#inform 6

[manonamora-if-reviews]

Aisle by Sam Barlow

============= Links

Play the game

Read walkthrough - ClubFloyd Transcript (players commentary)

See other reviews of the game

See other games by Sam (Wikipedia)

============= Synopsis

"Late Thursday night. You've had a hard day and the last thing you need is this: shopping. Luckily, the place is pretty empty and you're progressing rapidly. On to the next aisle...

============= Other Info

Aisle is an Inform 6 parser game, first published in 1999. It is a beloved short IF game which became a staple in the IF annals, wining Best Medium at the XYZZY awards and making it on multiple best IF games of all times lists. The game was also parodied in Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle and referenced in other IF parsers.

Status: Completed

Genre: Slice-of-life

CW: /

Note: depending on the action picked: violence, assault, mention of death, depression, illnesses, suicide, murder, nudity (those account for about 15% of actions?)

============= Playthrough

First Played: Jan/Feb? 2023*

Last Played: 26-May-2023

Playtime: around 30min (walkthrough)

Rating: - /5

Thoughts: A beautiful and tragic game, a masterpiece of good experimentation.

*technically not played by myself, but during a shared streaming with the French IF Community

============= Review

Aisle started out as a game which would not need the usual meta-verbs... i.e. a game with only one turn. The initial idea was: How do I make a game with only one turn interesting? Give it lots of endings--in fact there are many 'endings' and (hopefully) every sensible action results in an 'ending'. There is no winning action. There is however more going on than just this and the more endings you see the more things should become clear." [--blurb from The Z-Files Catalogue]

Spoilers ahead. It is recommended to play the game first. The review is based on my understanding/reading of the story.

You play an (older?) gentleman doing some late night groceries after a long day. Most of it is pretty mundane and uninteresting, until you see some fresh gnocchi in the pasta aisle. Your mind can only think of the last time you had those, in Rome. Around you, the shelves block your view to the other aisles, and a brunette woman stands a few meters away, filling her trolley with pots of sauce.

And in this aisle you stop your trolley, waiting on what to do next.

Though I never found more than a few dozens by myself/with the French IF peeps, there are over 136 actions producing an ending in this game. 136! Whether you interact with yourself or your environment, there are a lot more you can explore with this very restrained environment.

Even if the experiment of one-action-the-end is truly amusing and insanely entertaining (who doesn't like a treasure hunt for all 136 endings*), it is the writing that shines the most in this piece. The game is humourus, and dark, has bits of lightness, and becomes incredibly sordid, it is sad and genuinely touching... It can say so much with so very little. Truly incredible.

*a Gotta Catch them All! but endings xD

Through the endings, a backstory forms around the PC. Or maybe two or three. He had a wife, went to Rome with her, but something happened (death/illness/something else?), and he was left alone. It is not truly clear what happened to his wife, or the PC's involvement in said disappearance/death*, but what is certain is the pain and the guilt the PC still feels after all this time (has it be years, by now?), making him unable to form new connections with people, leaving him truly and completely alone. What stays is his fond memory of that trip to Rome and those gnocchi he ate there...

*some endings mention the PC killing the wife, others talks of her suicide (assisted/alone, etc...

======== Sidenote

Aisle is the reason The Roads not Taken exists. The OG idea was to recreate the gameplay of Aisle, but in a different setting. While this didn't pan out, TRNT was still heavily influenced by this game.

[kawaoneechan]

Story of my life.

I'm working on an interactive fiction thing and wanted to have a help system like in the later Infocom releases. I'm using PunyInform because I want it to run well on Z-Machine v6 at most, and Inform 7 forces v8 or a completely different VM. So I look around. The DM4 has a page about how to implement a menu system that leverages the object tree model, and there's a download on the archive of the same. PunyInform comes with a menu system too but it's not as nice to work with.

Turns out the menu system only supports submenus, text screen options, and toggle options. No "press enter to reveal the next hint" InvisiClues™.

So I implement them myself, as one does. Hint Options, with an array of strings for the individual items as opposed to more objects, a header text, item prefixes, "no more" text...

... and then I find out that because the footnotes in the DM4 are really fucking tiny, I didn't see it mention a pre-made extension that you can find and download that adds hints.

Story of my life.

But I'm pretty sure they don't have anything for header items that appear in bold font and get skipped over when you change your selection.

Like this but with reverse color instead of a > with an explicable cursor block next to it, like in Zork Zero.

[kawaoneechan]

If you have Frotz running on the A3X, you might as well make a small gamelet about the A3X' mascot.

[biscuit-tornado]

The Candy Striper of St. Asterix by improvmonster

A Totally Tubular 80s Text Adventure.

I'm not doing formal interactive fiction reviews, but if you grew up in the 80s, you're going to want to play this for the Walkman experience alone (and enjoy the protag's friend's mixtape, because she has great fucking taste)

Invisiclues™️ included in a separate html file if you get stuck. The parser is reasonably responsive to typical IF verbiage, although there was a section where typical verbs could have had a bit more nudge in their response (e.g., something out of reach in theory is still in scope for PULL/PUSH/TAKE/MOVE, etc.) but that's kinda nitpicking.

characters are pretty 1d but they serve the purpose of driving the story. it's not an indepth character driven piece -- you're on a mission and available TALK TO topics are kind of limited, but give you enough clues to know kind of the outlines of what you need to do. I had to resort to the hints, because of the aforementioned nitpick, but that really wasn't a bummer

recommend, overall. I had a good time in it

[nelson-riddle-me-this]

DO THEY REALLY??

[kawaoneechan]

A thought on perspective in IF

Infocom games are almost always second person, so you are likely to get eaten by a grue, and so are items like the thing your aunt gave you. But also, you can wrap a towel around both your head and my head — both work.

Compare and contrast that to Softporn Adventure, which is in first person and has no possessives in items at all — "your" and "my" are simply not recognized inputs.

FOWD being an Inform 6 game, I should probably keep it as it is now: second person, "your" in shortnames for stuff like body parts, and both "my" and "your" when referring to them in commands.

Thoughts?

[kawaoneechan]

Playing FOWD on a Mac. Because why not?

[kawaoneechan]

Latest build of Farrah's Ordinary Work Day, running on a Commodore 64. Because why not.