2007 Interactive Fiction Competition

These are my reviews of the games I played in the 2007 Interactive Fiction Competition. I play/review as many games as possible depending on my current platform (windows or linux); this means tads, inform, hugo and usually also alan, adrift, quest, and windows/msdos executables. When I'm on a windows machine I use multimedia interpreters where appropriate.

I've sorted games into three categories, "highly recommended" (the best of the competition), "recommended" (worth the time spent playing), and "not recommended" (not worth playing); and then sorted the games alphabetically within those categories. I've put an asterisk (*) by some games that were difficult to categorize or when the categorization feels extremely subjective; you may want to read the review before deciding whether to play them.

Some of these reviews may contain minor spoilers. Unfortunately, for some games, even knowing that there is a spoiler in the review may itself be a spoiler. I don't know what to do about this short of the Magic Amnesia Stick. If you have the time and inclination, I recommend playing the games first, but if not, go ahead and read the reviews. Nothing major is spoiled.

If a game was entered by proxy or under a pseudonym, the actual author is listed afterwards in square brackets.

Highly Recommended Games

An Act of Murder (Hugh Dunnett) Z-Machine:
Mystery games are like romance games and action games in that everyone wants to write them, but nobody knows how to capture the genre properly. With mysteries, for instance, you have a combination of three hard things: the PC needs to talk to a lot of NPCs, the player needs to make an intuitive leap to solve the case, and the player needs to communicate their solution in a way that proves both that they have discovered the right solution and that they aren't just guessing. There are a lot of imperfect solutions to all three problems, but I don't think I've seen another game that tackles them in the same way as An Act of Murder.

The first clever idea is to essentially eliminate hard thing number two by making the crime totally obvious. Rather than being one of those dealies where the guy is stabbed through the heart while locked in a room located in the middle of the Yukon (it turns out a grizzly did it), the murder here is totally straightforward: somebody ganked the dead guy with a blunt instrument and he fell out the window. The work of the detective, then, is to accumulate facts: ask people for alibis, find the murder weapon, work out the time of death. This turns the murder investigation into precisely the sort of thing IF is best at: brief conversations with NPCs about known topics (>ASK BOB ABOUT MURDER. ASK BOB ABOUT FRED. ASK FRED ABOUT MURDER. ASK FRED ABOUT BOB), exploration to locate objects, and close examination of objects discovered to find more topics. This produces facts, and if you can work out when, how, and why, you can work out who.

Or, rather, Inspector Duffy can. The next clever bit about this game is that virtually no brainpower is required on the part of the player. If you've found all the facts (which, admittedly, do require some cleverness to locate), then telling them to Duffy will cause him to assemble the case. At which point you get to make the arrest yourself — once again, putting the genre into a form IF is good at. Notice also that Duffy doing this doesn't preclude the player from working out the solution to the mystery on their own, but it does ensure that you will solve the mystery if and only if you have sufficient facts (and since Duffy doesn't show up until you run out of time or call him on the phone, there is plenty of time for you to think about the solution before he gets involved).

The final clever bit about the game is randomness. See, it's designed so that every time you play, it randomly chooses the murderer, motive, and murder weapon. At first I thought this was a waste of time, but now I realize this is actually totally clever. Because of the previous clever ideas, you simply can't have an ultra-complex locked-room mystery: it'd be too hard to find facts and Duffy's deductions would be so above the players' that the player would be reduced to the level of Dr. Watson or perhaps even a Scotland Yard bungler. Furthermore, remember that the actual gameplay consists of investigation, not deduction. These two together make it totally sensible to have the game be simple and replayable rather than complex and one-time-only.

Despite all this cleverness, the game isn't totally flawless. The characters' obsessive cataloging of exact times is a little implausible (although helpful), and really the game could have been even more investigation-y — there are relatively few commands besides examine needed to collect clues, when it would have been awesome if we had to dust for fingerprints and look through magnifying glasses and stuff. The writing often dips a little too far towards the silly for my taste, too. While the portrait is hilarious, the bit at the beginning where you can pretend not to be a detective feels a little off. But all in all, this is the most successful mystery game I've seen in a quite a while. It's a new take on the genre and one that has definitely given me food for thought.
(Disclaimer: I was a beta-tester for this game)

 

 

