for the Sword of Justice by Damon L. Wakes

Last year, Damon L. Wakes gave us Gorth Loinhammer, a rather amusing parody of the gamebook experience which not only allowed, but actually encouraged you to cheat with the character sheet. This year, we get Quest for the Sword of Justice, a piece that was built in RPG Maker and looks like a top-down map on which you steer your character around. It took me a while to learn that you can interact with the world by walking up to things and then pressing Enter; a little guidance would have been useful here!

Like the earlier game, Quest for the Sword of Justice is a parody of common RPG tropes. In this particular case, the traditional “this guys is the HERO” and “please pick up every object you find” tropes are combined with a rather real-world conception of law and property, meaning that the player character will inevitably end up in court. If he has stolen everything, he’ll end up in jail forever; if he hasn’t stolen much, he’ll be acquitted, but in the meantime the Evil Guy has destroyed the world.

Is it funny? Some of the sequences certainly are (especially in the court), though I can’t help but feel that Girth Loinhammer was fresher. The trope of picking up everything that isn’t nailed down has already been parodied so many times that it is not really clear what we gain from yet another parody. The RPG Maker format also requires us to spend a lot more time wandering around aimlessly and pressing Enter to read default refusal messages, which dilutes the comedy.

My most serious criticism, however, is that the game is frightfully unclear in communicating to the player when to play on and when to stop banging their head against the wall. I spent at least 15 minutes in prison trying to get out, encouraged by the appearance of some imaginary friends. But you can’t get out, so that was time wasted. The same thing happened when I searched for ways to avoid the two endings already described. I certainly don’t mind a game where the expected ‘good’ ending turns out to be non-existent! But I would like the game to signal this to me at some point, rather than leaving me to fruitless exploration. So this is one area where I think Quest for the Sword of Justice could be improved both dramatically and easily.

3 Likes

Seasonal Apocalypse Disorder by Zan and Xavid

Seasonal Apocalypse Disorder is a parser game of a relatively classic variety: you walk through sparsely described rooms, collect assorted items, and solve puzzles with them. There’s even a combination lock! And it’s a very competent example of such a game: polished, with good and often funny responses for strange actions you may want to take, and a parser one mostly doesn’t struggle with. (I found “steady ladder” a bit of a reach, and the fact that “hook hat” was required and “fish hat” didn’t work actually got me stuck until I consulted the walkthrough.)

So far so standard, but Zan and Xavid spice things up with the titular seasonal approach. The game takes place across the four seasons, which means that you can traverse the same geography at four points in time. As you progress, you will first open up all the seasons; then you will gain the ability to switch season anywhere (which is a pretty well thought-out way to open up a few new locations); and you finally acquire the ability to take items with you through time. This approach lends a theme to the game’s different puzzles, and the leaps of logic required to exploit your time travel abilities are the most satisfying moments in the game.

As a fiction there’s less here – I never got a very clear sense of what this cult is up to, and didn’t feel much need to try out other endings after I had escaped destruction by jumping through a fiery pentagram. Still, this is a solid and sympathetic puzzle game, and I enjoyed my time with it.

Sense of Harmony by Scenario World

Disclaimer: I was a tester for this game.

In Sense of Harmony, you play a cybernetically enhanced woman. This fact is reflected in the intriguing interface: keywords in the text give you side boxes with more information, information that you only have access to because of your enhancements. It is as if when you click on the link, the character is paying extra attention to this detail and allowing her cybernetics to kick in. This works really well, especially because this new information often allows you to choose more options.

Here’s an example of that. You – a sex worker – are having some post-coital talk with your client. And perhaps your only option is to say something rather offhand, cursory. But when you focus on his breathing, you notice that he’s under stress; and then you have the option to actually say something perceptive and helpful. Mechanics and content are in wonderful harmony with each other.

Of course, this would not matter much without a good story; but here too Sense of Harmony delivers, at least up to a certain point. What we have here is some really good set-up: several interesting characters are introduced, a sci-fi backstory is slowly developed, and tensions in the PC’s personal life are revealed. Then there is the meeting with harmony – perhaps the weakest scene, since it is quite disorienting not only for the player character, but also for the player – and then… things stop. Because this is a prelude! It’s definitely a good sign that this prelude leaves us wanting more. But it is also a bit of a downer that right now, there isn’t more, and all the set-up is there only for future use.

So I certainly recommend this, but that recommendation will become a lot stronger once more instalments of the sage become available.

4 Likes

Amazing Quest by Nick Montfort

This is a, 11-line Commodore 64 BASIC programme that spits out a variety of ‘locations’ and ‘actions’, and asks you to state whether or not you want to take that action. In fact, though, what you type doesn’t matter at all: the computer ignores the input and just calculates a random outcome. After a certain number of ‘successes’, you arrive back at your home planet. The prose is extremely sparse, the story close to non-existent. There is no reason to interact with this piece of software that only the most generous could call a ‘game’ or a ‘fiction’.

