Another Earth, Another Sky / Augustine / Blade Sentinel / BOFH / The Case of Samuel Gregor / Coffee Quest II / Color and Number / Concrete Paradise / Constraints / Eric’s Gift / Evacuate / Fort Aegea / Four Mile Island / The Granite Book / Hell: A Comedy of Errors / Identity Thief / Jane / Janitor / Koan / Moonbase / The Moonlit Tower / MythTale / Not Much Time / Out of the Study / A Party to Murder / Photograph / The PK Girl / Ramón and Jonathan / Rent-A-Spy / Scary House Amulet! / Screen / Sun and Moon / The Temple / Terrible Lizards / Till Death Makes a Monk-Fish Out of Me! / Tookie’s Song / Unraveling God / When Help Collides
Note: I played the games in the order presented below, but I didn’t write the reviews until after playing them all. And my reviews are all somewhat spoilery, so let the reader beware.
—David Welbourn
Links to other years' reviews: 2004, 2005.
The comp gets off to a strong start with this one-room megapuzzle, where you must examine every object you can see, and examine every part of every object, and examine the parts of the parts until you feel like you’re trapped in a room filled with Chinese nesting dolls. At first, this pleasantly reminded me of Metamorphoses, another game that also made liberal use of detail objects. But as play progresses, the sheer number of detail objects becomes daunting, since it seems there’s little to do except find and examine them all. Including items that aren’t mentioned at all, but must be inferred. Grr.
As it happens, you also must look under and look behind everything as well, otherwise you’re certain to miss critical objects. It is truly unfortunate that the verb “search” wasn’t implemented as a synonym for both actions. Without it, a search of the study is less likely to succeed, since you forget what you’ve looked under or looked behind, and as these actions usually give you no useful information, you tend to forget to try them on other objects.
The game doesn’t always play fair, either. Besides the never-mentioned objects and the various red herrings in the room, there’s one critical object that must be pulled, and there’s no hint or suggestion that you ought to pull it, or even that you can pull it. In fact, the object itself is quite easy to miss, and I only found it by doing “take all”. That strikes me as highly unfair.
Oh well. It’s still a nice puzzle, even with its flaws. I especially liked how the family photo worked in – dare it say it – multiple levels. That was clever.
Rating: 7.
| earthside transporter room |
| You have received your final mission orders from Earth Control. Something has happened to Moonbase Alpha. |
Sometimes you can tell right from the first room that a game isn’t going to be very good. By themselves, the cheesiness of a teleport gate and a ray gun aren’t that bad. But I also note that the room’s name is in lower case, that there’s no exit from the room except the teleport gate, and that the control panel is worse than superfluous. Considering the presence of my nephew’s toy, just where is this transporter room anyway? – in my brother’s (or sister’s) house? And why is there a moon-to-earth button on the earthside panel? What good does that do? Why not just an on-off switch?
Furthermore, I’m heading into a potentially dangerous situation without any equipment or precautions at all. Shouldn’t I have a spacesuit in case the base is out of air or contaminated with germs or radioactivity? Shouldn’t I also have a flashlight, a medical kit, a radio transmitter, and a weapon? (Alas, Moonbase isn’t the only game guilty of this lack of forethought.)
Unhappily, the moonbase itself seems to be little different than a small, poorly designed office building with an airlock. For example, there’s a wall plaque that’s too high up to read, in a room with a high ceiling. Why is the plaque mounted so high? Don’t they want people to read it? Why build a room with a high ceiling on a moonbase, where maintaining the air quality would be troublesome? Because it’s a puzzle in an IF game, I suppose. Bah. Why can’t I jump up to the plaque in the moon’s lighter gravity? I guess the author didn’t think of that either.
The rest of the game was more of the same. Nothing was particularly challenging or interesting. The moonbase had no telescopes, space maps, moon maps, rock assays, rovers, or any fun equipment at all. Puzzles were there just for the sake of being puzzles and give you points, and they rarely advanced the minimal plot.
Near the end, there was a bug involving inventory management which forced me to restart the game from the beginning. So, I was not entirely thrilled with this game, though I did manage to complete it.
Rating: 2.
On board the Luxury Millennium, you’ve somehow slept through whatever alarms go off when aliens trash half a spaceship. Everyone else has evacuated. Now it’s your turn.
It’s a somewhat uneven game, as it gushes about the opulence of the furnishings, but leaves you somewhat uninformed as to what you should try to do. I know I wasn’t the only one who tried to tie the scarf to the balcony railing to try to reach the garden, but the game didn’t know about “tie”. Often, it wasn’t clear which objects were useful for puzzles, and which were just scenery.
Still, I bravely forged on, until I entered the Engineering Maze. There were other mazes in other games in the competition, but this maze was the worst; no fun at all. I stopped playing, although maybe I'll come back to this later.
Rating: 5.
