#ifcomp 27

[patrickbrianmooney]

IFComp 2021: Andy Joel’s “The House on Highfield Lane”

This is a review of a game entered into IFComp 2021, the twenty-seventh annual interactive fiction competition. This year, there are 71 games in the Comp, all free to play. There’s some good stuff in there this year! Anyone is welcome to play and vote on the entries during the Comp period, and you need vote on only five games by the middle of November for your votes to count toward the games’ overall scores!

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

I tried hard to get into this and just couldn't, even over a period of a few days.

There's nothing directly wrong with it -- it's a competently implemented game. More, it's a competently implemented system, because this game is written by the current maintainer of the Quest system, and shows off the new version of Quest, QuestJS, which runs entirely in the browser. Running a parser IF interpreter entirely using JavaScript in a browser is no small thing, and showing it off with a competent game isn't a small thing either.

But I just couldn't get into it. The plot is thin: coming home from school one day, you find a letter on the street, right outside a house you pass every day, the house that has always seemed weird and interesting and creepy. Strangely, it's addressed to someone in the house outside of which you've found it lying on the street, so instead of leaving it where it is, or on the porch, or putting it back in the mailbox, you decide to go in and deliver it. The door slams behind you and can't be opened again. You'll have to explore.

I wandered the house, finding 26 rooms (not counting the two out front) and interacting with various things, and everything seemed to work fine. But there's no real narrative, and not much character-building for the protagonist, 15-year-old Mandy, whose voice is interesting when it comes through. (But that doesn't happen often enough, and the effect is muted by the fact that she's referred to in the third person. At least one other reviewer has commented positively on this rather unusual choice, saying essentially that it helps effect the surreal story's defamiliarization; but I found it off-putting to be distanced from the protagonist in this way.) The rooms have their puzzles, some of which I solved quickly and some of which I moved on without solving, thinking I'd come back to them. I never did: none of them motivated me to come back and take another whack at them. I am not sure what the telescope is intended to do (though I tried all 64 positioning combinations, nothing resulted), nor what information I'm supposed to get out of the tiny resident of the dollhouse before the balloon touches the floor and resets the room. I managed to find the boots behind the dresser in the giant parlor but have no idea what to do with them. I noticed that the number of mannequins in the dining room keeps increasing but have no idea how to respond to that, or even if it's something I should respond to. There's just no narrative explanation tied to any of the puzzles, nor is there any kind of coherence between the puzzles themselves that I can see. It seems to be a grab bag with a thin veneer of plot over it. That's not bad in itself, but neither does it keep my interest while I'm typing expansions on turn left wheel left. look through telescope. turn left wheel left. look through telescope. turn left wheel left. turn right wheel left. look through telescope over and over.

Putting the Quest interpreter into JavaScript and running it from the browser is a step forward for Quest, I think: it frees Quest from its historical Windows-only limitation and makes it available to anyone with a browser. (This might be the first time I've played a Quest game in the Comp for exactly that reason.) But it's exchanging one set of constraints for another: it's then locked into the limitations of the browser's ecosystem in much the same way that it used to be locked into the problems of the Windows environment. The most immediately noticeable issue for me was transcripting: transcripts are kept by the browser and have to be manually downloaded. And they're produced in HTML, not plain-text, format. In some ways, this is good: if the game uses text styling, that's preserved, whereas, in the past, you just had to make your peace with the fact that there was no way to preserve it. That's a step forward. But there are downsides, too: the transcripting comments are nonstandard; transcripts are apparently lost after play, and when restarting; the transcript isn't written continuously to a file (which rules out the possibility of auto mapping during play with a tool like Trizbort; of course, mandatory HTML formatting in the transcript contributes to that problem, too); you have to remember to save a transcript manually . All of that is kind of awkward (and yet it's the best possible way to deal with the constraints imposed by the browser environment). Too, games are inextricably tied to the browser they're started in; it's effectively impossible to keep your saved game while changing interpreters (browsers, in this case). It also means that they're part of the browser's information ontology, with all of the problems that implies: you can lose your saved games by clearing saved browser information.

