So maybe I should get back to my reviews, eh? I think I have three of these left to write up, and in fact I lied when I said that I wasn’t going to try any more games, so there’s one more left I might try.

These are text-adventure games, arty to various degrees, meant to be be judged in under two hours of play. The games can be found here. My reviews will be categorized under “IFComp.”

This is a review of “The Duel in the Snow,” which can be downloaded here or played online here or here, if you’ve got the right plug-ins.

This is a story game. There’s one puzzle that you’re not really supposed to solve, another that you can get the answer to pretty easily in-game (and annoying as all get-out until then, though perhaps there’s a certain thematic appropriateness to that; look under the spoiler space), and that’s about it puzzle-wise. Nor can you affect much that happens in the plot, which is also thematically appropriate, as the protagonist is a shlimazl who can’t affect much that happens in his own life. Insofar as there’s a challenge, it’s in figuring out just what is going on.

This game does a lot well. I forget exactly who said that this game shows how much atmosphere you can get from snowy nineteenth-century Russia, but whoever that was spoke truly. And you might want to go around adding “Victor Pavlovich” to the end of all your sentences — “There’s no more milk, Victor Pavlovich” — and see how much more melancholy your life gets. The second time I played through I was impressed at how the game conveyed the main character’s hopelessness.

But that second playthrough was after I’d pretty much had the deeper story explained to me. And I don’t think you really need to understand the story to get the atmosphere, but I did think that the clues to the story were too well hidden, so the first time through I felt like things were going on without me. I kept waiting for some event or revelation of significance in something, but it didn’t happen. And again, that might be thematically appropriate — the PC feels much the same way — but it’s not necessarily a good thing for a game to make us feel just like the PC would.

[EDIT: Amanda Lange expresses my reaction to the first playthrough well: "I just felt like the story was a bit too on-rails and I was just drifting through it." Though I was still much more positive than she was about the game, partly because this kind of game seems to be much more my kind of thing than hers.]

This is the kind of game I’d like to make, too, and it really is successful in a lot of ways. But it makes me think that the best way to make this kind of game, where you discover the backstory through the details, is to include a lot of those details. Soak every room in them. Because not every player will hit upon all the clues you leave, and not every player will hit on the same clues, so it’s good if the player will get as much of an idea as you want from the clues they do get.

The atmosphere and the main character were very well done, though. And that’s as critical as anything else.

Only now, looking through Emily’s reviews, did I notice that this and Duel that Spanned the Ages have the exact same logo. I mean, exact same. Huh.
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Victor Gijsber’s commenters here and Emily Short’s here have a good account of what the story is. Actually “miseri” does the heavy lifting; she (?) has especially insightful comments about Kropkin’s anecdotes at the end of Emily’s thread.

I almost did the thing that would’ve saved me on my first playthrough, but there was something where I needed to put the thing that would’ve saved me. So close! I don’t think it’s a bad thing that the way to survive the duel is unclued and fairly ridiculous, because you’re not really supposed to survive, and it’s not like the PC would be going through any great efforts to save his life.

The thirst puzzle was a pain though; it was pretty guess-the-verby, and while the recurring method about your thirst actually did drive me to try to find something to drink, as if I’d actually been thirsty, once again I’m not sure that the game should be trying to make us feel as miserable as the protagonist.

In Emily’s comments Jimmy Maher complained about being unable to avoid hitting Gronsovksij in the flashback, but I didn’t mind at all. For one thing, it’s a flashback; for another, by the codes V.P. lives by, I’m pretty sure he has no choice in the matter. He could no more avoid challenging Gronovskij than we could dance naked on the street, and the game isn’t under any more obligation to let us avoid the duel than it would be to let a contemporary PC take its clothes off. Offer not good on that Invisible Man game.

Really enormous spoiler after the next space.
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I don’t care if Kropkin cuckolded us and set us up to be killed, I’m grateful to him for giving me the answer to the soda syphon puzzle. Man, that was annoying.

I’ve been playing some of the games from the 2009 IF Comp. These are text-adventure games, arty to various degrees, meant to be be judged in under two hours of play. The games can be found here. My reviews will be categorized under “IFComp.”

This is a review of “The Duel That Spanned the Ages,” which can be downloaded here or played online here or here, if you’ve got the right plug-ins. Though you might want to read the first sentence of my review before clicking the first link, plus the Parchment links for the game files have been wonky lately.

So, in my review of Snowquest, I mentioned that Parchment can’t display more text than will fit in your browser window at once. The Duel That Spanned the Ages opened with a text dump that scrolled right past my browser window. Excessive text dumps are usually a bad thing in IF, I think. Even if there’s some fantastic prose involved, it’s probably a good idea to break the dump up with a couple of space-bar presses. A reasonable maximum length is probably the amount of text that Parchment can display at once in my browser window.

I’m in no position to carp at verbosity! And the writing was perfectly fine, if perhaps a bit overblown — but not quite good enough to sustain a textdump of that length. (Perhaps when we can see it as the intro to a complete series rather than a comp game it’ll seem a little less out of proportion.) The game alternates your character’s perspective with occasional third-person cutscenes, where other characters talk in hushed tones about what your character is up to. (It doesn’t say they’re hushed, but they sound hushed. I guess that’s one way the game gets points for evocativeness.) But the cutscenes didn’t engage me. They were a bit too obviously enigmatic; I think the initial weird events would probably have given me enough impulse to wonder what was going on without these scenes.

About the gameplay: It’s an IF version of a first-person shooter. FPSs are not Emily’s sort of thing. I believe they are Victor’s. They are not my sort of thing, in the way that flying airplanes wasn’t Beethoven’s sort of thing; I don’t have the technology and I wouldn’t know what to do with it. The only game console I’ve ever owned was an Atari 2600, unless Pong counts. So, together with a couple of irritants that are detailed below the spoiler space, the game didn’t really get a fair shot from me. [UPDATE: And on further play I like it better.]

