2006 Interactive Fiction Competition

These are my reviews of the games I played in the 2006 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
  • The Elysium Enigma
  • Floatpoint
  • Game Producer!
  • Legion
  • The Primrose Path

• Recommended Games
  • The Apocalypse Clock
  • Aunts and Butlers
  • Ballymun Adventure
  • The Bible Retold*
  • Delightful Wallpaper*
  • Fight or Flight
  • Labyrinth
  • Lawn of Love
  • Madam Spider's Web
  • MANALIVE, A Mystery of Madness - I
  • Mobius
  • Moon-Shaped
  • Polendina
  • Requiem
  • The Sisters
  • Star City*
  • Strange Geometries
  • Tentellian Island
  • The Tower of the Elephant
  • The Traveling Swordsman
  • Unauthorized Termination
  • Visocica*
  • Wumpus Run*
  • Xen: The Hunt

• Not Recommended Games
  • Another Goddamn Escape the Locked Room Game
  • Beam
  • A Broken Man
  • Carmen Devine: Supernatural Troubleshooter
  • Enter the Dark
  • Fetter's Grim
  • Green Falls
  • Hedge
  • The Initial State
  • MANALIVE, A Mystery of Madness - II*
  • Pathfinder
  • PTGOOD 8*10^23
  • Simple Adventure
  • Sisyphus

Highly Recommended Games

The Elysium Enigma (Eric Eve) TADS 3:
I think this is going to be a lot of people's favorite game. It's got a decent setting, a world big and detailed enough to explore but not so complicated that you can't understand all of it, a few NPCs but not too many, an interesting storyline that you can get fully in the time allotted but still explore further if you want, and a wide variety of puzzles, many of which are optional. It also feels subtly professional in a way that's hard to identify — I think it's a combination of a lot of built-in T3 library and module features (typo correction, lots of actions handled automatically, and other things emphasizing automatic ease-of-use) and authorial attention to detail in terms of message defaults and breadth of simulation.

Having said all this, I do of course have a couple complaints. One is with the story pacing — this is in some ways a mystery, and it was a little frustrating working out what was going on pretty early on but not being able to act on it immediately. Another is with some of the puzzles. This is pretty subjective, but a number of the puzzles felt way too, uh, IF-y. Like, things that you only have to do in a convoluted way because this is an IF game and otherwise there wouldn't be a puzzle. The final thing was the issue of moral greyness. This is clearly something the author's interested in — there is plenty of backstory to suggest the Empire folks aren't the good guys all the time. But in practice it never really pans out in the game — there doesn't seem to be a way for me to act as anything other than a loyal citizen of the Empire, and not even any hint from the other NPCs that I should be otherwise. But on balance these are pretty small gripes, and I totally recommend The Elysium Enigma.

There is of course a bunch of other stuff I could say here. The writing is up to Short's usual high standards, and the endings are complex but satisfying. The main thing I'm not sure about with Floatpoint is the short-term interactions. This is impossible for me to really evaluate given my prior experience with it, but it seems like there's not enough direction for the player, not enough explanation of what they can do. This isn't to say there's nothing for them to do — goodness knows there's plenty here, maybe even too much — but finding it is a different matter.

I'm not sure Floatpoint is the best-designed game or even the best game of the comp, but if people are talking about one game from this competition five years from now, it'll be this one. And that should be reason enough to play it now.
(Disclaimer: I was an alpha-tester for this game and fairly intimately involved in the development)

And the problems aren't even super-hard or complicated, either. One of them has the irritating feature that you get into an unwinnable state if you're not carrying the right object, but other than that, they generally take just a few moves to resolve. I hardly ever say this about a comp game, but I wish this game was, like, twice as long and twice as hard. I finished it with a top score on my second playthrough. This seems like not the right thing to shoot for with this kind of game, which is essentially a big optimization puzzle. It seems like there's a lot more that can be done with interlocking deadlines for things, additional problems coming up later, things you thought were solved falling apart again — you know, all the stuff that happens in real life when working at the last minute.

I definitely liked this game, I just wish there'd been more to it.

