intfiction.org

Riverside by a bunch of people

Perhaps the ambitions of the authors exceeded their ability to such a degree that they finally had to angrily abandon their effort. It sort of felt like a child trying to put together a Lego kit then smashing it to pieces instead in frustration.

The game opens with a promising funeral scene, but it turns out nothing much in the scene is implemented: you can't interact with your fellow mourners, nor any of the surroundings (tombstones, etc). In fact for the most part the only verb implemented was EXAMINE.

Then the story proceeds to a dull and similarly un-implemented apartment scene. I thought I would be unable to finish the game (despite the walkthrough), but luckily Emily Short's review came in with the save for the one sentence you need: READ ALBUM.

Not that it mattered, as shortly thereafter the game self destructs in a fit of pique.

-- Peter

A Martian Odyssey by "Horatio"

When your title conjures up Bowie songs and Bradbury stories, boy, you'd better have it all together.

This game doesn't, unfortunately. But it does have an "old school" vibe that is not entirely unwelcome, and the spare descriptive style serves to showcase the alien landscape and keeps its "otherness" mostly unknown. You want to find out more about the things you see and creatures you meet, but basically the game is too simple and won't let you, so you only have an imperfect idea of what you are looking at most of the time. While this effect is not likely intentional, nevertheless I think it is workable. We are no where near Bradbury, here, but the game does have the creative energy of the old pulps, and could if more successful suggest a work by, say, A. Merritt. The alien creatures are tremendously imaginative.

(My favorite:

I was also happy to see that the spare descriptions were researched in terms of naming some areas of the Martian landscape. In some ways, a lot of care went into this game.

But as with many of the other games I've played in the comp so far, the implementation is too simple and ultimately fails. Not enough synonyms, not enough thought for all the ways a person might try to accomplish a task, guess-the-verb as the only way forward. And puzzles are generally of two types: either I knew what I needed to do but could not come up with the phrasing to make it work, or I didn't know, and couldn't know without authorial mind-reading.

And then it ends, when the game was still just a series of vignettes. The game just might have been able to overcome its severe implementation problems if it had an overarching premise of more grandeur than simply: I crashed, I'm walking back to get picked up.

-- Peter

Red Moon by Jonathan Hay

It's a one room game. Not much to do, nor much going on. There are no puzzles, other than to figure out that you must repeat a command over and over again before getting the desired result. Sometimes the response to the command changes, sometimes it doesn't. The "world" described in the single room doesn't make much sense: an old wooden shack with...a computer? With a little refinement, this could be an interesting opener to a longer game. As it stands it tries for a short, clever EC - Comics type ending but it lacks punch.

-- Peter

Violet by Jeremy Freese

Every once in a while a game comes along and creates a character so stunningly vivid and fully realized that you feel you know and love them. Last year's comp brought us the player character Grunk in Lost Pig. This year, it's Violet, the player character's girlfriend, who does not even appear in this one room game but who inhabits the authorial voice of the game. Every response generated through your interaction is told to you by Violet -- not, she reminds us, Actual Me Violet, but close enough. I think I'm in love.



The story is simple: you need to write your dissertation, you keep getting distracted by things. And the story, such that it is, is one I pretty much deeply hate: any game having to do with college life generally makes me want to floss with barbed wire. So what makes this boring, lame, annoying storyline palatable is basically the fact that it is fucking brilliantly imagined, written, and implemented.

One issue for the bug-fix release:


Best Puzzle:


Jeremy: Seriously, this game is truly great. Thank you for raising the bar. Please write more.

Jeremy, one more thing: But really, not about college again. Please.

-- Peter

Violet, have to agree with you - what a fantastic game. By far the best I've played at this Comp, and I've played more than half of them already. I'd go and say it is better than a lot of games that have won previous year's comps.

You're not giving me much incentive to keep playing games, here! Still, looking at your remaining list, I think there are still some possibilities of finding a peer. But my guess is we're looking through the rest to find all the runners-up. Violet is a game that I will study, when this comp is over, and marvel at. Not in terms of the puzzles, particularly, or the awful setting, but in the sustained narrative voice, the over-writing of the stock answers, done completely seamlessly. Remarkable stuff.