Well, it starts out kinda fun, with the child protagonist running gleefully to the candy store, that I dared hope that this game might be a spiritual sequel to Arrival. No such luck.
After I got arrested and jailed for unwittingly passing a counterfeit one-dollar bill, it was obvious that logic and common sense would be taking a holiday. (No one would jail a kid for such an offense, and who would bother to counterfeit a one-dollar bill?)
*sigh* So. Escaping from a jail cell again, are we? (Well, it has been a few months since Unease was released, hasn’t it?) Fortunately, all the answers are in the books here, so we don’t have to do a lot of thinking. So we, uh, kill the guard, huh? Gosh, Wally, we could do that, but won’t Dad yell at us and Mom cry into the potatoes?
So, it continues like that. The game don’t make much sense, morally, logically, or sometimes even physically, but you have little trouble solving the puzzles if you remember what’s suggested by the books. Supposedly I won when I escaped the prison, but I still didn’t get any candy.
Rating: 3.
This adventure at your aunt’s farm follows a standard IF storyline: you’ve been called in to solve an unusual problem, and after a bit of sleuthing, you determine that you must find a group of specific unusual objects and give them to someone (in this case, your aunt), and this will solve the problem. And no, she won’t help you, or tell you where she keeps her stuff.
Fortunately for you and your aunt, all the needed unusual objects are hiding somewhere on her farm, so a trip to the local mall to buy these things in a sensible manner won’t be necessary.
It’s a fairly straightforward and mostly pleasant game, but there are problems, most of which should have been caught by testing. Logical problems like the knife in the washing machine, and the crowbar that’s too big to carry. The game doesn’t know the verb “cut”, even though there’s a knife. Solving the pillow’s puzzle was made unnecessarily difficult because the game didn’t recognize alternate ways to phrase the commands. And spelling errors like “Translyvanian” and “thouroughly” provided some unintentional laughs, but my favourite howler was when a flower bulb lodged itself in my “throught”.
Rating: 5.
Hm. Reliving memories isn’t a bad idea for a game (see Photograph and MythTale below), but aren’t these memories trivial? Commonplace? Lessee, you’re razzed by friends, you kissed a girl (“she looked so sweat”), you argued with your sister, and you watched tv. Like, so what? What does any of that have to do with where you are now in life? I don’t know, and the game doesn’t go into that.
Worse, the tv show sections aren’t particularly evocative. I actually didn’t clue in that the first one was about Gilligan’s Island until after I finished the game. I had imagined “Little Buddy” as a wooden marionette like Pinocchio, because... why else would his hat be stuck on his head?
Timing and implementation problems plagued the second tv segment. Those scissors wouldn’t let me cut off the Caped Crusaders tights (or any other clothing) no matter how often I tried, which made the scissors appear useless. And after dying once too many times, I was off to the walkthrough.
I should also point out that using unexplained magic to paper over continuity breaks is usually considered bad writing.
Rating: 4.
Not much to this game, is there? I finished it in eleven minutes and that includes being confused by the misleading description of the pot when it’s still on the pillar. Bare minimal location descriptions (without even any mention of available directions to travel in) add to the dullness of this remarkably brief game.
Rating: 3.
I’m not comfortable with murder mystery IFs, so I started the game very slowly and very cautiously, curbing my usual PC-as-kleptomaniac persona, and tried to act like a nice normal guest at my host’s wine and cheese party. Of course, this advanced the plot not at all, but I did meet mostly everyone at party, asked them about each other, ate some cheese, drank some wine, looked at numerous furnishings, and generally had a nice time.
Hmph. But that’s not what the game’s about, is it? It looks like it’s up to me to discover where the host is. I’m not sure why, though. What’s my motivation? So, anyway, I snoop a little, deduce where he is, solve a puzzle to reach him, and – voila! I find the host’s dead body.
So naturally, I tell everyone at the party that the host is dead. Unfortunately, that’s when things got surreal. No one seems particularly upset by my news (unless they were already), no one calls the police, and... the party continues. One guest was more concerned about his golf game than his dead friend! How callous! I would’ve called the police myself, but there’s no phone. Nor could I turn off the stereo and end the party. Flabbergasted at this lack of response to my announcement, I couldn’t figure out what I was expected to do next. Soon after, my two hours was up, mystery still unsolved. I guess I should’ve played as a kleptomaniac after all.
Rating: 5.
Another game with a slow start, because the PC won’t (or can’t) move. This is an annoying way to begin a game, but like Constraints, it has its reasons, and in retrospect, it couldn’t begin any other way.
The PC, is an old man in an old cabin. Old, and unloved. A coot. He is obsessed with looking at a photograph, a photograph that pictures the key moment of his life. That one moment on which his whole life pivoted, and his life changed for the worse. You’ll explore this memory, and learn why it means so much to him. And there are other memories to explore as well, so you’ll learn about who this old man was when he was a younger man, and when he was a boy. Together, these memories paint a powerful portrait of this man’s life.