Recommended Games

The Apocalypse Clock (GlorbWare) Z-Machine:
Like the title hints, this game has a time limit, but it's calculated surprisingly well — I ended up one turn short, undid six moves and finished with time to spare. Otherwise it is your pretty standard zany adventure, I think. There's a talking cat, a mad scientist, a secret tunnel in your house, the usual drill. There are a few bugs in the coding of certain things, but overall The Apocalypse Clock is a solid implementation of a not-too-fancy concept.

The good news about the latter bit is that it's much more directed than the first part: this sometimes feels a little railroady, but it's nice to have goals to work towards. The bad news is, the solutions are usually just as wacky as in the first part of the game, so the puzzles are still pretty hard to solve. In some ways this has the same issue as MANALIVE, A Mystery of Madness - I — the protagonist is supposed to be doing things that are a little zany (or accidentally causing zany things to happen), but this is hard to get the player to think of. In the end it doesn't exactly matter — this is the sort of game that is totally fun to play just from the walkthrough, so even if you get stuck, I suggest you stick with it.

Oh, and I should add that the game system is pretty impressive — as far as I know this is all a from-scratch parser, but I didn't have any issues with phrasing, it supported undo and save, and overall I give it a thumbs up.

Most of the puzzles weren't too unfair, but the game as a whole does suffer from serious no-reused-verbs syndrome. There's one object you have to search, one you have to look under, one you have to look behind, etc. I know the author said he's trying to teach people how to play IF, but while it's important to teach people about the basic set of commands most games support, it's also important to teach people that when a verb or phrasing works in one place, it'll work in other places too. Oh, and I was disappointed the map didn't work — I was pleased to find it, since the layout is kind of confusing, and a clickable map would have been immensely helpful (for that matter, giving the player access to the map at the beginning of the game would probably have been a good idea).

The ideas for dealing with the monster seem reasonable, but the implementation is pretty bad — there are lots of cases where only certain phrasings work and others give unhelpful error messages, or cases where it's not at all obvious what to do or where to go. On the bright side, the NPCs aren't bad. I thought the author did a decent job of giving them distinct personalities and skillsets and integrating those in a helpful way. They really needed a lot more conversation and "life" on their own, though, instead of just following the player around all the time (they do wander around if you don't tell them to follow you, but why would you want that?). Oh, and I was disappointed to see

>KISS KATHERINE
Keep your mind on the game.

The writing is the high quality I expect from Dee and the implementation does a few fancy things without any glitches that I noticed (although it does have a few instances of the irritating thing where you type X and it says "try typing Y instead" instead of just doing it for you). I half-suspect this is one of those cases where you get the idea for an awesome starting scene and implement it, hoping the rest of the game comes along at some point, and sometimes it does on its own and sometimes you have to force it. This feels forced. Oh well.

I'm not a huge Chesterton fan — he comes across to me as pretty heavy-handed and smug — but this game does have some reasonably funny bits of writing. It's too bad that this tends to get shown to us in large chunks (the end of the game is multiple screens full of text, in fact). I know it's hard and risks losing the flavor of the writing, but you really do have to work at breaking this kind of thing up when you're writing IF or the player will get lost trying to read it all.

In addition to this, there are a few coding errors of various kinds in this game — stuff like people saying the same text over and over again, or saying it in the wrong situations, or noun phrases erroneously getting an article when they shouldn't. But for a first game it's pretty solid, and it's an interesting experiment in adaptation even if it's not totally successful.

Moon-Shaped also suffers from an excess of puzzles where you have to do something which is only obviously useful in retrospect — since this is an IF game we mess with stuff just because it's there, but it's not good design. This is especially problematic for the subtype of this where an area will suddenly become available partway through the game, without the player being informed. That said, Ermer writes well and has a good talent for striking scenes and puzzles in the small: I just wish he was better about bringing them together into a solid whole.

(Much later I found out that if you're not wearing the locket, you miss out on a huge amount of backstory. Replaying this game with the locket on did help resolve some issues both of gameplay and of missing plot, though I'm not sure it's enough to salvage things entirely.)