So… what’s going on? Is Nick Montfort just trolling us? Or are there some hidden depths? I fooled around with the Commodore 64 shell a bit to read the (rather obfuscated) source code. But as far as I can see, there aren’t any hidden secrets in the game. So perhaps we should look at the Introduction and Strategy Guide. These are clearly meant as a joke, exhorting us again and again to use our imagination, to ‘get into the right cultural mindset’, and so on. But really, what’s the point here? Is this a parody of Infocom’s advertising that the best graphics are in your imagination? It certainly doesn’t seem to be a pointed or poignant reflection on anything with any contemporary presence.

Perhaps I’m missing something. But in the end, it does seem like Montfort is just trolling us.

3 Likes

Move on by Serhii Mozhaiskyi

Move on explores the possibility of having a tense chase scene in interactive fiction in a rather unique way: the player only gets a button that says “move on”, but what happens after moving on depends crucially on the timing of your click. It is perhaps easy to miss the little motorbike moving at the top of the screen, but that it where you ought to be looking, while the text itself gives you descriptive hints about whether to click fast or slow. (I suspect that the bike might be more prominent on a mobile display.) Once I understood the idea, I managed to win in one go.

There’s not too much here, but it’s a worthy little experiment. Whether it would work as a game mechanic in a longer work is something that remains to be seen.

2 Likes

Re: Amazing Quest by Nick Montfort

I too was rather baffled by this apparently inconsequential IFComp entry, so I went to ridiculous lengths to get at the BASIC source code for the program to see if there was more to the game than met the eye. There wasn’t. (Unless you count the bug that I found, which I then fixed for no good reason.)

Btw, in the comments on my blogpost, I had a conversation about the bug with the author. It’s probably the longest discussion of whether to use “>” rather than “<” in a BASIC program that there’s ever been — and I include the whole of the 1980s when I say that.

Oh — and please rest assured that I hate myself for pointing this out — the program is actually twelve lines long, rather than eleven as you said in your post.

3 Likes

You’re right, it’s twelve lines. I didn’t realise that there could be a line 0, and it seems as if Commodore BASIC also didn’t realise that, since “LIST 0” doesn’t seem to work!

3 Likes

Under They Thunder by Andrew Schultz

I think of Andrew Schultz as a bit of a cult author. He makes a very specific type of game, and makes that type of game very well; but it’s a kind of game that many players will find easier to respect than really get into. However, one just has to look at the scores of last year’s Very File Fairy File to see three people who gave it a 10 – and those people are the ‘cult’. I mean that it the most positive way possible. Those are the people who really dig the type of game that Schultz makes. And he is not going to disappoint them this year.

So what is the type of game I’m talking about? Well, the typical Andrew Schultz game is a wordplay game built around one very specific type of wordplay – palindromes, for instance, or, in this case, pig Latin. [See Footnote.] In a sense, the game then tries to be exhaustive: there is a systematic attempt to put an incredible number of instances of the wordplay into the game, and to build all aspects of the game (world, puzzles, story) around those instances. Furthermore, Andrew Schultz games comes with often quite incredible quality-of-life features, including sophisticated ways of getting hints. And finally, they always confront, in one way or another, the subject of bullying: these games are full of people who use verbal or emotional tactics to shut others down or manipulate them, and your job as player is finding ways to deal with people like that.

Under They Thunder is no exception. It is full to the brim of instances of pig Latin, often being quite encyclopedic about it, such as when it offers ten different variations on the formula “X-ile X-ay Isle”. The setting and story make little sense except as containers of precisely these instances of word-play: the reason that we have the locations we have is that they fit the pig Latin scheme. But there’s also the clear undercurrent of a confrontation with bullies and manipulators. And finally, we have great quality-of-life features, this time including several teleportation commands and an object that will close off all parts of the game that you don’t need to see on an ‘easy’ run.

I spent a solid hour with the game and managed to gather in more than 20 points. By that time I was kind of exhausted, and running out of ideas for what to do with the ray, and I decided to call it quits. Like the last two years, I admire what Andrew Schultz is doing here; and like the last two years, I feel that it’s not quite for me. It’s a bit too overwhelming, a bit too far from what fires me up about interactive fiction. But I certainly think that there will be some people who are going to enjoy the hell out of this!

[Footnote]
If you are as clueless about this as I was before I looked it up on Wikipedia: pig Latin is a form of wordplay in English where you transform, say, “boat” into “oat bay”, or “goat” into “oat gay”, or “stout” into “out stay”.

4 Likes

I know Andrew Schultz is a huge fan of Games magazine and similar which offers puzzles appealing to advanced puzzle fans with tricks and layers and extra rules: you never get just a straightforward crossword puzzle or word-search, it’s done with rebuses or has a theme or an extra logic-layer to figure out a situation (like the cabbage/sheep/wolf river crossing). That’s the type of games he’s most interested making - themed word puzzles that take advantage of the interactivity of a parser.