Because, carping aside, this is a solid game. Things are where they’re supposed to be, the puzzles (except for one) that I found were well-clued (even if a lot of them tended to be “shoot something” — maybe I do know what to do with an FPS), and there was clearly a lot of care put into this. There were also some funny bits (examine your badge). I also suspect that I drifted away from the game just as it started to get really interesting [UPDATE: in fact, this was the case], and there may have been an element of teaching you to play involved in the early puzzles. In fact, I’m going back to play it after reading a partial transcript, because I have an idea of how to solve one of the puzzles I’ve seen. Still, it wasn’t my favorite.
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I must confess that, when we got to the first puzzley bit after the initial not-super-interactive scenes, my first thought was “A maze?” And then “A shootout in a maze?” This was unfair — the mazey bit is small enough, and the navigational system helpful enough, that there wasn’t any of the interminable wandering around that makes mazes suck. On the other hand, the descriptions of the exits seemed to disappear from the description just as I started to really need them, in the shootout. I think there was a conscious decision to shorten the descriptions to capture the breathless excitement of the fight, but in practice it meant I had to type “look” a lot.

Irritant #1: The new message for “jump” is clever; however, that message should not appear when I’m standing next to an open hatch in a spaceship that’s hurtling toward the ground. In that context “jump” means “jump OUT,” dammit! Fortunately this happened well before the clock ran out on the puzzle.

Irritant #2: The solution for the puzzle after the crash was pretty annoying (good hints, though). It’s probably OK that the thing you have to do is buried in the description of something else; except it’s something the PC would think of immediately, even if the player didn’t; perhaps the player’s lack of knowledge mimics the PC’s oxygen shortage? Also, at this point there was a change in the status bar which made me think that the particular solution wasn’t available.

The tragic thing is, although I am playing it again, I think I’ve exceeded the two-hour limit and am not allowed to judge it based on what happens. So, again, I didn’t quite give it a fair shot. Worth checking out, anyway. [UPDATE: Yes, it's a lot more fun now. Oddly enough, because of the more traditional IF use-this-to-trigger-that puzzles. Also I think reading Merk's transcript helped me past a part that I would've found annoying. But I wouldn't have returned to it if other reviewers hadn't talked me up. So; thanks to the other reviewers; and to the author, you might want to tweak the puzzle listed as Irritant 2, to avoid washing out the likes of me early in your game.]

[FINAL UPDATE: And the last text dumps were in fact pretty effective, except that I think the last one scrolled off even in Java. Well done in the end, and sorry I didn't finish it all in two hours. Having got to the end, I think the last third-person scene would be much more effective without the previous ones.]

[UPDATE: If I shoot a robot spider off my leg, shouldn't it smash into a floor rather than a wall? Perhaps I lifted my leg for a better shot.]

I’ve been playing some of the games from the 2009 IF Comp. These are text-adventure games, arty to various degrees, meant to be be judged in under two hours of play. The games can be found here. My reviews will be categorized under “IFComp.”

This is a review of “Earl Grey,” which can be downloaded here and may be playable online here, though I can’t get that link to play in my browser. If you want to download these games and play them, you’ll need an interpreter. Some things about interpreters can be found here. I use Zoom for the Mac when I’m not playing online.

So. I’m going to be somewhat not-nice about this game. It has a great idea, and does some completely new stuff in IF, but it also had the highest Frustration Meter of any game I played in the comp, and I don’t think it’s my fault. It’s like, bicycles have been around for a while, and there isn’t anything very interesting about a bicycle, but if you know how to ride one it can get you from one place to the next. Personal jetpacks are exciting and way cool, and whoever invents any kind of personal jetpack is going to deserve high praise for innovation in the field of transportation. But if you can’t control the jetpack, it won’t be very much fun to try to use it to get from A to B. In fact, it’ll lead to some serious owies.

A game like Interface is a bicycle. Earl Grey is an out-of-control jetpack. When Yoon-Ha Lee asked of it, “Please either be (a) hilariously bad in an over-the-top manner or (b) staggeringly wonderful,” I think she got both.

[Actually I can't ride a bicycle, due to an early busting-my-head-open experience. But like I said here, most IF games presuppose you already know how to play IF some. Except for something like the Dreamhold, I guess, which comes with training wheels. I'm now going to push this metaphor over the edge of a cliff, and you won't have to see it anymore. *CRASH*]

Anyway, I need to temper my unenthusiasm some; a lot of people didn’t find this game unplayable and in fact enjoyed it. Jenni loved it. Sidney Merk, well, liked it better than I did, and I get the impression he wasn’t as frustrated as I was by a similar playthrough. So not everyone will still have my issues. Still, it’s my review, and I get to explain what my issues were, and why I think in order to make this a really excellent game the authors would have to replace about 60% of the puzzles and 75% of the plot.

Before I start complaining, I really like word puzzles. I just replayed every level of Blocks With Letters On and More Blocks With Letters On after that. In fact this may have hurt the game for me; when I read it was a word puzzle game I went for it immediately, so I may have been hurt by raised expectations.

My main complaint is that the game misses an opportunity to teach you how to play it. This might seem ironic, since it has a tutorial, explains that it doesn’t use most verbs, and in fact Jenni said “I like when games attempt to teach you how to play them, especially if they’ve got special new features….” The problem for me was that after the initial tutorial, it throws you into a bunch of situations where it’s not obvious what your goal is; instead of having a goal and looking to see how to use your new techniques to reach it, you have to look for what you can apply your technique to and hope it advances some goal you may not know you had. Which actually could be kind of fun if the application was obvious, but a lot of these puzzles pretty much have to be done by brute force. At the very bottom, under an extra spoiler space, I’m going to complain about the most egregious one.

Again, there was a problem of expectations here. Someone (I can’t find who right now [UPDATE: it was Elizabeth), when it looked like the game would be about going to various houses and getting various teas, complained about collection quests. But this structure at least would’ve given you a well-defined goal at each stage, and given the authors a chance to slowly ramp up the opportunity. And they could still divert the game into the wacky plot in the middle — in fact that might increase the impact of the wacky plot, since you were expecting to do more than collect tea.

Another issue was the conversation — there are several points where you can only move the game along by talking to someone, a lot, when you’d rather be messing with words. Seven “TALK TO DUDE” commands in a row is a lot, and though the dialogue has its moments it’s not quite good enough to sustain it. Also, there was one point (details below the spoiler space) where my dialogue with one character hung up because I hadn’t tripped the right event flag, which made me think there was a puzzle that just wasn’t there.