Well, all of these are inherent limitations that apply if you choose to play in a contemporary browser, and QuestJS handles them in basically the same way that Adventuron does, after all. But all of them are awkward, and encountering them always makes me wish I just had a copy of the game that I could play in a standard interpreter. A standard interpreter is an abstraction layer, too, like the browser is; but a browser is a general-purpose abstraction layer for many types of content, but a standard console-based interpreter has the advantage of having been designed for parser IF in the way that the browser was not, so it solves these problems better, or at least in ways that I'm used to.

There's the additional annoyance of the fact that the browser is poor at keeping the keyboard focus in the input pane when switching between the browser and another application. This made it painful to map manually in another window while playing: switching windows to draw in the map canvas running in another application meant that the input field didn't have focus any more, so I had to take my hands off of the keyboard again and reach back over for the mouse, drag it, and click it in the input pane. This sounds a small thing but becomes annoying after the first hundred or so times you have to do it. (I will say that, from this perspective, Adventuron definitely does a better job of keeping keyboard focus where it should be than QuestJS does, at least on Firefox.)

Beyond the minor annoyances, though, it was fairly sparse and quit object-oriented. Almost all map connections are in cardinal directions. The location text and many of the object descriptions are well-written but you wish the text had more randomized variations (say, when trying all 64 possible viewing positions for the telescope). There were few objects in rooms and some scenery that was mentioned didn't actually exist. The situations were charming but I needed some more narrative coherence for why there was a giant room and a tiny man in a dollhouse and a reanimation laboratory and a balloon that resets the room and a game map that's apparently a spiral inscribed on a sphere? (Am I reading my own map right?) It's possible that there are some interesting answers to these questions, but there was nothing directly drawing me into a story: the story was just not present enough while I was exploring.

I'd gladly play it through with a walkthrough or hints, but I just wasn't engaged enough with this one to push through the puzzles I didn't solve immediately.

My score: 5/10

(These comments apply to the 7 October 2021 release of The House on Highfield Lane.)

[patrickbrianmooney]

IFComp 2021: Ade McT’s “Dr Horror’s House of Terror!”

This is a review of a game entered into IFComp 2021, the twenty-seventh annual interactive fiction competition. This year, there are 71 games in the Comp, all free to play. There’s some good stuff in there this year! Anyone is welcome to play and vote on the entries during the Comp period, and you need vote on only five games by the middle of November for your votes to count toward the games’ overall scores!

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

I've played some really strong games in the Comp this year so far, but this just became my favorite so far. It's polished, funny, campy, and well-written, and it really sucked me in for most of a busy day: I'm still moving, but I kept finding twenty minutes to sit down in front of my laptop and explore the next studio. It was big and addictive, a classic puzzly romp with well-developed puzzles. The pacing is good, well-adapted to a rather long game, with a nicely in medias res beginning that throws you right in at the deep end of a zany madcap introductory sequence: you're an actor in a series of classic 1950s-style horror films who discovers that the monsters in the monster movies you're making are real, not staged, monsters. You also have to try to stop the head of your studio before he summons a demon with the rest of the studio's high executives. Once you get the immediate backstory, you've got a small piece of the puzzle to solve immediately, and after that, the map is basically wide open, with multiple problems that can be solved at any time. Each of the movie studios in the game is the set where a separate film is being shot: a vampire movie, a werewolf movie, a ghost story, a movie about an archaeological dig in Egypt, a movie where a monster is sewn together from parts of corpses. Each is a mini-game with similar goals: solve puzzles, align with one or more undead monsters on the set. When you've solved the individual mini-games in all five studios, the final battle between the undead army you've assembled and the demonic army summoned by the movie studio occurs. You can of course captain either side.