And then, back as the old man, slowly, things begin to turn full circle. Past kindnesses paid in the past begin to reap unexpected dividends. But it always goes back to the photograph, until it is the sole focus of attention. We have returned to the paralysis of the opening. And...
You’ll just have to play it to find out what happens next.
Rating: 9.
I didn’t understand this game, and I’m sure I’m not alone. The game starts off very slowly on a barren landscape of granite and mist, and you only get anywhere by examining things, which kinda reminded me of Space Under the Window, sorta. And the PC is... well, I honestly don’t know. The PC refers to itself as “we”, says we lost our wings long ago, has no objections to eating a corpse, screams in terror when trying to read a book, and dares not touch corn. I couldn’t consolidate all that, so I imagined that I was a giant grasshopper and got on with it.
When you escape from “lost” (a clear nominee for worst location name, if ever I saw one), you reach a new landscape that is no less confusing, and only slightly less barren. More alien weirdness, if you like that sort of thing. There’s eight or so locations, and you can go in most of the eight compass directions from any of them, but there’s no point in mapping it since the connections are all random. Annoying.
Even more annoying is lack of support for the verb “point” There’s an NPC, and you can’t talk to her, but you do want to communicate with her. I tried pointing to a table; the game didn’t understand. But when I try the walkthrough’s syntax “girl, lie on table”, the game shows me pointing to the table, and the girl complying. Aargh.
Rating: 4.
A short, on the rails story about a scientist messing around in stuff that ‘man was not meant to know’. Which sounds awful as I write this, but it isn’t that bad, really.
Three things that stand out in my mind about this game that were done really well: (1) the bedtime conversation with Claudia – wonderful interplay (how do you respond without hurting Claudia’s feelings, yet remain true to both your religious and scientific beliefs?); (2) the moment you decide to let Justin die – that was a stunner; (3) the text in the book in your office – finally, a game that dares to give us the technical skinny, instead of copping-out with something like “that’s too technical for you” or “you’ve no time for that now”.
Still, it is short. It is on the rails. And it does presuppose a literal heaven and hell, etc., which makes the exercise somewhat biased.
Rating: 7.
I’m a female druid, now, eh? That’s different. Let me read all this background stuff and get up to speed... (half an hour later)... okay, I think I understood all that. Interesting. Let’s see the rest of the fort.
Hm. Pretty minimal. But then again, I didn’t really want to fuss about with the crops and livestock.
Oh, I have a case to hear? Good, the plot is waking up. I wish I had Pryziella’s training, though, I don’t want to make a bad ruling... (half an hour later)... Geez. I’d make a terrible judge. I still don’t know what’s more fair. I’ll choose one to see what the result’s like, then “undo” and choose the other one. Oh. Of course. Why didn’t I realize that either was acceptable? Because I thought this was a real decision affecting real people, that’s why. Hm. But that’s good, right?
“Warning! Warning! Plot complication approaching! Contact Starfleet Command!” Sorry, that was sarcastic of me. I appreciate the nudge, but I was going to consult the Chief Druid anyway.
Okay, talk to Chief Druid... (fifteen minutes later)... So. Green Dragon. Likes gambling. Got it. It’s like Kirk vs. the Triskelions, or Hawkeye vs. the Gamesmaster. Let’s parlay with the dragon. Yay, conversation tree! I didn’t get to talk to the Chief Druid, so I’m gonna play around with this... (fifteen minutes later)... enough of this. Let’s gamble. Yikes. This isn’t Kirk vs. the Triskelions. It’s Kirk vs. the Gorn!
Which way, which way? Well, I’m a druid, let’s play to our strengths and go for forest... (half an hour later)... Damn it. I’ve run out of time, and I’ve barely seen anything. I’ll have to give this game the benefit of the doubt and come back to it later.
Rating: 7.
Finally, something lighthearted. Frankly, it was a relief to play a less serious game at this point, and the opening puzzle with the keys was just right. The game felt friendly, and I liked that.
The game feels very much like it’s the author’s first IF game. For example, the four seasons are a mild cliché, and using gemstones as treasures is a bigger cliché. And I doubt that an established author would leave in an object description like “see row of icicles text”, or put in an algebra puzzle.
Furthermore, our aliens don’t seem very alien at all, nor are the challenges. In fact, it all feels very North American, particularly the bowling. Even the seasonal theme is North American: not all countries divide the seasons into winter, spring, summer, and fall, and only an English speaker would use plus signs as a visual pun for “summer”.
There were a few problems, too. Some items were underimplemented; for example, the office equipment. Communicating a time of day was frustrating; for example, phrases like “say 8 to eddie”, “say 9 am to eddie”, and “say 10:00 am to eddie” weren’t understood. The bowling sequence was tedious, forcing me to type “g” for every ball in the game. I appreciate the amount of work that the bowling score chart must have taken, but really, that section would work better if the entire bowling game was played out all at once. Just summarize how the bowling game went and tell me who won and lost.