There was a lot of funny stuff in the game, and though I sometimes found the PC’s subtitled commentary a bit twee, there were some great lines. (Though the tone of the game also bothered me; more below.) (Also; bad idea to put the most important part of the inventory in the subtitles, because that means you can’t scroll back to see it.) And it’s good that you can’t actually make the game unwinnable; it always resets to a winnable state. But overall, I have to say that this is a great idea, but I’d really like to see a different game written around it.
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The main trigger for my problem with the tone actually was also the first trigger for my problem with the gameplay. At the end of the tutorial, Eaves prevents you from descending to town until you’ve finished your lessons, but he doesn’t have any more lessons to give you. The conversation stalls out. And at this point the game clearly expects you to do something pretty dickish to Eaves; but there’s no reason for Eaves to keep you from leaving until you do something dickish to him, and I didn’t actually want to do anything dickish to him. IF is often coldhearted, but I’d usually rather it wasn’t. This also betrayed a problem the game sometimes had with insufficiently artful ways of keeping you on the plot, the worst example being “Something holds you back” when you try to go through the portal without having fixed the mess where you are.

It reminded me of the part in Ad Verbum where you have to make a (very unpleasant) child cry so you can take a toy from him; and I know Ad Verbum wasn’t supposed to engage my emotions, but that made me feel like crap. (The particular way you solve this puzzle didn’t help, also that unlike the rest of Ad Verbum the solution didn’t seem very verbal.) Except in Earl Grey when you do that dickish thing AN ENTIRE TOWN GETS DESTROYED BY A FIREBALL. That put me off even more, and the things you do to rectify the situation didn’t seem nearly adequate. Yoon-Ha Lee had a similar problem.

Also, why is Eaves knocking the sky to summon Earl Gry? Shouldn’t he be knocking the tea?

The conversation-trigger problem I had was in the scene with the ogreling, the guardsman, and, er, the other character. I got to the point where Other was pointing out an anti-ogre knife, but he wouldn’t give it to me because I hadn’t finished talking to the ogerling yet. I figured that my PC wouldn’t have much trouble going after the ogreling before being explicitly told he needed a real weapon, and I spent a while trying to see if I could somehow summon up a drink to trade the Other for the knife — it’s not like he said, “I’ll give you this knife when you’re certain you need it.”

And, like everyone else, I was completely lost when I hit the sphere. I had no idea what I might want to do. (More detail below the next spoiler space.) After a little walkthroughing I got to the point where I could let the sea lions drown, and then I quit in despair, because I didn’t want to do any more awful things. (And read Sidney Merk’s transcript to see what happened. I’m actually particularly glad I didn’t play through to the end, because the end seems terribly unsatisfying, though there may have been a bit more explanation in the subtitles.)
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OK, I can see how it’s amusing to take the r and n from a crown to turn it into a cow so a lazy moo will hang into the air so you can add the n back and turn it into a lazy moon which will cast the white luster of rock into the ocean (except you can’t see it by examining the ocean, you have to examine the moon) which you can turn into a white cluster of rock for the sea lions to shelter on. But that’s something that would be fun to watch, because it’s so delightfully illogical. When there’s no way to know in advance that creating a cow will eventually give you a white luster of rock, trying to do this is torturous.

I’ve been playing some of the games from the 2009 IF Comp. These are text-adventure games, arty to various degrees, meant to be be judged in under two hours of play. The games can be found here. My reviews will be categorized under “IFComp.”

This is a review of “Snowquest,” which can be downloaded here or played online here, if you’ve got the right plug-ins. If you want to download these games and play them, you’ll need an interpreter. Some things about interpreters can be found here. I use Zoom for the Mac when I’m not playing online.

My reaction to this game may be a bit skewed, because the author, Eric Eve, was the only author I’d heard of in advance. (Though I’d never played any of his games.) So my expectations were high; and not uniquely mine, I’ve seen at least one other place where someone described this game as an early favorite. Which means I’m probably grading it on a harsher curve than everything else.

This game does a lot of things very right, too. It moves through a lot of different environments in an interesting way, and it’s generally well put together. The earlier, snowier sections had a very strong sense of setting. One very right thing is that it not only lists the available directions in the status bar, it lists ones you haven’t gone yet in red. This was very useful in the late mid-game, which required a lot of back-and-forthing through different locations.

You’ve probably sensed that this is all leading up to a quibble. So: I quibble about the story. The beginning parts of the game were evocative and mysterious, and then there was a twist, and then… the part after the twist seemed pretty thin. It didn’t help that I put the game down just after reaching the twist, so the post-twist part was effectively an Act II. The weighting just seemed off. Now, I’ve praised a bunch of games that didn’t have much of a sense of story, but this game seemed as though it wanted to put a lot of weight on the story, and the story couldn’t really bear it. (Eve’s about text explains that he wanted to keep the game within the limits of the Z-machine’s memory, so in order to add new things he’d have to take things out. I approve of using the Z-machine, since it means I can play online, but I think maybe he could’ve cut out some of the part before the twist to balance it better.)

Another thing — this isn’t really the game’s fault — is that Parchment, the online interpreter, doesn’t seem to be able to display more than a windowful of text at a time. If the game is telling it to print a block of text that’s more than a windowful long, it’ll lock onto the top or the bottom, not letting you scroll up and down to see what’s going on. This got to be an issue when I desperately needed the last hint for a puzzle, and there were so many hints in the sequence that the hint I needed was stuck at the bottom though the text was locked to the top. Fortunately I needed only one word, and the hint did flash on the screen for a fraction of a second, so I was able to figure it out. As I said, this isn’t really a problem with the game. Though maybe the fact that I needed to get a single word from the hint, well, is. (Note: It may have been my fault.)

Anyway: Interesting atmosphere, mostly fair puzzles, a lot of intrigue in the buildup, but the payoff felt a little empty.
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If I were going to add more to the end, I’d cut the dream sequence; but a lot of it was very well done. For instance, examine the priest a couple of times; that strikes me as pretty dreamlike. (Though maybe it could’ve been toned down a bit.) Also, on a replay I noticed that the conversation with the woman is exactly the same no matter what conversation topics you choose, “ASK HER ABOUT DORITOS” or whatever; but what’s well done is, if you aren’t trolling the game, you’re very likely to choose topics that made sense. However, I wasn’t trolling the game when I tried to fly down during the dream (I figured, better to rejoin my body than head to those mountains I clearly wasn’t going to reach), and the text wasn’t awfully responsive to that. Still, I may want to write something with a dream sequence sometime, and this gives me ideas.