Lord Bellwater's Secret (Sam Gordon) Z-Machine:
A nice little 19th-century mystery investigation. I never get tired of games that let me poke around other people's houses, especially when secret compartments are involved. The writing set a good tone, and the puzzles were simple but fun. The only exception to this was the last puzzle, where I ran into repeated parser issues and had to try a couple phrasings before I got one the game would buy — a bad thing to have happen given that it is the last puzzle and you don't want to lose momentum. Also on the implementation issues front, I see this game has a Shade-esque nested room scheme but didn't seem to get any benefit out of it. The only time I noticed it was when I saw messages about walking from one place to another, or when a command failed because I was in the wrong sub-room. I was also a little surprised by the ending — I mean, yeah, I guess it's a twist and it's a little more realistic but I don't think it's nearly as satisfying. Overall, though, this game was fun and snappy. Just what I like to see.

 

 

Lost Pig (Grunk [Admiral Jota]) Z-Machine:
My last IF-related interaction with Admiral Jota was also a beta-testing setup, but that time it was the other way around. To demonstrate the way it generally went, here are few quotes from the source code for Max Blaster and Doris de Lightning Against the Parrot Creatures of Venus:
datacent.t: // Jota points out this is a perfect opportunity for some smoochies.
verbs.t: // per Jota's request, display the conversation menu when undoing (in
verbs.t: // Per Jota's request:
verbs.t: // I can't believe I'm doing this. Blame Jota.
verbs.t: // Another crazy Jota one (I hope somebody tries some of these ever)
Or perhaps I could express it more compactly by saying he's the reason the game supports >REENACT FAMOUS SOCIO-POLITICAL DECISIONS (and, incidentally, he's also responsible for Savoir Faire's LLP). So what I'm trying to say is, when I found out he was writing a game I figured it was totally going to be the sort of game where you could light your pants on fire.

Well, ok, I didn't, but I should have. Because you can, I mean. Anyway, er, the deal here is that this is a pretty decent puzzle game (possibly even better than pretty decent, but it's not quite long enough for my taste) combined with an amazing amount of effort put into supporting silly actions the player might try, and the whole thing written in a style where you will just have to take my word that it is immensely charming without being cloying. Aces.
(Disclaimer: I was a beta-tester for this game)

 

 

Orevore Courier (Brian Rapp) Z-Machine:
For a game in which you're locked in your room the whole time, Orevore Courier is surprisingly open and charming. It's one of those short games you play over and over until you get it right, but there is enough stuff going on to watch, even when on the wrong paths, that I was kept entertained until I'd solved the thing. It does suffer from a few interface glitches — it's not obvious you can refer to the buttons by their full names rather than their abbreviations, I didn't realize that the 'heat' and 'cool' knobs were actually controls for two separate thermostat systems, and there was one point where it really would have been nice to have a call button in the other rooms — but these are pretty minor overall. A nicely compact puzzle game with good writing and a pleasure to play. (It was also sweet to see the dedication to Star Foster; it's a slightly unusual tribute but I'm sure she would have liked it.)

 

 

Recommended Games

Across The Stars (Dark Star and Peter Mattsson) Z-Machine:
For some reason it is obligatory for every comp to have at least one sf game where you crash-land on an alien planet and poke around for a bit. In recent years I have taken to playing those early in the comp: I find it's a nice warmup since I get some puzzles to wrestle with but there is nothing unexpected in the storyline to startle me. This game is a perfectly good example of that type. I ran into a little artifact wonkiness right at the end but was able to work around it fine, and though the resolution was a little unsatisfying story-wise, that's not the important bit anyway. Also, props for the ridiculously elaborate feelies.

 

 

The Chinese Room (Joey Jones and Harry Giles) Glulx:
Hunh, okay. This is basically a game by undergrad philosophy students for undergrad philosophy students, the IF version of this comic. Thankfully, there is a command to get the necessary background info on all of the references, but I imagine you'll get more out of it if you don't have to look them up. As a game, it's ok but not great. The concept and general layout are good, but it feels like it still has a lot of rough edges that could have used some extra smoothing. There are a few clunkers in the parsing (like the place where >VERB THING gives a default error message when >VERB THING WITH OTHER THING works, or a particular command in the first room that doesn't work until you've examined something else). The puzzles are generally about the right difficulty level but there're not a lot of guidance for wrong answers, which can make them hard to solve. Furthermore, there's very little interaction between puzzles — items have only one use even when they might plausibly be used for multiple puzzles. Overall, I had a pretty good time playing this; not a great time, but a good time, and a philosophy student would probably like it better.