On the plus side, some of the puzzles had multiple solutions, several of the aliens were chatty enough to talk to (and offer hints), and the epilogue summarized on how well you did and commented on what you missed.
So, um. I liked it. It wasn’t great, but it was okay.
Rating: 5.
Hm. You’ve been called in by the police as a puzzle expert to help them search a cult’s temple devoted to the worship of colors and numbers. Oddly, they send you in alone without an officer to safeguard you or answer any questions you might have.
And, indeed, the temple is filled with puzzles, but it’s a strangely charmless temple. There’s little evidence to betray how the worshippers actually lived, or ever were here at all. Where did they prepare their food or eat it? Where did they sleep? Where did they bathe? The most common furnishing is a pedestal, and I imagined that the local pedestal maker must be quite rich by now. And considering how most of the puzzles are mechanical (pull lever, pull rope, push button, etc.) and require the player to sketch out diagrams of the descriptions, I think this game would’ve been better rendered as a graphical adventure, not text.
The further you get into it, the less sense it makes. The puzzles start getting ridiculous. The statues puzzle provides almost no feedback and is tedious to solve without a “turn statue to <direction>” syntax. The puzzles are just plain bothersome to figure out, or require a bit of read-author’s-mind, and that’s not fun. You get tired of flipping switches and pushing buttons and start trusting to luck to get you through (which sometimes works). The huge underground area, which I can’t imagine anyone other than the cult’s leader using, is basically a long series of obstacles to ultimately guard... a dead end. Huh? Did the leader forget to build an escape route?
Rating: 4.
I’m somewhat fond of this sad, short tale, mostly because it was so good at conveying a dreamlike quality in its prose. Moonlight, darkness, sadness, inevitability – it conveys all that.
On the down side, it is very short, very much on the rails, and there’s far far too much s/he ‘seems to know what you’re thinking’ going on.
The café sequence also suffered from what I call “ballroom paralysis”, which often happens to me in ballrooms in other games and where my only options seem to be drinking wine and making conversation, except that I’ve run out of topics to ask about. Only in this case I was drinking coffee. Turns out there’s more you can do with coffee than just drink it.
Rating: 6.
The best thing about this game is the premise: find dinosaur eggs in the past. I didn’t play this one long enough to find any lizards, but I sure found a lot of terrible. I got a disambiguation error on my very first command: “x Bot”. Exploring around a bit revealed a huge boring jungle maze and several cave entrances. Dinosaurs live in caves? And fancy them sending me into the past without a flashlight. My rival has a light source thingy, and he wants my machete. Heh. No way am I gonna give him that... until I discover that the game doesn’t know the verb “cut”. Blech.
Okay, so I give the useless machete to bad guy. Yay, I get his light source thingy and he leaves! Boo, he stole my bot’s power supply! Yay, the bot has stopped farting! Boo, what a stupid game! Yay, I’m quitting!
Rating: 1.
This game is about wife abuse, an unpleasant and difficult subject. Although Jane presents the story reasonably well, and portrays the topic in as good taste as could be expected, the story just doesn’t go deep enough to explain why Jane and her husband are reacting the way they do.
We learn that an abusive husband may isolate his wife from all friends and help. We learn that violence can escalate. We learn that there is help for victims like Jane, but that she has to ask for it. What we don’t learn is why any of this is happening in the first place, and we can’t, because these people are ciphers.
The story mechanics borrows a page from Rameses: all choices have no useful effect except to advance the story on rails, which unfortunately makes things seem more hopeless than they ought to be. In effect, the game itself assists Jane’s husband because it has a fixed story to tell. I think this might have worked better if Jane was given real choices to make, and if the game had multiple endings so we could learn which choices were good, and which bad. Otherwise, it just seems so hopeless, and I know that wasn’t the intent.
Rating: 6.
A less than thrilling game about a police officer who moonlights as a superhero. You’d think that would be a conflict of interest. Strangely, you’re not even told you’re playing a woman named Alice Morgan until after a confusing prologue sequence.
That wouldn’t be so bad, but this game is so filled with illogic, misspellings, and bugs that all the life is sucked out of this adventure. For example, when you pick up a newspaper, your partner Jim walks into the office. Want to see that again? Drop the newspaper and pick it up again. Another example: when you talk to Jim in the morning, there are few appropriate conversation choices for that time of day, like “Good morning, Jim”. Trouble is, he has the identical options in the evening.
I didn’t get much further than that; I couldn’t get past the guards near the alley. Between the fact that one of the guards was an “it”, and that “bins” wasn’t a synonym for “garbage bins”, the game did little to convince me that the story was worth continuing with.