Oh, I’d also cut the conversation with Mundle about the book of Yashor. We don’t really need any extra motivation to get the thingy — we’re game players. We see thingies, we get them. And as Yoon-Ha Lee points out, the conversation is very infodumpy. (I do feel that her complaint, “Oh please God not a quest,” is unfair, or at least that she was warned. It does exactly what it says on the tin.)

The puzzley parts I thought were mostly very fair and well clued; one of the times I had to go to the hints, it was because I hadn’t thought very hard about what one of the bits of description in one of the locations was good for. The last bit of that sequence, though, seemed pretty guess-the-verby to me. I’m not sure how I should have known that after I had, um, done X with the Y, the next thing to do was Z it. Xing the Y should probably have been enough to trigger the next event. Idea: in a situation like that, if you’ve entered two invalid verbs with the same object, the parser should say “You wiggle the Y back and forth, pushing and pulling, until [supply verb that you were supposed to guess].” Or give you a hint. It’s at least as simulative as the game where you have to try six times before you can squeeze through the narrow opening.

The last puzzle I actually thought was quite nice, which is to say I solved it, which may be to say it was unsubtle. But there was a good “teaching you to play the game” moment here. Ah, I won’t spoil it more specifically, though you may not want to finish this paragraph. I will say that it wasn’t really the last puzzle for me, because I managed to get killed after solving it, because I didn’t pick the gun up. I was looking for something more complex to do. You don’t want me on your side in a fight.

The big choice at the end felt pretty flimsy, though, because the real-world versions of the characters were barely fleshed in. Also it wasn’t too hard to figure out who was untrustworthy, with just a little dithering. I should definitely play Eve’s more famous games, though, because he’s obviously trying to do interesting stuff, and he does so much so well that it’s easy to see his other games coming together in a way that this one didn’t, for me.

I’ve been playing some of the games from the 2009 IF Comp. These are text-adventure games, arty to various degrees, meant to be be judged in under two hours of play. The games can be found here. My reviews will be categorized under “IFComp.”

This is a review of “Byzantine Perspective,” which can be downloaded here or played online here or here, if you’ve got the right plug-ins.

It comes with a nicely designed map, which you can get here (pdf file). In many games the map is a spoiler, but not in this one — it’s an in-universe object. You’re going to need it to finish the puzzle, unless you are some kind of puzzle god. Did I mention that it’s mildly irksome that the “Play online” page doesn’t tell you which games have extra files? This is one of a couple of ways in which I think the comp isn’t the friendliest for newbie players.

If you want to download these games and play them, you’ll need an interpreter. Some things about interpreters can be found here. I use Zoom for the Mac when I’m not playing online (and at least one of these games needs Zoom).

So, the consensus is that this game has one central puzzle, and that when you solve the puzzle, you’ve done what you have to do in the game. The consensus is also that the puzzle is pretty awesome. The consensus is right — except that when I solved (what I think was) the main part of the puzzle, I still couldn’t figure out what to do next, because my IF-fu is weak. But I got a nice toasty feeling about what I did solve, and felt appropriately chagrined that I hadn’t figured out the next step when I looked at the walkthrough.

Some people (I forget who) said more or less that it was a great puzzle but they couldn’t rate the game very highly because the puzzle was all there is. This seems a little shortsighted to me — the game does what it does very well, what it does is something only IF can do, and adding in a whole mess of extra story would only have distracted from the good part. Its achievement may be smaller-scale than that of say Photopia or Spider and Web, but small is beautiful. And I didn’t think many of the other games (that I’ve played) were a Photopia or a Spider and Web.

The game’s world is a bit under-described, perhaps — since the PC is an art student in a museum, she might reasonably want to drink in more prose — but too much description might have distracted from the main puzzle. (I did have one complaint related to this, which will be after the last spoiler space.) And I did get at least something of a sense of the PC’s character, communicated effectively in not many words.

The game had a couple of bugs (weird output in response to some commands), but nothing that affected gameplay. A nice game overall.

Since talking about the puzzle spoils the game more than usual, I’m putting in two spoiler-spaced sections. Reading the next one probably won’t wreck the game for you. The one after that might.
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It might seem that a game like this, which is a puzzle that you get or you don’t, can’t possibly fit in with what I said about how I like games that teach you how to play them. And to some extent that’s true. But there’s a way in which the game does teach you how to play it, as well. You start in confusion, and will stay confused for a while, but eventually you can sort your confused movements into a pattern. There’s also a bit of having learned what to do from other IF, which partly explains how I managed to need the walkthrough even after solving the main puzzle.

Also, I managed to lose the game. I think that required actual effort.
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The thing that irked me a bit was the multitool. In a game with basically three objects, one’s a red herring? Harrumph. Perhaps I should work on my red herring detector. Also, there was one point where a door handle probably should’ve been implemented and wasn’t, though if it had been I probably would’ve spent ages trying to unscrew it with the multitool and got annoyed.

[THIS ONE'S A BIG SPOILER] Unlike Jenni, I didn’t find it unconvincing that I had a pair of goggles with a button I didn’t know about. I once lived in an apartment for a whole year without figuring out how to turn down the radiator — when I was moving out I discovered that the whole top of the radiator cover flipped open, allowing me to reach the knob thingy. This was in Milwaukee, so there was pretty much an unlimited supply of cold air outside to use to adjust the temperature. You will have gathered that I wasn’t paying for heat myself. [And yes, I feel guilty about using the extra carbon. I really thought I couldn't control the radiator. I suppose I failed to examine the right object.] Actually there’s a little buggykins here; you can’t press the button until you read the note, but you can feel the button.

[ALSO A BIG SPOILER] And unlike everyone else, I didn’t find looking up “Byzantine Perspective” helpful. I mean, that’s not actually what the goggles did, is it?

But first, an admission: I’m probably not going to play any more games from the IFComp, even though some of the ones I haven’t played look interesting, and one (Broken Legs) looks like it might be one of the best games of the comp. From the first few turns it has great writing, voice, attitude, and characterization, and one of the best responses to “xyzzy” ever. (Interface’s response is pretty good too.) It also apparently has a puzzle structure kind of like Varicella’s, and I’m too intimidated to even start playing Varicella, because I know I will FAIL. And I suspect it won’t be the good kind of fail, where I get to see a lot of witty failure scenes and learn what I did wrong and improve, but the bad kind of fail, where I get to see the same failure scenes over and over. This is my fault (though it does connect into what I like in games, which I will discuss below).