Anyway, it's a lot of fun, not least because of the loving homage to classic horror movies, with their hackneyed plots and one-dimensional characters and predictable usage of tropes. Knowledge of how things work in the movies is helpful in moving the plot along here: how *does* Dr. Frankenstein animate his Monster? Where do zombies rise frome? (But the game also comes with a good set of hints that requires a ROT13 decoder to interpret; and I used it in several places to keep the plot moving forward. The hints themselves are excellent.) The puzzles are generally quite good, integral to and arising naturally from the plot, and often have a similar structure: a security guard needs to be disabled or removed from play; a back-story element needs to be discovered and applied to the current situation; some sort of protection from the monster is needed; an alliance has to be forged. Often, there are multiple ways to solve the puzzles. All in all, it's got the best-developed puzzles I've seen in the Comp this year, too. (Though they had their small missteps, too: the ghost-history problem was fiddly, and so was the problem of trapping the security guard in the archaeological movie. There were places where more synonyms would have been helpful, too.)

The writing is quite good throughout: there's a great PC voice, a sort of indignant actor who's a little slow on the uptake. It's maintained consistently throughout the game, and multiple branchings around plot points are often written very similarly, with amusing variations in details. (Compare the opening scenes of the final battle depending on which side you pick, or the various endings, depending on how the battle turns out.) The occasional small typos and punctuation problems don't change the fact that the writing is funny and in character and very well done.

There are a *lot* of really good parser games in the Comp this year, but this really takes the cake for me. So far, anyway. There's still a few days left in the Comp.

My score: 9/10.

(I also drew a map of the game’s geography while playing.)

[patrickbrianmooney]

IFComp 2021: Sarah Willson’s “Closure: An ill-advised sad teen heist”

This is a review of a game entered into IFComp 2021, the twenty-seventh annual interactive fiction competition. This year, there are 71 games in the Comp, all free to play. There’s some good stuff in there this year! Anyone is welcome to play and vote on the entries during the Comp period, and you need vote on only five games by the middle of November for your votes to count toward the games’ overall scores!

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

Clever, well-implemented small game that exhibits the virtue of knowing what its boundaries are and not trying to be more than it is. You're a girl about to graduate from high school and have broken into your college-freshman recently-turned-ex-boyfriend's dorm room while he's known to be out for the afternoon, looking for a picture of the two of you together that you know he has and an explanation for why he recently dumped you. It's an exploration game (and, as the secondary title says, a heist), and it pulls it off well. The premise -- which rises above the level of being a simple gimmick, I think -- is that you're the protagonist's friend, lending moral support and direction to the heist, giving her instructions remotely in the same way that most parser IF has you giving instructions to the PC.

It's a short game, maybe a twenty to thirty minutes, and there are no real puzzles; Kira, the PC, comments on what she's finding and how she understands it, so there's not even the hermeneutic puzzle of piecing together the clues to form a theory. It makes up for it with excellent writing: voice and tone are on-point throughout the game, and the epiphany that Kira gradually has as she goes through her ex's room and sees their relationship from new angles is paced and managed very well. There's a gradual revelation about the ex, too, and that's also managed well throughout the game.

Aside from the clever parser positioning, there's nothing particularly unusual about the game, but it was a fun quick play. I'd like to see more from the author in the future.

My score: 7/10.

(I also drew a map of the game’s geography while playing.)

[patrickbrianmooney]

IFComp 2021: Truthcraze’s “AardVarK versus The Hype”

This is a review of a game entered into IFComp 2021, the twenty-seventh annual interactive fiction competition. This year, there are 71 games in the Comp, all free to play. There’s some good stuff in there this year! Anyone is welcome to play and vote on the entries during the Comp period, and you need vote on only five games by the middle of November for your votes to count toward the games’ overall scores!