Rating: 1.
Gather ’round, and listen to this tale, a tale of swordsmen and dark magic, a tale of triumph and tragedy. And it begins in a lowly village just outside of Wales, in the year 1400...
Alas, the village is doomed. Its people (including your family) are slaughtered by Kasil and his men. And so you train to be knight, learning all the right verbs to use (nice touch to imbed the info that way) and plot your revenge. Unfortunately, when you next meet your nemesis, you’re in a magical place of power (which I suppose explains the lava), and foolishly curse both you and Kasil to eternal life, until one of you kills the other with his sword. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, are you?
Next stop: present day, St. Augustine, Florida. The rest of the game takes place here, and in various other time periods in St. Augustine’s past. By now you’ll have realized that the story is on rails; you can wander away every now and then, but since nothing happens where the story isn’t, you learn not to wander off. I didn’t mind. Of course, you’ll exchange more swordplay with Kasil, but you’ll also influence the history of St. Augustine in many ways (although those parts are mostly told to you, not played), and fall in love with a few women, only to tragically lose them.
It’s a big story, and aside from a few glitches, the story is spun out reasonably well. By game’s end, I felt as if I’d eaten a full meal or watched a good movie. I was satisfied. (But the PC is still a twit if it really took him 600 years to figure out what he ought to have done long ago.)
Rating: 9.
It’s an interesting setup. You’re a thief with cybernetic eyes and a cybernetic hand, looking for a datachip in a senator’s bedroom. A senator, who you just killed, and wounded you badly. So. This is not lighthearted cybernetics like that of Inspector Gadget or even The Six Million Dollar Man. This is cyber noir and X-Files. Creepy stuff.
Well, that’s what it was trying for. And as far as setting the mood, it partially succeeded. Unfortunately, the execution of basic game mechanics was not up to the task.
Some of it was a lack of adequate feedback on the use of various gizmos. I had a spray that supposedly dissolved biomatter, but seemed impotent when sprayed on myself or on the senator’s body. My eyes and hand supposedly recorded patterns of other people’s eyes and hands, but how to access or emulate a specific pattern? Or tell which pattern I was currently using? A mirror was unresponsive to many commands which made it difficult to figure out what to do with it.
Once you have the datachip and make your getaway, the game enters into an on-the-rails mode of play that could use some fine tuning. One begins to flounder, not sure what’s expected. Where should we drive the car? What’s the syntax for driving (“drive home” vs. “drive to home”)? What should we ask the NPC? There’s also a minor bug: try the verbs “extend” and “retract” at the end of the game.
Rating: 4.
If you were hoping for a fun game with juvenile humour and poor writing, this one might be the one for you. There is no pretense of “art” or “story” here. You just want coffee, okay? And maybe a few laughs along the way.
The writing is no better than that of Moonbase, but happily, the author knows it’s dreck, and just goes with it. The crude humour, which is the game’s strong suit, flows easily and liberally. Your fellow officemates are stereotypes, and the game has much fun mocking them, like the office gossip whose voice creates a solid wall of sound, or the dumb blonde who bursts into tears when her pencil breaks (the pencil is a copy of Microsoft Office for Blondes). Try kissing or screwing your officemates for more off-colour responses.
The game mostly takes place in your office building, but you’ll also visit some caves and Narnia before you’re done, and the game makes no apologizes for such blatant inconsistencies. It just happens that way. Deal with it.
The puzzles are pretty easy, although I did have verb trouble with one of them. Alternate syntax support would be nice. One question that’s never answered is: What happened to Coffee Quest I?
Rating: 4.
My. Someone likes boldface and exclamation marks, don’t they?
This is a very silly game. There’s a grand total of four rooms in the house, and approximately eight locations for the each of the driveway, forest maze, and cave maze areas. That means that more than half the game is in a maze. And it’s all punctuated with statements like “There is a monster here!! It is scary!!!” Yeesh.
Anyway, two of the scary house monsters are pleasantly chatty enough that you can figure out what to do – which is to defeat or placate all the monsters, of course – provided that you can first scavenge enough tools to do the job.
Although the game more-or-less works, boldface and exclamation marks are no substitute for narrative, and game feels both childish and empty as a result. And it’s not the least bit scary. (Although the author does manage to nicely convey just how vile s/he thinks Pepsi is.)
Rating: 3.
This entry might be better considered as conceptual art, rather than a game. As art, it’s an interesting study in presenting non-interactivity in an interactive medium. As game, it’s at turns boring, frustrating, annoying, or dull.
This exercise is presented as a trio of situations where you’re invited to effect a change, but whatever you try will fail. Struggling against fate does make for better play than just pushing “z” over and over. But however successful the game is at presenting failure, it still fails to be a compelling game experience. In all cases, there seems little hope that you might succeed at all, and of course, the point of the game is that you can’t succeed. So why bother? Failure isn’t fun.