Anyway, the main reason I won’t play the rest of the games, at least not right now, is that I’ve pretty much used up the amount of time I can spend on IF this month, and I still have to write six (gulp) more reviews. (Also, a couple of the games I have left won’t play online from the play online page — these are the ones that don’t have .zsomething extensions on the Java link. When I click the Java link it asks me to download something. Now I believe that this is because these are larger, non-Z-machine games, and the online interpreters only work on Z-machine games, but I barely understand that sentence. Anyway, I thought I’d mention it. It also may be an issue with my browser setup.)

So I thought I’d say a little about what I seem to like and dislike in games, which may help assuage the feelings of anyone whose game I’ve harshed out on because I couldn’t solve it.

Oh, and this entry contains a lot of links to TVTropes, because I hate your productivity almost as much as mine.

Something I don’t like: being frustrated, unless that frustration ends in a satisfying breakthrough moment (or at least a satisfying “aha!” once I look at the walkthrough). It’s a character flaw of mine that I get frustrated too easily, especially when combined with a stubbornness that makes me not want to stop doing the thing that’s frustrating me. (I’ve played through a game that killed me 1507 times in just over two hours. Which did feel good when I finished it, but that level of persistence may be a form of insanity.)

A corollary is that I’m unusually bugged by puzzles that I think are insufficiently clued — ones that send me to the walkthrough and make me ask “How was I supposed to know to do that?” This is a superset of guess-the-verb puzzles (which I think everyone hates), where the problem is often that you think “X can’t possibly work” because you think you’ve tried X, you just didn’t try to do X using the exact wording that’s programmed in. (cf.) If there are tons of synonyms for “give shirt to troll,” but no indication that you were wearing a shirt, it’s not a guess-the-verb but it’s still unclued. (This example comes from a game that was deliberately meant to be unplayable, so I haven’t hurt anyone’s feelings yet, I hope.) (And one of those links reminds me — when the PC is in bed or a chair or something, can we have “up” mean “out”? I realize that “up” usually doesn’t work because it’s used to move to other rooms rather than out of beds/chairs in the room you’re in, but this always throws me off.)

Timing puzzles also can get frustrating for me — partly because I tend to play online, which means I don’t save. And they can be good at raising dramatic tension. But they’re also good at killing me off and making me go through a bunch of steps again, or sending me to the walkthrough because I realize that if I keep trying various things that don’t work I’m going to be die soon. This is more of a personal preference than something I think designers should respect, although if the solution to the timed puzzle exceeds the undo buffer, you’re at least Tough on the cruelty scale. (Perhaps Nasty if it’s not obvious when the timer runs out.)

Naturally the combination of these two is particularly lethal, though I guess mileage varies — Sidney gave a rating of “superb” to a game that, from his transcript, killed him at least twice with a timed puzzle that sent him to the hints. When he tried the solution his thought was “I wasn’t thorough enough,” which probably marks him as a more tolerant (or experienced) player than me. Or at least one with save files.

What I do like: I do like story, setting, and plot. This may be seem odd given a couple of my reviews — I liked Gleaming the Verb fine even though it has no story, setting, and plot, or much of anything else, and I said some fairly tolerant things about the unimplemented stuff in The Grand Quest until they started making the puzzle impossible to do. That’s because these things don’t — or needn’t — lead to the kind of frustration that I don’t like. I could play through Gleaming the Verb fine. But story, setting, and plot sure make a game richer.

I like a game that gives you some sense of forward progress. That’s one reason for the dreaded plot coupons. It may be an artificial device to have to collect the nine Orbs of Fronulax (or the six colored masks or the three (symbolic) pieces of your wife’s heart) in order to defeat the whosis, but when you get one of those things, you know you’ve done something. And progress doesn’t have to be so blatantly coupony. If there’s a door you can’t open, you’ve made progress when you’ve opened it. Usually. Even Galatea has something of a progress meter — of course when Galatea turns around it’s all the more rewarding for the emotional work you’ve put into it.

[By the way, if you somehow have managed to read this post this far and have never played Galatea, do it.]

I also like a game that teaches you how to play it. That’s something that Anna Anthropy talks about here with the beginning of Super Mario Bros. and here with the somewhat more obscure game Star Guard. With games I’ve played, that’s something Cave Story is absolutely superb at. Just before the boss battle that I’m currently stuck on, there’s a bit where you have to make a curving jump onto a block that’s descending to crush you, from underneath that block. This is a reasonably difficult jump. But a screen before that, there’s a screen where you have to make a very similar jump up from an area that you’ve cleared, under no time pressure, with no bad consequences if you’ve failed. So before you have to do or die, you’ve had plenty of time to practice.

The “Blocks with Letters On” games also do that quite well. They gradually introduce new devices — using the explanatory text that Anthropy disparages — which open up new kinds of gameplay. And there are tricks that go with the new devices; you learn how to use two flying blocks as a moving bridge to ferry other blocks across gaps, and then later you have to figure out how to do it with only one flying block (and other stuff); or you encounter some devices that rotate blocks, and you have to learn where to drop your block so it rotates the right amount, and then what to do when you don’t seem to be able to drop a block in the right place. But this way of teaching you the game is far from hand-holding. Plenty of times you have to think laterally, because a lesson that you think you’ve learned leads you the wrong way here. (Levels 27 and 28 of the first game do this elegantly.) If I were tossed into one of the later levels, I wouldn’t know where to begin, but because of the way the game has taught me, I know how to pull off some complicated stuff.

[There's one instance where I think the lateral thinking breaks an implicit contract with the player, rot13ed: hc gvyy yriry guveglgjb, gur tnzr unf orra ragveryl ghea-onfrq; ohg ng yriry guvegl-gjb, lbh unir gb gnxr na npgvba va erny gvzr (lbh unir gb zbir ba naq bss n tngr fb gung gur nffbpvngrq oybpxf qvfnccrne naq ernccrne va gvzr sbe n oybpx gb snyy guebhtu bar naq or pnhtug ol gur bgure. Also the animations for levels 47 and 48 are somewhat unpleasant in a sexist way.]