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

Fun, quirky game, good premise, mostly good execution. Good writing in a lot of ways, especially including dialogue and other elements of characterization. The various player characters -- the members of the AardVarK band -- are all distinct personalities, sketched quickly in a few sentences the first time you occupy their viewpoint. The game mechanic letting you switch between characters is clever and, overall, works pretty well. The basic plot -- your town is being overtaken by zombie puppets, run by a nefarious soft-drink corporation, and only your band's 1997-era garage music can save the world -- is both totally believable and completely absurd, and the game walks that line pretty well, too, operating both in the "poking fun" and the "totally serious" registers as needed. It's not quite a metaphor, and it's not quite a symbol of any other kind; it's high camp, with plenty of '90s music and fashion references. In fact, it's sort of the basic plot of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, but without the annoying actors, and toning down the ridiculous hyperbolic claims to something a little more possible to suspend disbelief for. Whereas Bill and Ted never moved outside of the basically sarcastic approach, AardVarK has characters that are surprisingly sincere most of the time, and the narrative's point of view is more wistful head-shaking than sneering. Partly this is because the characters aren't just young, not fundamentally idiotic, and that makes a big difference.

There were two real downsides to the game. Most basically, it's on rails for a good portion of it: you have several open problems, but they don't really intersect, and while the PC-switching mechanic works well, the arcs in the middle of the game don't intersect directly in any way: there's no opportunity for Amanda to help Paul or Lewis when the group splits up, since they apparently can't meet each other again until each has accomplished their own sub-task. Each sub-task is a series of puzzles, and the puzzles are very sequence-specific, sometimes requiring real leaps of intuition. (To get a pack of condoms at the convenience store so you can solve a puzzle, you need to manage both the store attendant's attention and your own social embarrassment; this involves setting a hot-dog roller on fire by sullenly ignoring a sign next to it. This is kind of hard and requires some real cognitive leaps.) There's a built-in hint system that works well at nudging you toward the right action, but I would much rather have the hints come directly from the game itself, not from a hint system that's bolted on to the game, even if it's triggered by entering parser commands.

The other downside, for me, was the fact that the game consists of a set of vignettes. They're good, and one leads to another, but the structure feels jumpy, in part because each segment is really rather small: solve a quick chain of puzzles, switch viewpoint again. This is another game where a system was built that's complex enough to deserve more use. I'd really like to see the multi-PC mechanic get to stretch out and work, and the game's really over rather quickly, alas.

But it was fun, and the writing was glorious. It's just that it was too small, too jumpy, for me. But, again, being left wanting more isn't a bad place to be in at the end of a game.

(This review is based on the 5 November revision of AardVarK.)

My score: 7/10.

(I also drew a map of the game’s geography while playing.)

[patrickbrianmooney]

IFComp 2021: Carroll Lewis’s “Off-Season at the Dream Factory”

This is a review of a game entered into IFComp 2021, the twenty-seventh annual interactive fiction competition. This year, there are 71 games in the Comp, all free to play. There’s some good stuff in there this year! Anyone is welcome to play and vote on the entries during the Comp period, and you need vote on only five games by the middle of November for your votes to count toward the games’ overall scores!

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

Another fun bit of weirdness -- there's a lot going on in this game, and despite the widely heterogenous elements, the game largely works well. The PC is an orc, whose job is to repeatedly be killed and resurrected as an actor in the "Dreams" of paying customers. Since it uses an orc who's low-status in his own society as a PC, it sort of resembles Lost Pig, which it occasionally winks at. But the PC's conditions of labor are much more in focus here than they were in Lost Pig, because a susbstantial portion of the game involves the PC doing his own job, either by directly interacting with customers and coworkers or else by searching for (items leading to ...) new combat spells or otherwise solving puzzles that touch on the PC's work.

This was a rather structurally ambitious work, too: a three-day sequence where each day repeats and varies the events of the day before. Every day, you go to work; you come you work; you home from work; and you dream. The dream sequences provide items that are taken back to the waking world and used to solve puzzles there. Most of the game takes place on day two.