(Reading blue text on a black background isn’t fun either.)
Rating: 3.
Hm. Spooky. I haven’t read any Lovecraft, so I was probably at a disadvantage for this one. Certainly, I far preferred this uneasy ambience better than that of Scary House Amulet!, but it never really got scary or frightening either.
One odd technique was used several times. I would attempt action X, and I’d do that, but then the game might say I then did a related action Y, followed by impossible-to-foresee effect Z. Sometimes this technique worked, sometimes it didn’t. It doesn’t work if I never think of trying X in the first place, or if I try X in the wrong location and if I become convinced this that action has no useful effect, then I get stuck (e.g.: what to do with the book). On the other hand, when it worked (e.g.: cat on the bridge), it was brilliant.
The game stumbled a few times. Sometime after sending my companion home, there was a cave-in underground, and he unexpectedly returned from Earth to tell me where a certain item was. Furthermore, the location that he told me about was one that I had already looked at, and although the game claimed that I wouldn’t have found the item if I hadn’t known where to look, I must strongly disagree. I most certainly should have been able to find the item there with or without prompting.
Rating: 7.
Easily my favourite game of the competition. Although I have yet to play the prequel game, Earth and Sky, I hardly felt like a late-comer to the party. In a remarkably short period of time, I felt right at home in my super-suit, and the easy give and take between me and my sister Emily felt like I’d known her for years.
The suit itself is a kick. Your primary superpower is strength, and gosh, it’s fun to hit things and see the huge cartoon KA-POW! sound effects. It’s so cathartic.
Most of the game takes place on an artificial planet, not unlike Small World, where you can meet many interesting creatures (like the squid, we mustn’t forget the squid), and of course, solve a puzzle or two. The puzzles aren’t very difficult, although they might give you pause for a short while. I also suspect that under Andrew Plotkin’s cruelty scale, this game would be rated as Merciful; I don’t think you can get stuck or die.
After finishing, I tried to think of anything I didn’t like about the game, and I couldn’t. I liked it all. Much later, I thought that I’d’ve liked to interact with the creatures more. And maybe have more scenery stuff. And I’d definitely want Emily there with me. Hopefully the next installment will let the super siblings act as a team, and not split them up too often. That would be fantastic.
Rating: 10.
Y’know, I had such hopes for this game, just based on the name alone. Would Ramón and Jonathan be roommates? Brothers? Co-workers? Lovers? Well, no, none of those. They are hangmen, and co-defendants in a trial.
Unbelievably, that’s all you’ll learn about the titular characters. Okay, one of them sneers, the other doesn’t. This is characterization? (In fact, when trying to interact with any of the seven NPCs that you can meet in the game, you can only get a response from just two of them.)
Nor do you learn much about the trial, or even much about your own character, except that you’re unhappy with the verdict. Expressing your displeasure in a useful way is made difficult since the objects you’ll need aren’t visible, and which I only found out about by peeking at the walkthrough. Admittedly, one might be able to figure out the correct actions at the beginning without the walkthrough, but it seems unlikely.
And then, the game ends very soon after that first puzzle, ending with a situation that doesn’t seem very politically savvy. An “ugly American” ending. Yuck.
Rating: 2.
I’m sorry, but I didn’t like this one at all. It wasn’t just the fact that the PC is a bastard in the service of expensive electronics with weird names. And it wasn’t just because I couldn’t empathize with him at all. And that I disliked him for his greed when I have to make do with so much less.
I also disliked this game for lying to me so often. For example, it tells me that I have a fantastic computer, but I can’t even turn the thing on. It tells me that my safe opens to my touch, yet “touch safe” doesn’t open the safe. It tells me that using my swipe card is second-nature, and yet it forces me to guess the verb syntax to use it; for example, “swipe card” doesn’t work. It tells me that my form is all filled-out, but it isn’t; it still needs a signature (but the game doesn’t tell me that).
Finally, I disliked this game because its game world is so sparsely implemented, and the characters are so wooden and unresponsive. And soon after finding the hammer of pretentiousness, I realized that I had no interest in playing the game any further.
Rating: 1.
I can understand being nostalgic for older games like those written by Infocom or Sierra. But I can’t understand being nostalgic for homebrews like this game appears to emulate. Even back then, this is what we played only when we were desperate for a text adventure, any text adventure. Today, we can do better than that. And hey: here we are again, walking into a dangerous situation without any equipment, forcing us to do a scavenger hunt in enemy territory before we can deal with the real issues.
Bother. The rooms and object descriptions are minimal. The parser is minimal. The NPC keeps flitting in and out without any actual presence. Having to say “access north” and “access south” all the time is a pain. There’s a maze. The puzzles are dead simple, except for the last puzzle... and that’s when you learn that the game doesn’t support “save” and “restore”. Ugh.
Rating: 2.