I think this game shows that Whyld can come up with perfectly good plots — even after finishing it I'm not really sure what the hell was going on, but hey, I wasn't sure in Blue Chairs or Chancellor either. The implementation is solid enough. The writing is fine; I think Whyld's overdoing the noir in places but it's acceptable for the kind of story he wants to tell (except for the point of view — he needs to settle on either first or second, even if it is a series of flashbacks).

So what's the problem? I think it's lack of player agency. You can't accuse the game of being railroaded: the player has lots of opportunities to branch the story. But nevertheless, there's very little player agency because the player doesn't have any idea what's going on! In most games this wouldn't be a big deal. Typically player agency comes through their ability to interact with and affect the game world by manipulating objects, moving around, and solving puzzles. The game will have a story but it's not the player's responsibility to affect it directly; all interaction is indirect via object manipulation, and if the player doesn't know exactly what story change will occur, it's no big deal, because they're focused on the objects. Requiem strips out all the puzzle solving and looking and exploring (not totally, but exploration is totally unimportant), with the intent of giving the story primacy. That's great in theory, but it's problematic when the player doesn't have any idea how or why to manipulate the story, and they end up doing the narrative equivalent of wandering around lost in a maze.

I think the problem is that the storylines Whyld is coming up with lately aren't suitable for the player experience he wants to have: they're all about cryptic mystery and the storyline gradually unfolding around a hapless protagonist. In other words, exactly the sort of storyline that should be implemented as a straight-ahead railroad. The kind of story that fits the kind of game design Whyld's written here is one where the protagonist is competent and informed — the player can make choices and know something about what they're getting into with each one. Of course, if he does this, I'll probably have some other gripe. But it's still worth a shot.

I am absolutely not against new, complicated systems in IF games. But when they're there, the author has to realize that they're asking the player to do a large amount of learning, practicing, and restarting. They should be sure that this effort is worth it, in terms of the value this system adds to the storyline and in terms of how much this is what the game is "about". If this was a game about, say, a dogfighter pilot, a complex flying simulator would be totally worth it. You'd have a couple flights during the game and the player would get a chance to master the system and then enjoy the fruits of that mastery. But here it's really not worth it — you have one flight to make, and it doesn't feel like that much of a win over a one-paragraph cutscene.

It's obviously easy for me to make these judgements in retrospect than it is for the author to make when writing, but here's a classic case where I wish the author had, earlier in the design process, thought about what this feature was going to actually mean to the player, compared it to what else they could spend the time implementing, and decided to cut it.

I was impressed how many chunks of the actual text The Tower of the Elephant managed to work into the game, without feeling unnatural or stilted. Even the improvised writing tends to be either inconspicuous or similar enough to blend nicely with the rest, so the overall effect is a really strong Howard voice. The only real problem here is that I'm not sure playing The Tower of the Elephant is actually that much more fun than reading the story would be. This may be the inevitable downside of doing a faithful adaptation: the game does cope to some extent with the player going off-track in the story, but it still ends up feeling a little railroaded (although maybe that's just because I've read the original story — I'd be curious what people who haven't read the original story (and, ideally, didn't realize it was an adaptation) thought).
(Disclaimer: I was a beta-tester for this game)

The storyline is pretty railroady but also fun and reasonably original (with the setting being a big part of this). The ending is a little unsatisfying — I think it drags slightly too long, and as usual I disapprove of endgame "choices" where one of them loses the game immediately and the other lets it continue (the scene is appropriate to include in this kind of story, but just handle it as a cutscene).

It's an ADRIFT game but that's no big deal feature-wise by this point. There are a few places where we get into weird things that would possibly work better in another system — like I don't like the menus where you type A/B/C or 1/2/3 or whatever. They feel "non-IFy", and I'd much prefer "TELEPORT TO HOME" instead, even if it's longer. It's also irritating that TRADE X FOR Y is not the same as TRADE Y FOR X.

On the whole, though, this is quite a solid and fun little game and I recommend it.