Some clever moves didn't quite pay off here. My biggest annoyance was the alternate navigation in the first dungeon sequence, which abandons compass directions in favor of tracking the directional orientation of the player -- not within the room, but relative to the dungeon as a whole. I found it awkward because it wasn't always clear exactly how my actions resulted in a change to both my PC's orientation and his position. So I banged around for several minutes before I figured out that (a) the TURN AROUND movement command doesn't just alter orientation within the room, but take a step backward and then alter the PC's orientation; and (b) the only implicit changes in PC spatial orgientation that happen are that the RIGHT and LEFT commands (that have the shorthands R and L, respectively) change the PC's orientation to face in the direction moved. (I also found it surprisingly awkward that, on my keyboard layout, L is placed to be struck with my right hand, whereas L has to be struck with my right. This normally wouldn't bother me, but trying to figure out how orientation worked made me think a lot about exact physical mappings.) The navigation confusion is made worse by the fact that this dream is a traditional maze, where all rooms have the same name. I didn't have to resort to dropping items, but it took some thrashing around before I could orient myself.

So also being a standard maze made the dungeon-dream hard to navigate. It might have paid off if the same navigation system had been used for the second dream, but that dream instead consists of a different type of maze, similar to one early on the first day, where the puzzle itself (requiring identifying and deciphering a clue that translates into cardinal compass directions) requires that the maze be oriented via the cardinal compass directions. Re-using the navigation system that had been learned in the first dream instead in order to provide a new puzzle with it would have made the effort spent learning the system for the first dream seem more worthwhile.

In the end, this was one of several things that made the game feel a little thin: there's a lot of really good ideas in here, and several interesting systems are developed, but none of them really gets a chance to stretch its legs and run. There's enough ideas in here for a larger game, and there are places in the game where I think that there's already room for expansion.

The graphics are beautiful, really a good example of how a textual work can be enhanced with illustrations. They manage to be at the same time both well-composed, striking photographs and also an invocation of the 8-bit gaming era's aesthetic. That's a hard line to walk, but the designer has done it well.

All in all I liked it quite a bit. It's another game that left me wishing for more or what it offers: more plot, more scope for the mechanics, more development of the ideas.

My rating: 7/10.

(I also drew a map of the game's geography while playing.)

[patrickbrianmooney]

IFComp 2021: grave snail games’s “Codex Sadistica: A Heavy Metal Minigame”

This is a review of a game entered into IFComp 2021, the twenty-seventh annual interactive fiction competition. This year, there are 71 games in the Comp, all free to play. There’s some good stuff in there this year! Anyone is welcome to play and vote on the entries during the Comp period, and you need vote on only five games by the middle of November for your votes to count toward the games’ overall scores!

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

The writing here was pretty good: characterization paints a great picture of the PC and NPCs, and it really captures the dynamics of subfactions of a fandom nitpicking at each other. It’s a great illustration of Adorno and Horkheimer’s observation that capitalism appropriates everything and produces endless variations on it so that no one escapes being seen and embraced by Capital.

The plot is fun, kind of a loving gentle-poking-fun-at of a fandom. What seems to be light sneering at the beginning turns into a game where the beliefs that seemed silly at the beginning -- of course metal is going to save us all! -- are validated by the plot at the end. (Though I sort of wonder just how tongue-in-cheek this is, or anyway, how it should be read; and that makes me wonder if it’s a kind of gentle sneering at the end, just a different kind from the beginning.) The game embraces the tropes and the stereotypes of the genre and builds something out of them, a sort of feel-good story about people coming together to build something worthwhile and destroy something evil.

The game is small, but that’s not necessarily a downside; in any case, it says “minigame” right there in the game’s subtitle.