Do you like puzzles? Do you like a challenge? Are you nostalgic for games like Colossal Cave and Zork I? And do you like breaking mimesis? Yes? Then this is the game for you.
Remember Zero Sum Game from 1997? In that game, you had just finished an adventure with the high score, but then your mom ordered you to put all your treasures back where you found them. Janitor starts out much the same way, except this time you’re a janitor at the Flavorplex Text Adventure Company, a player has finished the game, and it’s your job to put everything back. And just like in Zero Sum Game, the score goes down when you solve a puzzle, not up. Fortunately, Janitor is far less bloodthirsty.
An added conceit to the proceedings is the addition of mimesis and space warping technologies. The internal game, a cave-crawl called Flavorplex Qualifying Adventure, is built like a series of movie sets adjoining the company’s hallways, and populated with actual treasures. But internally, a mimesis field makes the sets seem real and hides the access corridor exits, while some other pseudoscience connects the rooms so that they follow the adventure’s desired layout. And you’re equipped with a mimesis disruptor in your mop so you can see how the rooms really are and get your job done.
So once you’ve understood all that (and probably made two contradictory maps of the place), and stopped chuckling at all the in-jokey game references, you can start figuring out what goes where. As you might imagine, it’s somewhat tricky, and in places somewhat unfairly so. I wasn’t done when my two hours ran out, and I had to rate it partway through. (There are hints, both in-game, and in an external html file should you need them. And, in time, I did need them.)
Still, the game wouldn’t let me go. Quite apart from the desire to successfully reset the game, there were clues that something wasn’t quite right about Flavorplex; there’s a mystery to solve as well. You might want to talk to your boss’s secretary, Eva, guest starring from Grim Fandango, about a few things.
And when you’ve won Janitor, you can still continue to play by playing the Flavorplex game forwards! What fun.
Rating: 8.
It took me a while to get into the spirit of this one—the game seemed unable to let me buy an ice cream cone or ask about specific flavours at the ice cream shop—until the true purpose of getting me to the ice cream shop was revealed: so I could witness a kidnapping, and further, introduce me to a few pretty anime girls, some of whom have powers of psychokinesis a.k.a. PK.
So, anyway, I and one of the girls race off to the rescue, infiltrate an amazingly lacklustre office building, liberate the second girl, and then we all went to the home of the third girl. Thankfully, the home is far better furnished and implemented. There’s a short discussion about the sleeping arrangements, and then we had breakfast the next morning. I played all this as a disinterested gentleman (I opted to sleep on the couch), but I wondered where this was leading to.
This became clearer when a chance bug in one of the conversations appended the current score. Or maybe I should say “scores”, since there was a different score associated with each girl, and there are apparently... I can’t believe I’m going to write this... eight girls you can score with.
Oh-kay. I guess I’m not part of the target audience for this game, but it seems like it’s also willing to let me play the celibate should I wish to, so I keep playing. Unfortunately, the game world geography suddenly opens up wide at the same time when I don’t have much direction except to find out more about “them” (the kidnappers). And then my two hours runs out.
Rating: 5.
Is this text version of “SimHell” IF? Just barely. But it’s not much fun either.
Problem 1: Scoring is awkward. There’s no reason why I should have to keep typing “score”. Be kind and put those vital stats in the status bar.
Problem 2: Assessing souls’ penances is awkward. There’s no simple way to assess how much penance a particular soul is producing. Which makes it difficult to tell if your changes are making things better or worse.
Problem 3: Inventory management is awkward. I lost track of the number of times I tried to pick up something and failed, because the staff wouldn’t go into the sack. I also lost track of the number of times I tried to drop something and failed, because room content limiting code somehow thought that tortures were also souls.
Problem 4: I got stuck. After playing for a while, I had lots of ready cash, but no way to buy new gems, or even new rooms, so how could I proceed? Also, the peddler failed to realize he had nothing further to sell me after I bought all his wares.
Rating: 2.
Well, here we are, yet again, scrounging for basic tools like lockpicks, screwdrivers, and stethoscopes, instead of bringing our own tools to the job like a professional. Honestly, what kind of cheap spy are you, Jane O’Connor?
Never mind. Our target office building has pathetic security: cheap locks, easy to guess passwords, no security cameras, and the only guards are at the exits and they never go on patrol. Lucky us.
Hm. Not much in this building, is there? Oh, there’s a vase of roses, and some paintings of sinking ships to give a minimal personality to the place, but it seems awfully empty otherwise. Maybe another thief came in here earlier and stole all the chairs, filing cabinets, books, staplers, coffee makers, and telephones.
Still, it is a bit of a thrill to do all this derring-do without getting caught, carefully covering up most of our tracks. And the elevator was fun. And I liked how most every room had its own smell.
Rating: 7.