 

 

Deadline Enchanter (Anonymous) Z-Machine:
Deadline Enchanter has two premises, one good and one bad. The good one is that the game is a message, a sort of construct created by a weird alien thing and sent to you. The subparts of this premise that involve the details of the weird alien place are also good. The bad premise was that, I am forced by experience to assume, the author didn't come up with this premise until a few weeks before the comp deadline, and said "I'll never get a game done in time ... unless, wait, what if I give them the walkthrough in-game?" The subparts of this premise involving the game being not only unwinnable without reading the walkthrough but virtually unimplemented outside of the commands of the walkthrough are also bad. I'm going to call this recommended, on balance, because it's very quick to play through given the whole walkthrough thing, and the writing is pretty. But as a game it's lousy.

 

 

A Fine Day for Reaping (revgiblet) ADRIFT:
This is a perfectly good puzzle game about being Death and wandering around reaping souls. It's nice that the puzzles have multiple solutions but sometimes it felt like there wasn't enough guidance for any of them — eg, it's easy to miss the way to get access to the time machine and that cuts out a lot of solutions. Also, a number of situations have random messages, one or two of which are important. This is lousy design — you should at least ensure the important messages show up first or second, and then you can return to the random pool, or else you risk people never sticking around long enough to see them. Speaking of lousy design, the game also has a time limit. It's a long one, but I don't see what it adds, except the chance that someone will get all the way to the end and then lose, and have to go back to an earlier saved game. And yeah, this is in ADRIFT but that didn't cause me any grief, except that there are too many custom commands (using the elevator and entering years in the time machine were both places when I had to drop out of normal IF syntax to use the author's custom syntax, and it was irritating every single time).

 

 

Gathered In Darkness (Dr. Froth) Quest:
This is basically one of those thrillers set in a mostly-abandoned research base. The writing is frankly pretty shlocky, all severed body parts lying around in surprising places and zombies* and demons summoned to kill people. There were parts in serious need of proof-reading, like the 'cheese grader' I found in the pantry (no dairy-product aficionado should be without one). But, personally, I like this kind of thing: it's like the artificial grape flavor of IF games or something.

The puzzles were just about the right difficulty level and the game was the right size. It was a good idea of the author to put in some explanatory notes about Quest at the beginning, since it's an unusual system and takes a little getting used to. It's true it doesn't have undo but in fact this game provided undo on death (except in one place, argh) which turned out to be the main place I needed it. The author says he's releasing the latter two-thirds of the game after the comp — I'm looking forward to it.

*There is one hilarious part where you find a dead guy who has a note in the wallet next to him reading, essentially, "Gosh, if I die, I sure hope they don't summon a demon into my body to raise me as a zombie."

 

 

In The Mind Of The Master (David Whyld) ADRIFT:
Another comp, another David Whyld game. I am always a little startled by how long he's been able to keep this up, especially since (I assume) there are all these ADRIFT-only comps he is also entering. Anyway, In The Mind Of The Master is one of his non-comedy pieces, and has the kind of storyline they often have — weird fantasy in the modern world and no clear explanation for things ever given. From the author's notes it sounds like he intended the game to be pretty nonlinear, but I didn't find this to be the case in practice. Unlike, say, Heroes, the play experience seemed pretty similar with different characters*, and it definitely felt like the plot was funnelled pretty tightly to the end-scene. I like the premise and there were some interesting setting bits but I was left feeling unsatisfied overall.

*I think the design principle here is not to have two axes of nonlinearity — if you can pick different characters, then the puzzles shouldn't also have multiple solutions, or at least the characters shouldn't share solutions. Otherwise you risk having people like me just doing the same solution regardless of which character they pick, and not seeing any of the benefit of either axis.

 

 

Jealousy Duel X (Alex Camelio) Multiple:
This is a graphical CYOA, essentially a goofy dating sim. It turns out not having >UNDO in CYOA games is irritating, because I was always running into places where I could choose to either make a pass at someone or offer them a pair of stilts and if I wanted to try the second option I would have to replay the game all the way up to this point again. I quickly ran out of patience to play through all the possibilities but I expect someone'll come up with a walkthrough at some point, and then I will happily play through the whole thing then.