Blocks With Letters On can get away with its complexity partly because it’s a strictly rule-based game, and it follows the rules. The abandonware game Blobbo Lite, is a sort of Sokoban (or Load Runner) gone berserk — you have to manipulate all sorts of objects to get to your toy chests. For instance, you might push a bowling ball, which falls past an arrow, which shoots off and hits a mine, which blows up the wall next to it and the floor it’s on (and you, if you’re next to it). It’s tile-based, turn-based, and rule-based; but it doesn’t tell you the rules up front, and it sometimes breaks them. But it sets up the way it breaks the rules. For instance, there’s one (fiendishly difficult) level where some of the chests are sealed off behind walls. There’s no way to get to them, if the walls behave like every wall you’ve seen before; and that’s how you know they don’t. Some of the walls are passable. There’s obviously no other way the level could be solvable. Later on there’s a level that forces you to go along a winding path into many separate areas, with some puzzles that look impossible until you realize that you have to go on to (what looks like) the next area before you can solve this area. At the very end is what looks like an impossible area to solve; you can get the last chest, but only by cutting off the level exit. Did you have to do something different in the previous area? No; you can just walk through the wall to the exit. That level would’ve been a literal Wall Banger, if the previous level hadn’t forced you to figure out that you could walk through walls when you really needed to.

Back to IF. It can be hard for a single work of IF to teach you how to play it. For one thing, most puzzly IF is going to try to get you to do something counterintuitive sometime, in a way that somehow makes sense. Else it wouldn’t be puzzly. It still can be done. The Dreamhold does a good job, not just by the in-game tutorial, but by the sequence of puzzles. And one of the games in the comp, the best I think, teaches you to play it too. (Maybe Broken Legs teaches you accretively.) But I think IF in general teaches you through the genre.

For instance, when I played A Flustered Duck I was bemused by one particular location, which obviously had something important that I couldn’t find, even after examining every possible noun. It turned out that I had to search rather than examine. (This was still a moment of player-PC disjuncture, since the PC knew what was there and what it was for, and I did not know and, um, had not expected to be doing that. Which sounds NSFW but isn’t. The game has an excellent hint system, which makes up for it.) There’s at least one game in the IFComp that uses “search” a lot, and if it hadn’t been for AFD it would’ve born the brunt of my annoyance. — In fact, going back a bit, when I first played Metamorphoses I couldn’t find a crucial early object because I didn’t know you could make things show up by examining other things. Also I couldn’t figure out how to work the contraption until I looked at the walkthrough, but that’s just me being dense.

The upshot? Well, IF in general has a learning curve, and I may be close to the beginning of it. But the conventions of IF are not to be tossed aside lightly. A game that doesn’t respond to conventional probing, and doesn’t give you an idea of what it will respond to, can be like a book bound back to front, or one where you’re supposed to read the pages in alphabetical order (eight five four one six seven three two). The players may not be able to get started. Or they may — I have a post up about Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle. But watch out. And then keep cluing your puzzles; the basic vocabulary of IF may be enough to get the player going, but the game has to boost them along.

That’s why I was so positive about Interface and even about Gleaming the Verb. Interface sets you up in a situation, lets you know some of the things you need to do, and as you move around you gradually uncover more puzzles and more of what you need to solve it. It’s not profound, but it’s enjoyable. Gleaming the Verb doesn’t actually do any of the standard IF stuff (which may be why I liked it more than IF vets). But it does tell you what to do at the beginning, and then if you can make the leap to the next command (which is something I did kind of automatically) the rest of the puzzles build on that. So at least it teaches you what to do, if you can take the first step. It may be just a riddle, but it’s a fair riddle.

Anyway, that’s where I’m coming from, at much too much length. Probably the most important bits of it should be folded into a later post, “Why do people swear at IF?”

Emily (very mild spoilers for Byzantine Perspective) pointed out that “fix” in Inform is by default a synonym for attach. That explains what happens when you type “fix booth” into Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle.

I’ve been playing some of the games from the 2009 IF Comp. These are text-adventure games, arty to various degrees, meant to be be judged in under two hours of play. The games can be found here. My reviews will be categorized under “IFComp.”

But this isn’t a review. Here I’m reflecting on the games I’ve played, or started (I haven’t played them all, and I won’t), by a simple measure: The Bechdel Test. The test, found here and discussed here (and other places), goes like this:

Does the work
(1) have two female characters
(2) who talk to each other
(3) about something besides a man?

It’s not always an entirely fair test for IF, for two reasons. One is that any work with a viewpoint character is going to have trouble if that character is male. (Though the character can observe a conversation between two women.) IF almost always has a viewpoint character, the PC, and if the PC is male then the game is usually hosed. Though there still could be conversations in cut scenes, or overheard conversations.

A second issue with the test is that conversations are hard to program, and many games don’t have much in the way of conversation. If the PC is the only character, the game will flunk on step (1).

A third issue is that the PC is often genderless, or whatever the player is. This really gets its own category — games that pass the test if the PC is a woman.

Fair to the medium or not, the disturbing thing about the test is how few works pass it, and by how narrow margins. It’s one thing for an individual work to have no conversations between female characters; it’s another thing when almost nothing does. Read this to see how pernicious that can be in Hollywood. Anyway, it’s interesting to see what passes and what doesn’t. There may be mild spoilers for the IFComp games after the break (there’s also a discussion of some of Emily Short’s games, though I don’t think it’s spoilery).

[UPDATE: Maybe I should say this more clearly: If your game doesn't pass the test, that's not a slam on your game. I realize that talk of "passing" and "flunking" makes it sound like flunking is a horrible thing, but lots of individual games have perfectly good reasons for not including conversations between two women. (Things are much different for movies and TV shows, which are third-person and generally have lots more conversations and characters.) I'm using the test to think about how gendered IF is as a whole, and maybe to start a conversation.]

Also, it should really be the Bechdel-Wallace Test, since apparently Alison Bechdel’s friend Liz Wallace came up with it first.

One way of thinking of how hard it is for IF to pass this is that Emily Short is obviously concerned with feminism, and even more obviously concerned with conversation, and a lot of her games don’t pass it. Offhand, of the games I’ve played, Galatea, Floatpoint, Alabaster, and the When in Rome chapters have male PCs (though in Floatpoint the PC may witness a conversation among women that I didn’t get to); Best of Three has a female PC talking to a man; Glass… it certainly has women talking to each other, though I think a man may always be present (not to mention the PC), but they’re basically talking about a man, aren’t they? Fugue definitely has conversations among women characters, but again about a man (this was part of a constraint not set by Emily). Metamorphoses has a female PC but no conversation in the main gameplay, but I think it may have a conversation that qualifies in one of the flashbacks. And this is not a shot at Emily at all; similarly, authors should not take it as a shot at themselves if I say their game doesn’t pass the test.