5 Likes

Absolutely! Of course, that’s why these games tend to be overwhelming to people like me (and the fact that it’s word puzzles in a language that is not my native tongue is adding another layer of challenge). But as I say in the review, I admire the results.

3 Likes

The Cave by Neil Aitken

“A Journey of Self-Discovery”. That turns out to be a rather misleading subtitle; I think much more clarity is created by the walkthrough, which tells us the following:

I think it is hard to understand The Cave without this knowledge. It looks a lot like a simple fantasy adventure where you have to escape from a cave and defeat some enemies along the way. But then why create a cave with random connections, where you revisit the same locations over and over? Why have puzzles that are mostly trivial, easy to solve without even meaning to? And why have the game end rather abruptly, not because of some series of achievements, but because we have taken a certain number of otherwise causally inefficacious actions? It’s hardly a satisfying experience compared to what a much more traditional approach might have brought us.

In fact what is happening is that the game purposefully throws situations at us, sometimes repeatedly, giving us different routes to success; all with the aim of allowing us to define a character by choosing to use certain stats. If you cast spells a lot, you end up with a high Intelligence. I suspect that if you fight a lot, you’ll be increasing your Strength.

As a dungeon crawl or a story of self-disovery, The Cave is rather lacking, although there are some nice moments of surprise. (I especially enjoyed the moment when I crawled into a chest in order to feel safe and sound.) But how does is succeed as an alternative way to generate the basic character ability scores for your favourite roleplaying game?

Given the six scores you end up with, the assumption seems to be that the game we are talking about is Dungeons & Dragons. Now character creation in D&D is in some ways very complicated (when it comes to choosing the mechanical bells and whistles of your character), but very simple when it comes to choosing your ability scores. If you want your character to be half-way decent, there is little choice. A wizard simply must have high Intelligence. A fighter needs Strength and Constitution. D&D4 indeed goes so far as to indicate, with the character class, how you should distribute your points. So… what problem is The Cave trying to solve? You could go in, cast a lot of spells, and end up with scores that are good for a wizard; but then it seems you could as easily just have chosen scores that are good for a wizard. (And it’s not the case that the game is a good way of discovering that you would like to play a wizard. For that, it is far too far removed from the actual D&D experience.)

I can imagine a game like The Cave being actually quite interesting in a very different context. Take Ultima IV, where character creation takes the form of being presented with a series of ethical dilemmas. “You are honour-bound to serve a lord who tortures innocent people in his dungeon. Will you free the captives or honour your commitments?” That could be interesting. Traveler had a character creation system where you basically simulated an entire life-path. That could also work really well in a choice format. More in general, it seems to me that it makes a lot of sense to use interactive fiction as a way to create interesting, surprising, narratively meaningful characters for particular roleplaying games. (It depends on the game, of course! You can’t do this kind of thing for a game like My Life with Master, where the characters have to fit a detailed collaboratively created setting.) So I see some potential in the underlying idea, but I don’t really see The Cave itself as a particularly useful tool.

3 Likes

Little Girl in Monsterland by Mike Stallone

Note: Little Girl in Monsterland is supposed to be a 15-hour game. This review is based on approximately 2 hours of play, perhaps a little more, and just looking at the map it is obvious that I haven’t seen most of the piece yet, though I solved a fair number of puzzles (by myself or using hints) and suspect I have a reasonably good idea of what the game as a whole is like.

With its use of graphics and an interface with persistent buttons, Little Girl in Monsterland sits somewhere between a choice-based interactive fiction and a point-and-click adventure. It tells the tale of a little girl, Olivia, who teams up with princess Camilla in order to have adventures. Possibly there is a greater point to the whole narrative, but this has not been revealed yet. Mostly, you’re just goofing around, trying to help people with little quests, and doing things that sound fun, such as meeting a famous knight, seeing a mermaid and winning a horse race. The entire thing is very good-natured, rather silly, sometimes a bit puerile, over-the-top in its parody, and overall just fun in an inoffensive way. To be honest, I rather liked playing a small girl who gets into all the weirdest situations and tries things that most adventure protagonist wouldn’t even contemplate. The atmosphere is definitely strengthened by high quality graphics; and judging from some screenshots in the forum, a future version of the game will have much better graphics yet.

In the puzzle department, Little Girl in Monsterland is trying to solve a problem that people have been thinking about for a long time: how to test player comprehension. Sure, the player used object A on object B… but did they anticipate what that combination would do? The way that Mike Stallone attempts to solve this is by explicitly asking the player for a rationale. If you try to use the paint on the statue, the game asks you to choose what you then expect to happen from a small list of options – and Olivia will only proceed with the action if you make the right choice. This is a nice idea. When it worked well, it was pretty satisfying; and it certainly discourages trying to brute force your way through the world.