P.S. This game is written in flash, but only available as windows and mac executables — couldn't it have been distributed as a flash file and a web page and been playable on any platform?

 

 

The Lost Dimension (C. Yong) DOS Exe:
This is one of those RPGs where your plane crashes in the Bermuda Triangle and so you are forced to fight off ravenous lions, stone apes, aliens and slime creatures using only your trusty long sword and holy water, except when you decide to chuck a grenade instead. The interface here is a definite step up from, say, WandMaster, but it's still not really friendly for either keyboard or mouse. The storyline is, like you might have guessed, not really there, and the writing isn't much to speak of either, but I have a weakness for this kind of goofy RPG and had a pretty good time playing.

 

 

My Mind's Mishmash (Robert Street) ADRIFT:
I feel like I should have understood My Mind's Mishmash better than I did after playing through it all. Like, I think the deal is it's a VR game you're playing, but is it supposed to be based on actual historical events? Are you one of the characters depicted in the game? If so, isn't it kind of weird to do a VR game of a horrific massacre only a short time after the massacre? (Though I guess the 9/11 movies only took five years to show up.) But if it's not a real thing and you're not an involved character, why do you care? Is it basically just a competitive IF game?

Confusion over the storyline aside, this was pretty fun. The primary shtick is being able to switch between being immaterial and being material, and this turns out to be fun in a sneak-around kinda way. It also has a cute device of separate episodes that you jump between, although I wish more had been done with switching back and forth. The feud with the other guy provides a nice larger-scale plot and a good balance with the smaller-scale puzzles. The puzzles were overall fairly straightforward, nothing too exciting but usually not too obscure either. The setting felt kind of recycled and not entirely coherent — blah blah robots blah blah psychic powers — but this turned out not to matter so much, because sneaking around immaterially puts a new spin on everything anyway. So overall, pretty decent.

 

 

My Name is Jack Mills (Juhana Leinonen) Z-Machine:
Another game that suffers a little from theoretical/actual playstyle mismatch. Like, you're supposed to be a noir private eye but in terms of actual play you do usual adventurer stuff — trying to find ways to sneak into places or off with things — and most of the noir talking and scamming are in cutscenes. But it's not totally noir-less: there are cigars to smoke and car chases to go on and irritating receptionists to outwit.

The game isn't long but is pretty multilinear. That's not the tradeoff I would have chosen myself in this situation — it seems like noir would work better with a single complex story rather than a bunch of forking paths the PC can freely choose between — but it's nice to see in general. Overall, not spectacular, but satisfying.

 

 

Press [Escape] to Save (Mark Jones) Z-Machine:
Press [Escape] to Save is one of the classic my-first-IF-game types, the one where the PC is just hanging out when suddenly a mysterious guy shows up and says "you must do this quest for me!" and you say okay, because what else are you going to do. I'm afraid it's pretty evident that it is in fact the author's first game — there are some guess-the-verb things, some important objects not mentioned in room descriptions, some objects mentioned in room descriptions that can't be interacted with, and so on. The writing is kind of erratic and the author seemed to be making up the plot as he went along. It's usually (I think) unintentionally funny, but often veers into purposely funny. Or maybe it's usually purposely funny, who knows. Puzzle-wise I generally had no idea what I was supposed to be doing and relied on the walkthrough for more or less the entire second half. But despite all that, Press [Escape] to Save has got that enthusiastic my-first-game spirit to such a degree that it's hard to dislike it. Oh yeah, and it's somehow appropriate that the author shifts the game into fixed-mode font early on and forgets to unshift it for the rest of the game.

P.S. You can't actually press escape to save in this game, as far as I can tell.

 

 

Reconciling Mother (Plone Glenn) TADS 3:
Reconciling Mother is like Amissville II if the Santoonie kids grew up and started smoking pot. Or like Kallisti without the sex and pretension and coding ability. Or like Blue Chairs' kid brother. I thought at first it was totally incompetent and incoherent but then it started making a weird sort of sense and the coding issues began to seem like intentional attempts to capture some kind of .. well, ok, I don't really know. But maybe that's exactly the point.

 

 

Slap that Fish (Peter Nepstad) TADS 2:
Ok, this is just .. man. I assume Nepstad is worried about being typecast as the staid chronicler of 1893: A World's Fair Mystery and The Ebb and Flow of the Tide, so he came up with this little number. The concept is very silly and very straightforward: there is one joke, it is given in the title, and the game repeats it over and over again. If you think the title is funny, that might be enough. For me it was pretty borderline, but I'll give him the nod just for the chutzpah of the attempt.