It’s another question which games pass the reverse-gendered Bechdel test (two men talking not about a woman). The same issues with conversation should arise there, so if more games pass the reverse test, well, maybe that says something. (FWIW, I think that Floatpoint and the first When in Rome chapter are the only games from the previous paragraph that meet the reverse test; though it may depend on what ending of Alabaster you get.)

OK, here’s my count — and I’m doing this mostly from memory, so I could be wrong:

Games that pass if the PC is female:
Beta Tester (definitely; can meet the reverse test if PC is male and you say xyzzy)
Earl Grey (I think, and just barely — I didn’t get to the end in my own playing, but it’s my understanding from the transcript that a female NPC or two shows up; even then, the PC doesn’t have much dialogue with them; definitely meets the reverse test if PC is male)

Games with female PCs that pass (neither meets the reverse test):
Broken Legs (in a big way — I’ve done three turns and there may be more conversation between women in this game than in the rest put together)
Snowquest (just barely; the PC talks to a woman for a bit in the dream sequence, but all the other NPCs are male)

Borderline cases:
Rover’s Day Out (there is one scene where the female PC is talking to someone of unknown gender; another scene, well, is complicated, but there’s a man in the room and the conversation may be about something male-identified)
GATOR-ON, Friend to Wetlands! (I don’t think the PC is gendered; neither is the guide, who talks; there are some female NPCs you interact with, though there are also male NPCs present; doesn’t meet the reverse test to any greater extent)

Games with male PCs:
The Duel That Spanned the Ages (there’s some conversation in cutscenes among characters whose gender I don’t know; on the other hand, they’re talking about the male PC so it probably doesn’t pass anyway; meets the reverse test)
Condemned (as I mentioned I didn’t get far into this; I understand there are conversations with male PCs later, though they may or may not be about a girl so it may not meet the reverse test; it’s possible that two female NPCs talk to each other)
Interface (meets the reverse test)
The Grand Quest (meets the reverse test)
The Believable Adventures of an Invisible Man (I don’t think the PC talks to anyone, though I don’t know if NPCs talk to each other)
The Duel in the Snow (meets the reverse test, multiple ways)

Games with Genderless PCs that don’t pass the test:
Gleaming the Verb (no NPCs)
Byzantine Perspective (no NPCs)
Eruption (I think the PC is genderless; barely meets the reverse test if PC male)
Spelunker’s Quest (one NPC, identified as male, and I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say you don’t want to talk to him; there are some other genderless NPCs at the end but they basically don’t count, so it doesn’t meet the reverse test either)

…and I think those are all the ones I’ve played. So, a maximum of six out of these sixteen games pass the Bechdel test, which is more than I expected; but some of them pass it by the skin of their last two lines. Only one of sixteen games seems to have substantial conversation between women (girls, I guess). Using the more liberal criterion, nine of the sixteen games have male-male conversation not about women, and four have substantial male-male conversation not about women (probably five if I’d finished Condemned, and six if the PC in Earl Grey is male).

This set of games does seem a bit tilted toward the male — not much surprise there, especially since only two or maybe three of the authors are women. (I’m not making any judgments about the gender of “Utkonos,” which appears to be Russian for “platypus.” I am making a judgment about the gender of “bloodbath.”) Let me know if I’ve made any mistakes or about the games I haven’t tried.

I’ve been playing some of the games from the 2009 IF Comp. These are text-adventure games, arty to various degrees, meant to be be judged in under two hours of play. The games can be found here. My reviews will be categorized under “IFComp.”

This is a review of “Interface,” which can be downloaded here or played online here or here, if you’ve got the right plug-ins.

You know, I’ve been neglectful in saying that if you want to download these games and play them, you’ll need an interpreter. Some things about interpreters can be found here. I use Zoom for the Mac when I’m not playing online (and at least one of these games needs Zoom).

“Interface” is described as an old-school kind of game, conceived by the author as a 14-year-old. You go around, you pick things up, you use them to solve puzzles.

Specifically, “Interface” is a good old-school game. (Not that I actually played more than a few turns of any of those old-school games, and Victor points out that it avoids certain ways of sucking that actual old-school games tended not to avoid. [And you know, in the middle of writing this review I played a little of this online port of Zork, and Victor's right. Mazes suck.])

So “Interface” was nice and solvable — there was one puzzle that I might have needed hints for, except I had accidentally run across an allusion to it in another review — and though there were a couple of gaps in the scenery and a guess-the-syntax moment or two, it was mostly fun to play. One of the most pleasant experiences of the comp. As Jenni says, the hint system is excellent, and that really does help; one of the best games of the comp is going to get a stern look for this later. (Hmm, if I know the hint system is excellent, maybe I didn’t do so well at solving the puzzles as I remember.)

And as Emily says, even though there was a lot of unimplemented stuff, the NPC you have to deal with for the first part of the game, is entertainingly and believably jerky, and his house is a believable projection of his character. Of course, your mind has been transferred into a robot, so believability is relative here.

I also liked how most of the puzzles followed naturally from your plight, or from the NPC’s slobbiness, or from both.
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The guess-the-syntax problem was that exactly one of “put towel on pool” or “put towel in pool” worked, I forget which. Since the towel and pool were obviously destined to end up together — they may be glaring at each other on the poster, but you can see that it’s really love, or at least that their names are before the title of the movie which is as much a sign of love as anything — it wasn’t too much trouble to try both alternatives. (I also think “clean up pool” failed while “dry pool” works according to the walkthrough, but you can’t think of everything.) The big problem with guess-the-verbs is when you think the solution can’t involve the model train, the flashlight, and the glue, because “glue flashlight to train” didn’t work, but in fact you needed to type “fix flashlight to train with glue” or something like that. And this was where I liked that Gilby’s slovenly housekeeping led naturally to the puzzle.

Ditto for the cabinet puzzle. Quoth Jenni:

Also, it’s smart of Gilby to put the cabinet blocking this secret alcove on casters, if he’s going to be moving it often, but it’s too bad he hadn’t thought of that before the hardwood floor got all scratched up. Either that, or these are really shitty casters.

But that’s exactly the kind of caster a guy like Gilbey would have. (There was a pun on “caster” here that was so bad I deleted it. If you know me, you know that it was a very bad pun.)