One thing I did miss from the previous game was the focus on your large circle of friends. This is mostly an on-the-run game, away from campus, so was mostly stripped down to your relationship with a couple of girls. On the plus side, the style of this game meant the PC got to do more. The last game felt a little like the PC was a minor character as the NPCs are running the show. This game still has a little of this, particularly around Rikket, but as the PC comes into his powers it's definitely getting better. These things usually come in trilogies, so I'll be looking for the third next year. I'm hoping when it shows, there'll be even more opportunities for the player to make choices about the storyline, and choices that have a bigger effect. And, of course, a chance for the PC to kick a lot of ass with magic.

Not Recommended Games

Another Goddamn Escape the Locked Room Game (Riff Conner) Z-Machine:
I wanted to like this one more, but, well, see title. I certainly am all in favor of the general concept of doing a parody of this genre — it's weird that the games are so popular since they're generally so frustrating and not really fun. And this game does have some funny bits and some clever bits, which is not at all surprising from one of the Kingdom of Loathing guys. But too much of the game is too much like the aforementioned locked-room games, and I ended up playing it mostly the same way (ie, walkthrough in hand, swear words on lips). That said, I have a pretty low frustration threshhold for this kind of thing. If you don't, I expect you'll like it more.

Like, please mention exits in the room description. Having them in the status bar really isn't good enough: I didn't actually notice the status bar for half the game since it's all the way up at the top of the screen, and I'm always reading down at the bottom. It's also a lousy idea to have the big confrontation scene with the bad guy consist of you wandering around an area exploring while the bad guy takes ineffectual swings at you, and partway through you leave the area to ask somebody a question, come back again, and then do a single command to get rid of the bad guy forever. There are also some issues with the PC — if your shtick is that you're a werewolf, smelling should be implemented for way more items, and changing form should be relevant more than once-and-a-half times per game (the half is for a time when it's forced to occur but has no real effect).

I expect part of the problem here is that the game is too short, either because it was rushed or artificially truncated. If it was twice the length, I bet a lot of the structural issues would have been fixed naturally as the author filled it out to lengthen it.

But is that all there is to the game? Recently I read Viriconium, a book praised for the way in which it retells the same story in different guises, and have come to realize that Paul's games are just like that. In short, the fact that his games share so many elements isn't a mistake, it's actually that those elements are the fundamental building blocks of the master story he is trying to write. Just like a writer arranges the same words to form many different stories, meaning in a Panks game comes from the permutations of the standard elements. Where will the hellhound be located? What will be the name of the bar where the innkeeper assigns quests? Which room will the magic broadsword be sitting in? By seeing how a game adheres to or deviates from standard usage of these elements, we can see through to the author's message.

In this context it seems like we need to re-evaluate Ninja v1.30, which abandons all the standard Panks elements in favor of new ninja-esque ones. It's the equivalent of an English-speaking writer waking up and deciding to write a novel in Welsh. What message was he sending here? Was he signalling his intent to form a new "language" when he reentered the same game the next year as Ninja II? There is much here for future Panksologists to study.

The other bad sign about this game is the first room is implemented in much greater detail than the rest of the rooms, which usually means the author started carefully putting it together and then ran out of ideas or time and hurried through the rest of the game. I dunno. I didn't come across any serious bugs as such, but the interactions tend not to be implemented in much detail. I expect people who like puzzle games will probably like this — it has reasonably funny writing and stuff. But I didn't find it particularly satisfying, since nothing makes much sense and the puzzles didn't seem that clever. Oh, and considering that >PUNCH (A PERSON) IN THE FACE is mentioned explicitly in the about text, there are suprisingly few places in the game where it's implemented.

This narrow room's prominent feature is a sprawling viewport, which extends all the way along its northern face like a crevice in a soul.

On the whole I'm not really sold by these two games. It's a pity they're separate; I think playing them all as one lump would mitigate the deficiencies of the second game to some extent, but it's still problematic. Really, this book is making an argument for a certain kind of behavior, and an ideal IF translation would have gotten the player into the middle of that argument instead of expecting them to take on the role of someone already convinced.

Even though you did your part and helped the environment, that still does not cancel the fact that a man still died tonight due to your hand.

...you now realize what the night has meant to you. The meaning of Pathfinder. The meaning of freedom of choice. The freedom to jump off a bridge if you like, or to throw the brown parcel away and forget about what's inside.

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