This doesn't really give any idea about gameplay, so let me say that the game is a series of combats. But it's not lame randomized combat, it's a whole combat system puzzle. Unfortunately, there's virtually no guidance on how to interact with the system, besides a score given to tell you how you did at the end of each combat. The upshot is that for me the game was more a matter of muddling through than of actually getting better at things. But with a theme like this, maybe that's really appropriate.

 

 

Varkana (Farahnaaz) Glulx:
This is one of those games where you're not telling the most interesting story with these characters. There is someone who is sneaking around, stealing stuff, tricking people, and using magic. The other person is running errands, trying on new outfits, and eating lunch. I guess it is clear which of these I wish had been the PC. Not that there's anything wrong with running errands and eating lunch — this is basically the deal with A New Life, which was great — but in a game where the former set of stuff is going on, the latter tend to lose significance.

The endgame is where this all comes to a head. There's a change of pace and a plot twist you don't really understand, and then suddenly you have to start doing actions that seem unmotivated but turn out on a replay to be required. I found it hard to sympathize with the actual protagonist, given some of the actions performed. We find out backstory later on, but at that point it's too late. If the backstory had shown up earlier and perhaps if the PC had had a chance to make some meaningful decisions .. but then it'd be a pretty different game.

 

 

Wish (Edward Floren) Z-Machine:
Wish is a short and fluffy little game, vaguely Christmas-themed. It seemed for a bit like it was going to turn into something more fantastic and creepy given the borderline-Freudian symbolism of some of the elements, but no such luck. There are a few puzzles in this game but it's so minimalist they are pretty straightforward, even though the game rarely gives any guidance on what you're supposed to be doing.

 

 

Not Recommended Games

Adventure XT (dunric) DOS Exe:
This is your basic Paul Panks game and has all the motifs discussed elsewhere. It also has Smurfs, but I'm not convinced they add much to the symbolic lexicon of these games, and may even confuse matters. If an evil wizard is at the heart of things, as the intro explains, wouldn't he be working with Gargamel somehow? Or is Gargamel an exile himself, outcast from his peers due to his inability to complete his quest of capturing Smurfs and transmuting them to gold? Adventure XT contains no answers.

 

 

Beneath: a Transformation (Graham Lowther) Z-Machine:
As has been established repeatedly, I am a fan of Robert E Howard, but I haven't read anything about Bran Mak Morn or any of the other books this game references. And so I can authoritatively say that this game makes no damn sense without background. At some point in the future I will probably read the relevant books and then I will be able to speak with equal authority on whether it makes any sense then. It's set in modern times (or maybe the 1920s) and you wander around and go into a pet shop and have to pay in exact change but it turns out you the puzzle solution involves paying less and later there's a killer owl and a statue that teleports around for no apparent reason and — oh, never mind. This game does have the best status line of the comp, though.

 

 

Eduard the Seminarist (Heiko Theißen) Z-Machine:
Well, this certainly gets points for an unusual subject — I can't think of many other games that depict an incident in the life of a 19th-century German poet of the Swabian school. Unfortunately, it seems to be one of those setups where what the person actually did (write poetry, have exciting midnight meetings with other poets and discuss far into the night) is too difficult to code, so instead you get some slightly unlikely obstacles and then a cut-scene at the end where the real stuff gets mentioned. I'm afraid I also ran into a couple bugs, of the wander-into-the-object-tree sort, and the puzzles seemed pretty unclued. In particular, I'm curious if anyone will manage to get out of the room without using the walkthrough. So overall, interesting subject, but not a good take on it.

 

 

Ferrous Ring (Carma Ferris) Glulx:
Wow, this is totally nuts. Like the author says in the intro, this is basically a couple different ideas squashed into a single game, and the resulting product is pretty out-there. One idea is new UI stuff. The room descriptions have an unusual style, which then leads to a graphics-adventure-style parsing mode. You can type >LAMP to examine or take the lamp and >LAMP TABLE to put the lamp on the table. I experimented with this for a while, but I eventually decided it felt like I was playing with mittens on, and went back to the regular IF format. There are conversation menus, which aren't new but reemphasize how ugly conversation menus are in glk. There's a hint system that actually inserts the next command to type at the command prompt. (And I got a fair amount of use out of it, since there are several places where the puzzles are pretty read-the-author's-mind or important things aren't mentioned in room descriptions or what-not.)