MythTale is structured like a patchwork quilt. Many pieces are sewn together, but the seams show. It begins with you on a frozen mountainside, in ancient times, searching for treasure – but then you wake up. You were dreaming. You are actually at home, working on an IF game, but your notes have mysteriously disappeared. Whenever you obtain one of your lost pages, the main game shifts control to a self-contained vignette, where you must re-enact a Greek mythic tale. And then you’re back home again, as if you’ve had nothing more than a vivid daydream. Once you’ve found all your notes, you return to the world of your original dream (reminiscing, I suppose), and conclude that story.
I enjoyed all the myth/dream sequences, short as they were, and I loved the village in the endgame. Vivid, with a delicious choice of winning endings. The endgame and myths were easily the best parts of the game.
The modern day house is less wonderful. You have many cats, but you can’t pet or touch any of them. In fact, they seem to own you, rather than the reverse, which means you’re something of a wuss. The house feels sketchy. Lots of “That’s just scenery”, and the bathroom description refers to your washing machine, but there’s no place for one in the house.
There’s a major unexplained issue: How did your pages get to all those weird places they end up in? And why? Like in Screen, this is more unexplained magic, and it’s not good writing to just leave it like that. Give us an explanation, however implausible. Just... not as implausible as that cat feeder gadget, if you please.
Rating: 7.
This one starts out with a scientist (you) in a cylinder—didn’t we just do that with Unraveling God?—and, of course, something goes wrong. You are definitely not where you’re supposed to be, and your current circumstances are less than ideal, to say the least.
What’s wonderful about this game is how skillfully the story leads you into participating in some unlikely series of actions. I was goggle-eyed at one sequence which had me zooming toward a locked door (that I couldn’t open earlier) with danger racing at me close behind. The cool thing was, I now had the tool that could get me through the door, because that very same tool was responsible for getting me in danger in the first place! Wow.
It’s a tricky game, too. Your inventory will contain a few unusual tools and you’ll change bodies a few times before you’re done. Sometimes it’s too tricky. I had verb trouble for one of my tools. Even though I knew how to use it, I didn’t know which verb the game expected for it. And there’s a brilliant language puzzle that unfortunately requires you do to an unusual action to solve it, and as far as I can tell, the only clue for it was in a cutscene that happened much earlier.
Rating: 8.
Atmosphere. The Moonlit Tower is fairly drenched in atmosphere. Here is a game that invites you to examine, touch, listen, smell, sing, and play until you are sated. Light and shadow both are interesting to you, as are the four seasons. The motifs are Eastern ones, mostly Japanese, I think.
Even with all this detail, much of it is symbolic or atmospheric without substance. There is really very little hard information on why you’re in this strange tower or what you’re supposed to do here, and so you wander aimlessly, swimming through the lyrical descriptions like so much gauze and incense.
The PC isn’t amnesiac, or at least not fully so. You remember you and your brother attending a female justiciar, and considering how many of the objects refer to her, perhaps this tower was hers. And you remember the Emperor, who stripped her of her rank. And you’re male, no matter how utterly female the game seems. But you don’t learn much else.
So, anyway, you play around with things, and find some new things, and manipulate them, until you finally reach your destiny. There is more than one possible ending. I left the game thinking, “Gosh, that was nice. That was really nice. I wonder what it was about.”
Rating: 8.
Um. It’s not IF. It relies on knowledge and puzzle skills that I don’t have. It assumes that I have a copy of Shakespeare’s The Tempest to refer to. It has major read-author’s-mind problems. It’s all puzzle and far too difficult. It’s still not IF.
Rating: 1.
I played this for about twelve minutes and then gave up, because I found myself randomly pushing buttons on my keyboard like a demented monkey without understanding any of the text being spit back at the screen.
I was totally baffled. Like, there was a wagon, and a baby, but... I honestly had no sense of where I was supposed to be, what objects were nearby or far, what any of my options meant (Juke? What does that mean, to juke?), nor did I perceive how cause and effect worked in this game.
Unplayable.
Rating: 1.
You play a female psychologist hired to find a missing person, one Samuel Gregor, and the blueprints he stole. This task is hindered by wretched conversation menus that are a pain to use, a severe lack of synonyms for most objects, and an unnecessary inventory limit.
So, after wandering all over the city trying to find not just a clue, but also anyone responsive—for example, there are beggars, but you can’t give them any money—I finally win my way far enough to get the missing blueprints. However, for some odd reason, I can’t return them and even stranger, my character is now male, which I don’t discover until I try to enter a washroom. Bizarre. There was no transition effect at all, and my inventory is unchanged. I return to what was my office and discover my former self there, and only then learn that I’m now playing Gregor.
Obviously this is some wacky bug, so I check the walkthrough to see what I did wrong. Oh, dear. It’s not a bug. Fine. The game no longer makes any sense at all, and I stop playing.
Rating: 2.
Index / dswxyz(a)look*ca / Last Updated: August 22, 2004.