I suppose that where this fell down for me was in the implementation. The games’s basic mechanic -- gather together your bandmates and jam with them; different bandmates have different musical predilictions, and different combinations of bandmates jamming together generate different kinds of metal to solve different problems. It’s a fun mechanic, and a good idea, and it’s basically implemented well.

The problem is that the effects of the combinations aren’t easy to predict in advance: there’s no “well of course you need folk metal here, and that means jamming with X and Y” moment of insight for me. It was a matter of trying a combination and seeing what you get. You never really quite know who needs to be jamming to solve a particular problem. This could be fine, really; except that the ratio of how-complex-is-the-mechanic to how-many-problems-does-it-solve is rather high, so that by the time you’ve gathered all of your bandmates and learned the combinations, it’s time for the endgame. Really, it would have benefited from both a larger set of moves to make with the mechanic and a much larger set of problems to solve and/or a larger map. The solutions to puzzles made sense in retrospect but never quite enough to help in solving the next puzzle. I went to the walkthrough fairly early, and I went back halfway through the game. That second time, I stayed with it.

The implementation was also rather thin in a lot of places, where nouns that were mentioned weren’t implemented. Seeing something be mentioned, then trying to interact with it and being told that you can’t actually see it, happened often enough to be immersion-breaking. There were other small bits of non-implementation that had a similar effect. And, though the writing was good, the occasional departures from good communicative grammar happened often enough to be jarring.

So I guess what I really wanted here was more: more implementation, more world, more metal, more combinations, more puzzles to be solved with music, more polilsh on the small bits. But it was a fun little interlude in the Comp, and I’m glad I spent an hour and a half or so on it.

Overall score: 6/10.

(I also drew a map of the game’s geography while playing.)

[patrickbrianmooney]

IFComp 2021: Kyriakos Athanasopoulos’s “Ghosts Within”

This is a review of a game entered into IFComp 2021, the twenty-seventh annual interactive fiction competition. This year, there are 71 games in the Comp, all free to play. There’s some good stuff in there this year! Anyone is welcome to play and vote on the entries during the Comp period, and you need vote on only five games by the middle of November for your votes to count toward the games’ overall scores!

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

I really got sucked into this one. It’s a murder-mystery with ghosts, set on a very large map. (I hit 80 different locations on my play-through, and wasn’t able to see everything the game offers. Not by a long shot.) The map is mostly open: after the first, short segment, I explored as much as I could, which took more or less the two hours the Comp allows for judging. By the time I looked around and said “OK, now what?” I was past the two hour mark and my map showed about fifty locations. There are multiple paths through the game based on the initial moves made at the beginning and based on choices made along the way, which can open and close off narrative trajectories through the game. Even having reached two endings, I still haven’t seen a lot of the game’s material; the fact that no single traversal through the game can show everything is pretty clear from a “hints” thread on intfiction.org.

So there’s a lot of replay value here: there are still sides of the story that I haven’t seen, even after poking at the game every evening for a bit for most of a week. It’s not uncommon for me to want to go back to a game after the Comp is over to play with some aspect of it -- what else can I do with this magic system? can I get deeper into the basement? -- but it’s rare that I’ve spent this much time on a Comp game while only seeing such a comparatively small fraction of its content. I’m looking forward to getting back to this more than most I have been to most Comp games I’ve played and wanted to get back to.

There’s a lot to like about the story itself, too: the creepy atmospheric writing is remarkably effective at inducing a mood. The descriptions are rather spare in most places but usually do a fair job of sketching out the rather creepy region where the amnesiac protagonist finds himself. The game is peppered with well-chosen details that build an atmosphere, and probably the best of these are the random bits of descriptive text that the game occasionally pops off with as you move through the town of Foghelm: a group of cats passing by, an unexpected cough behind you, the wind in the trees. The NPCs are, in some ways, also quite well done: the author does a convincing job of making them seem to have their own projects independent of player agency. The puzzles are occasionally too hard or under-clued, but most are basically fair. All in all, the feeling of Something Going On that requires investigation is constructed very well, especially for a first game.