These UI innovations are all set against an unusual storyline. Not that the setting is that strange — it's one of those burned-out borderline post-apocalyptic settings, where people live in shelters and eat canned beans while calling people on their cell phones. No, the weird thing is the PC. In another situation I would guess that the PC is being intentionally depicted as schizophrenic: he's unable to talk normally with other humans or understand their behaviors, he has this overwhelming sense of being on a secret mission he can't explain, he has random flashes of memories. I recognize these are normal for an IF protagonist, but it goes seriously beyond the norm here. And yet the author clearly approves of these behaviors — the ending has a sense of satisfaction about it that I found frankly creepy.

Uh, so, I dunno. This isn't a difficult game to finish, unless you intend to never use the walkthrough, but I can't really decide if I liked it or not.

 

 

Fox, Fowl and Feed (Chris Conroy) Z-Machine:
I hate to be nasty about people's first IF game, but, c'mon, please don't enter your game in the comp if it's just a gussied-up coding exercise. This isn't exactly In the Spotlight in the sense that it does have some actual puzzles, but they're small and hard to solve. In some ways puzzles that only require one or two moves to solve are actually harder, because there are less openings for the player to stumble on the solution. The writing is cheery and good-natured but I'm afraid I mostly ended up glaring at the game.

 

 

Ghost of the Fireflies (Dunric) DOS Exe:
Ha ha ha. Ok, I give Panks points for having the balls to do a big fuck-you to all the people who have reviewed his games thus far. This game has a conversation menu, discusses indirect object parsing in the help menu (though whether it actually supports this is another story), supports >X to examine things, and has guest appearances from a bunch of previous Panks characters, including the ever-popular Ice Dragon and Jesus. Oh, and it has at least one honest-to-goodness puzzle. I would not say the game is actually fun or even all that playable but it is undeniably something a little different.

 

 

The Immortal (Just Rob) Z-Machine:
This is another classic comp entry archtype: the badass with amnesia. You know this guy is a badass right from the start because he has a katana, and so you are not at all surprised when he turns out to be Death's right-hand man (and you have read Sandman comics so you are not surprised that Death herself is female) and some kind of warrior in a no-holds-barred battle with the sinister forces of Mother Nature. Unfortunately this is just the first part of the story, and the author apparently got bogged down in the boring setup bits, so there isn't really that much awesome here. Furthermore, there are some totally crazy parser things going on here — I have no idea how the author did it, but there are places where certain vocab words just stop working for an object. So on the whole, it's not one of the better examples of the genre, but I am nevertheless pleased to see the tradition continue.

 

 

A Matter of Importance (Nestor I. McNaugh) TADS 2:
A Matter of Importance is a cross between a game and a prank, and the fact that it can't quite seem to make up its mind which it is at any given moment makes for a somewhat uncomfortable play experience — but unlike Annoyotron, I'm not sure whether that's intentional. For me, at least, it was enough like a real game that I ended up treating it as one, with the result that I was left dissatisfied with most of the puzzles. The writing, on the other hand, was pretty bright and charming, and though it didn't really redeem the game it took a good shot at it.

 

 

Packrat (Bill Powell) Z-Machine:
Meh. I like the idea of a game about a typical steal-everything adventurer in a more fairy-tale setting, and I liked the idea that seemed to be developing where he was learning to be less greedy. Unfortunately, Packrat had such serious implementation issues that I really didn't enjoy the game that the ideas translated into. To list a couple: in multiple places you have to try an action several times before it works; one of the important actions only half-works if you phrase it wrong (and then it's not obvious that it's only half-working so you wonder why you're stuck); items mentioned in the room description are routinely undescribed while other items aren't mentioned in the room description; an important item teleports around seemingly at random, for reasons which are never explained (perhaps it's a bug, who knows). So, yeah, I like the idea here but I don't like the game. With cleanup it could be pretty good, but I think it'd take a fair amount of work.

 

 

Vampyre Cross (Dunric) C64:
This accurately captures the old C64 experience of slow loading times and having to flip disks all the time. Otherwise it seemed pretty uninteresting.

 

 

And that's all. For other IF-related things, including many more reviews, you can go to my main IF page.