The inventory management puzzle felt gratuitous, though. It didn’t have much impact on gameplay, since you could always go back for whatever you’d dropped, and it was justified in-game by the robot’s limited number of pincers, but c’mon! Couldn’t Uncle Floyd have designed the robot to keep unlimited inventory in a bucket? Sure he could!

The game seemed to end a little abruptly though, perhaps because I had my eye on my score and saw it wasn’t close to the maximum. It might have been kind of nice to implement something upstairs — like maybe those fake puzzles that were in the hints but not the game. But again, a fun little game, and nothing wrong with brevity.

I’ve been playing some of the games from the 2009 IF Comp. These are text-adventure games, arty to various degrees, meant to be be judged in under two hours of play. The games can be found here. My reviews will be categorized under “IFComp.”

This entry contains short reviews of a lot of games. That I’m giving them short reviews shouldn’t be taken as a judgment on their quality, and in fact I’m being blatantly unfair to one of them. It’s just that I don’t necessarily have that much to say about them, and one of the other reviewers has probably said most of what I want to. Also that I realized it was silly to write a review that took more time to write than the game took to play and was longer than the game transcript. Though to be fair (to me), the filler text was longer than the transcript and took more time to write than the game took to play.

All these games can be played online. They are Spelunker’s Quest, The Grand Quest, Eruption, Condemned, Beta Tester, and The Believable Adventures of an Invisible Man. There will be some less spoilery comments before a spoiler space, some more spoilery ones after.

“Condemned” is the one I was blatantly unfair to. I had read some reviews (the less spoily bits) that made me look forward to it apprehensively, the game came on very over-the-top, which admittedly can be cool in a kind of Bulwer-Lyttony way (though you almost never need to describe something as “eerie” and “frightening,” and definitely not in the same paragraph), and then…
(continued below spoiler space)

“Beta Tester”: The writing was compulsively wacky and the gimmick of making you repeatedly hit “space” to get to the next bit of text grew old real fast. There were some funny wacky bits, like the hamster’s reactions and your bunny costume, but I didn’t want to keep playing. It didn’t help that the first puzzle was an excessively complex try everything-with-everything sort of deal; I understand subsequent rooms may be better. The author shouldn’t quit working though, just tone down the zany.

“The Grand Quest”: At first I thought, “Hey, most things aren’t implemented (like the chairs you can’t sit on), but that might just focus you on what’s needed for the puzzle. I’m OK with just a timewasting puzzlefest, right?” And the first puzzle was actually kind of cool, except [see below spoiler space]. Then the next real puzzle depended on something where it was hard to figure out what you needed to examine. (Perhaps because of the lack of implementation of other objects.) Pretty soon after that I gave up.

“Eruption”: An innocuous timewaster, I guess. I finished it without getting frustrated; the author should’ve given some clue that when you went north from one place on the path you arrived the next place by the east, which helped me spend a lot of turns wandering aimlessly, but at least it wasn’t (I don’t think) a timed puzzle, so I didn’t get killed. The snide tone of some of the descriptions and the note on the boat was grating.

“Believable Adventures”: I was pretty sure that the PC’s hatefulness was deliberate, and sometimes it was o funny over-the-top. But after doing some problems with help from hints, I realized that the puzzles would be too fiddly for me. This seems like a pretty long game, and that’s a lot of time to spend with this character. Also, the author seems to have an explicit moral in mind, but that moral, “Don’t be an invisible misanthrope, because they never accomplish much,” doesn’t seem very widely applicable.

“Spelunker’s Quest”: Go around, get items, use items. Up to a point this was another reasonable timewaster; there’s a guess-the-right-path-or-die problem at the beginning, and it’s one that takes two turns to kill you so you can’t fix it with UNDO, but it’s so close to the beginning that I didn’t mind starting over much. But eventually I ran into a pretty much unclued problem, and after hitting the walkthrough for that I got the game into an unwinnable state and didn’t want to start over. Also, making unsuccessful commands and even inventory take a turn on timed puzzles is a recipe for lots of UNDOing. (Have I mentioned that I don’t like timed puzzles?)
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Condemned: …I died on the first actual move of the flashback. And I’m like, how do you die during a flashback? Shouldn’t that go back in time and erase the intro text? Or is it forward in time? OK, I was just talking about that (spoilers for “Duel in the Snow”), but still. Anyway, I decided this didn’t look like my cup of tea. (This is a game that killed me on the first turn and made me like it. That’s a completely unfair comparison, again.)

Grand Quest: I wish the answer to the riddle had been a real word, like “Libra” instead of “Labra.” Also, I wasn’t that fond of the room where you have to run through the gate right away (as I said before, I don’t like timing puzzles), but it seems fair — you go into a room with a swiftly closing gate, you go under the gate. And the puzzle I was just complaining about doesn’t seem so unfair to me now; all you need to do is “x floor” and go from there. But I do think the sparse description made it harder to figure out you needed to look at the floor. Also, handling the coins was clunky.

Things seem to get worse from there; the puzzle where you have to say nothing in response to “What is an incorrect answer to this question?” is actually kind of clever, but there should be some indication that the answer you gave is wrong.

Eruption: I spent a while solving the last puzzle because I forgot that I’d started with a knife in my inventory. That was embarrassing. And all the things in the trash heap do point to a little bit of backstory, except by then I think I’d got most of the backstory. Oh, and there’s some controversy about the author’s artist statement, which I don’t want to talk about.

Believable Adventures: Crashing the sun into the earth was pretty cool though. And isn’t that an accomplishment?

Spelunker’s Quest: I actually didn’t mind the first couple cruel puzzle (if you go down the hole without the machine gun you’re toast), because I figured that in this kind of game you’d better search for everything before you go anywhere you haven’t been. Which meant that puzzle didn’t kill me. This is a rare enough pleasure that my experience was overall positive.

The unclued problem was the stone — first of all, after getting killed in the lake a few times I didn’t realize that I could search the lake without dying. (I missed the part of the text which suggests that you don’t get killed until the middle of the lake, but still.) And then… “rub stone” teleports you? Who knew? After that I suppose I should’ve tested the stone more to see how it worked, and I wouldn’t have screwed up the dynamite puzzle, but that’s when I quit…. and just now I played through it, and at the end my friends are in a hole that’s 1′ in diameter but 10′ deep? I’m sure they’re happy to see me, but they’re still screwed. And skinny. And short.