There are also ways that the game’s reach exceeds its grasp. Probably the most apparent of these is that some of the puzzles are just not clued well enough. Many items seem to need to be discovered simply through exhaustive investigation of every single noun mentioned in the room description. The game itself doesn’t do a great job of supporting this: sometimes SEARCH [THING] is necessary to discover something; sometimes it just works as a synonym for EXAMINE [THING], which is frustrating and discourages repeated use of SEARCH. It would be a real boon to the player if the item and room descriptions did a slightly better job of nudging the player toward what investigation needs to happen. Though I’m sure this is not the author’s intent, it occasionally feels like the only way to solve a problem is by lawnmowing every possible set of actions on every noun in any description of anything whatsoever.

Exits are not always clued as well as they could be, even with the exits listed in the status bar. (A mapper’s quibble: sometimes exits are listed only as in/out or up/down when they also correspond to one of the compass directions, and it would be nice to know which compass direction they correspond to. Sometimes the game gives you this information; sometimes not.)

At a higher level, it’s not always clear when the player is making a choice that affects the outcome of the game or the game state. The author acknowledges this with one particular choice, right at the game’s opening:

“Ghosts Within” by Kyriakos Athanasopoulos

The smell of damp moss fills the air. Wet grass and dirt surround you while you are lying face down on the cold forest floor. Your clothes are dirty, wet, and slightly torn in places. Your head's left side is throbbing, your heart is pounding irregularly, and your limbs have gone numb from the pain. You try to examine your surroundings, but the lighting is dim from your current position to do that. You try to stand up, but it feels way too exhausting. You try a second time with the help of a nearby fallen branch; finally, you manage to raise yourself from the ground...

Somewhere in a dark forest Now, standing on your feet though barely supporting yourself, you look at your surroundings once more. The forest is pretty dense to the north, and the heavy undergrowth also blocks your way there. Above you, the sky is almost black except for a few stars that pop out in between the foliage. Apart from them, you can barely spot light coming from a white building in the far west end of the forest and from what appear to be village houses not so far off to the south. You also see flickering candlelight coming from a small hut a lot closer to you to the east.

(Before you settle on one path, remember that you can always find information about the game by typing ABOUT, and with RESTORE you can restore a previously saved position!)

And so it is: the first choice sets a lot of parameters for the game: if you go west from that spot in the dark forest, as I did, you wind up starting at the research institute, talking to Dr. Hughes; if you go east, you wind up starting in a hut in that same forest, talking to Silas Holt; if you go south, you wind up in the mayor’s living room, talking to his daughter, Fay. Clear enough. But there are other choices that need to be made along the way, and some of them close off exploratory paths even though that’s not obvious at the time (or even afterwards!), and this is frustrating for the player. In a sense, this is “realistic”: that’s how life is, after all; you don’t always know what effects your decisions will cause, and it’s not always even obvious after the fact, and even if it seems obvious, well, “obvious” isn’t the same as “correct,” a fact that we twenty-first-century humans are constantly butting our heads against.

But “realism” isn’t really what’s needed in fiction, I think, and this is an illustration of how realism is not the same thing as, or a substitute for, the effective effect of realism. In a piece of parser IF, I want to be able to deduce the effects my choices have on the game state without having to look at the game’s source code, and that’s difficult or impossible here. 

There’s also some language problems: English is clearly not the author’s native language, and though his basic fluency is solid, there are enough malapropisms and infelicities to mar the work. Language is of course the entire medium of the work from the player’s point of view; and what the work is doing is interesting enough that this presentational aspect deserves polishing. Working closely with an editor whose native language is English would have paid off a lot here, I think.