That said, it didn’t always work well for me. [Just to be entirely clear, major puzzle spoiler will follow.] For instance, at one point you have to find a necklace in high grass. So I decided to use Camilla’s horse to eat the grass so I could more easily find the necklace. You choose to use the horse; then you state that you want to use it to cut the grass; and then you have to state “what will happen next”… but finding the necklace wasn’t there! This totally stumped me, and only use of the hints made it clear to me that I should have chosen the “someone will eat something” option. But that doesn’t happen next (it just is the cutting), and it wasn’t the reason for taking the horse to the grass.

Overall, I found the puzzles somewhat hit and miss. Some were quite logical and satisfying, such as finding the mermaid, entering the castle, and winning the horse race. Other seemed to be unsolvable without hints, such as the bizarre things you have to do in order to (unsuccessfully) cut the wood: somehow, a news item about a wooden house struck by lightning must give you the idea that you can cut wood by standing on top of it with a parasol. This is the kind of puzzle that makes no sense even when you have heard the solution. Another example: in order to get little girl’s tears, you must somehow come up with the idea that you will cry if you have a bellyache, and then seek out some nasty berries and eat them. I mean, I could hurt myself in a million ways in real life (and frankly there seem many more reliable ways of making myself cry then eating something bad); thinking of this specific course of action seems to be a study in reading the author’s mind.

And here it is unfortunate that the hint system is unhelpful to the point of being hostile and dismissive. First, it is slow, requiring you to open it up anew and wait a few seconds every time you want to show an additional hint. And then most of the hints aren’t really hints at all. Sometimes they’re even messages that say something along the lines of: “You don’t need a hint for this, you can just solve it.” For instance, when you try to find an out-of-circulation coin, the first four hints don’t tell you anything at all! (To be exact, the fourth hint is: “What place have you seen that could contain old coins?” If I knew that, I wouldn’t be asking for a hint, would I?) I found the combination of slow, dismissive hints that then reveal a totally obscure puzzle solution sometimes rather disheartening.

As it is, Little Girl in Monsterland is promising and I did enjoy checking it out; but I also found it somewhat frustrating. A more helpful hint system would go a long way in addressing this. And possibly also some code optimisation to speed up the interface? I at least experience notable lag after most button presses, and this really slowed down the play experience.

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Thanks for trying my game Victor :slight_smile:

Maybe the hint system is a bit too “progressive”. I’ll try to change that. I was assuming the first few hints should only tell you how to reason in order to solve the puzzle. But for those particular puzzles I might have been too gradual and cautious…

I’m a bit sad that you’ve seen the worse puzzles. Basically you’ve mostly only seen the “side puzzles”, because it seems you haven’t finished talking to Van Helsing, which didn’t unlock more interesting objectives. Interesting… I wasn’t expecting that… Maybe I need to make it more clear that the yellow talk button is supposed to be pressed. Thanks a lot for your useful feedback! :slight_smile:

Actually you don’t need to come up with that idea. You are supposed to read it from the available choices (and recognize that’s the correct option). One of the purposes of that interface is exactly to reduce the number of possibilities you have to consider.

The same holds for this puzzle: actually you don’t need to come up with the idea just from that clue. To the contrary, you can read the ending sentence “a lightning bolt will come” in the UI. (disguised among 7 other sentences). And this was supposed to instill the idea in your mind, without giving away the puzzle.

Thanks again for the valuable feedback! :pray: I hope you don’t give up :slight_smile:

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The Moon wed Saturn by Pseudavid

Note: I was an alpha-tester for this game.

The Moon wed Saturn is an experimental piece that plays with non-chronological narration. Of course, that’s by itself is innovative, but Pseudavid uses the possibilities of electronic fiction rather nicely in making the three moments of time across which the story takes place happen in three different columns on the screen. Thus, we always see where each of the three threads of the story has been left hanging. Switches from one to another thread are generally motivated by causal connections: we go back to the past to understand what just happened, or we move to the future to see the results of something play out. I found this an interesting technique, and one that should definitely be explore more by authors of interactive fiction.

The story of The Moon wed Saturn is relatively minimal. It tells us about the love of the nightly caretaker of an abandoned building site and the possibly unattainable girl who comes to visit her. The main theme being explored are those of satisfaction and safety. Are you willing to settle for just a little bit of future, or will you embrace a more dangerous but possibly also more satisfying life? The protagonist is inclined to the former, but her desire for the girl is slowly pulling him towards the latter. I did find that the story remained rather abstract and the characters rather distant from me – I wasn’t really drawn in to it. So although The Moon wed Saturn is definitely more than an abstract formal experiment, it’s the formal aspects that had the biggest interest for me.

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