-- Peter

The Lucubrator by Rick Dague

I got a feeling of deja-vu when firing up THE LUCUBRATOR. Because when I first discovered the TADS development system, and started fiddling with it, I decided I would write a game that started with you lying on a slab in a morgue (I don't recall the exact year, but TADS was still shareware at this time). I wrote a few rooms, slapped a toe tag on the body, and a lab with a lab rat. The idea was you would eat the rat, thus discovering your zombie-like craving for flesh.

And then, I left the country for work for a while and didn't have a computer for a couple years. When I got back into writing IF, I was well over zombies and thankfully the incomplete game exists only in my memory.

Or it did, until I started playing The Lucubrator. It's like Rick ate a part of my brain!

Though the central premise is the same, this actual real and released game deviates quite quickly from my imagined plot. For one thing, I didn't think to insert some sort of gay love triangle into my zombie plot, as is the case here, I guess. The story is unclear. In fact I never really understood why the gay couple was making zombies, except perhaps because adoption was not lawful in their state of residence. Does it have something to do with lucubrators? I'm trying, here.

The puzzles are all impossible. They generally have to do with killing people who are trying to kill you. So what you have is a timed puzzle, in which only one way to kill your opponent is allowed. This is the text adventure equivalent of the old Dragon's Lair arcade game, in which you are only allowed a single flick of the joystick in the proper direction to live; flicking it the wrong way results in death.

I sort of feel like zombies have reached the end of their useful shelf-life (again). Admittedly, SHAUN OF THE DEAD was pretty funny, but otherwise, that's it. And how VIOLET got away with both being on a college campus AND having zombies...well, let's just make it the exception that proves the rule.

-- Peter

Buried in Shoes by Kazuki Mishima

The other day a friend and I were discussing the books we were reading. I was reading War, Evil, and the End of History by Bernard-Henri Levy, which was interesting but generally I was still glad I just grabbed it from the library. She was reading The Zookeeper's Wife, by Diane Ackerman. The title (and author) made me curious, but then I was curious no more when told that it was about the Nazi occupation of Poland. It may or may not be a good story, but I realized at that moment that really, I don't ever need to read another Holocaust story again. I've read it, seen the documentaries, watched the movies. I can recite the statistics. I've read Michael Shermer's book about crazy people who deny the Holocaust even happened and why they do that. So no matter how good that book is, I just can't get up any interest in reading it. Because it is mining a subject that has been endlessly explored, while many other stories simply remain untold. (Similarly, I also can't watch even one more Italian mafia film or TV show, even if it is called the Sopranos.)

So, Buried in Shoes is another Holocaust story. I enjoyed the shifting perspectives, but I didn't learn enough in each perspective to really make them worthwhile. Also I would have liked to enter the perspective of the Hitler Youth as well, so that we may understand them more, and pity or hate them (or both) because of it.

No puzzles. The ending was abrupt. The game paints a picture, is evocative in its text, but is too short to fully immerse the player, and altogether lacking in learning moments even though the story is about learning, and forgiveness. Despite the creative and interesting title, Buried in Shoes ultimately does not deepen my understanding of the Holocaust, nor does it further the discussion. In the end, it's just another story that I wish was about something else.

-- Peter

It's also the opening to Shadowrun on the SNES - one of my all time favourite beginnings for a game. I totally mean to do it myself at some point.

(My apologies if someone else pointed this out in comments somewhere; I looked, but couldn't see that they had, but I'm new to this forum. Anyway...)

I had a very similar issue with Escape from the Underworld, but in the case of the cigar I actually got that puzzle without a hint. It's as overtly clued, really, as the receptionist hinting that she wants a cigarette or cigar: the maintenance guy's description states that he 'looks hot and sweaty and reeks of cigars.' I actually asked him about cigars before I even realized that would be a solution to a puzzle.

On the whole, though, as I stated in my review, I found that solutions to puzzles were generally hidden in secondary- and tertiary-level descriptions, but the vast majority of objects were implemented so shallowly that I'd stopped looking too deeply at anything early on in the game.