All in all, the structure that the author imagines is wonderful and complex and impressive, but it’s complex and ambitious enough that it gets bogged down in the implementation details in some places. But the game really is a lot of fun to play, and it’s amazingly well-implemented in many ways, especially for a first work. It reminded me of some ‘90s old-school games -- in particular, The Horror of Rylvania and Theatre -- both of which are also TADS games, if I recall correctly, and surely my visual and muscle memory of playing those in QTads, like I do with any TADS game, is part of that. But it’s not just that: it’s also the puzzly open-world map and the way that access is gated. There’s something about the exuberant spirit of ‘90s hobbyist IF that gets channeled here. I like that about the game.

I’m coming back to this one.

Overall score: 7/10.

(I also drew a map of the game’s geography while playing.)

(This review is based on the revision of 4 October to Ghosts Within, which was current when I started playing the game. As I write this, I see that there is a 19 October revision that came out a few hours after I started playing. C’est la vie.)

[patrickbrianmooney]

IFComp 2021: Mike Carletta’s “The Song of the Mockingbird”

This is a review of a game entered into IFComp 2021, the twenty-seventh annual interactive fiction competition. This year, there are 71 games in the Comp, all free to play. There’s some good stuff in there this year! Anyone is welcome to play and vote on the entries during the Comp period, and you need vote on only five games by the middle of November for your votes to count toward the games’ overall scores!

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

This was fun. I’m not a big fan of the Western genre, but Mike Carletta understands it and uses its tropes well. This is a well-crafted story with excellent writing. It’s unabashedly filled with one-dimensional characters who play on the tropes of the Western serial. This works well in parser IF when it’s done well: it lets the author sketch out a character in a few sentences and has the player leverage their knowledge of the genre to fill in the gaps. Mike Carletta does this very well, with humor and thoughtful phrasing and a good sense of character.

He did this well in his previous work, Dynamite Powers vs. the Ray of Night!, three years ago, too: that was another heavily genre-inflected piece that presents itself as an episode in a longer series, along the lines of the early- to mid-twentieth-century movie serial. Dynamite Powers was a superhero/SF piece, but the same basic this-is-an-episode-in-a-series mechanic and quick sketches of characters who are stock characters in the genre worked well there, too. But this feels like a more developed game: there’s more player freedom and a better-structured narrative here.

The basic conceit here is that you’re a singing cowboy (of course) who needs to rescue his lady love (of course) from a gang of (of course) outlaws, who have (of course) kidnapped her. At the beginning of the game, you’re trapped in an ambush as you ride to her rescue. There’s a rather hard puzzle at the beginning that leads to you escaping the ambush and putting you back on track to rescue Rosa. The game is unabashedly puzzley, and the puzzles are thoughtful and well constructed; they’re appropriate to the piece and arise from the narrative, rather than just being recycled parser-IF tropes. They were delightful, all in all.

But they were also kind of hard in places, and sometimes seemed under-clued. The most frustrating bit was that there were places where I had a general idea of what to do but had to struggle to make the parser understand (getting Felipe off of the windmill was the hardest bit for me, there being several similar objects in scope that were hard to distinguish when I was trying to explain what I wanted to the 'terp). There’s built-in help, and it mostly works, but the context-sensitivity doesn’t quite have its wrinkles ironed out enough: there were places where I needed just a little bit more of a nudge, but instead was told that there were no more hints available yet. “Go explore some more before I give you another hint” was frustrating in places, and didn’t always seem to match up with exactly where the hint-gating was, well, gating. Too, the walkthrough was well-written, but it didn’t include the exact phrasing needed to get past some of the fiddly bits, which was occasionally maddening.

But the world-building was great: the songs that “Boots” sings, the historical (and yet very timely) backstory (which is gradually revealed to involve insurrection, patriotism, and being a group of filthy traitors), the setting. The characterization is fantastic. The pacing is excellent. The map is tight and access is gated effectively. The puzzles are good.

This was a lot of fun to play.

Overall score: 8/10.

(I also drew a map of the game’s geography while playing.)