There were three trends I noticed this year. First, car accidents. Lots and lots of car accidents. I counted five. Also, there were a several games from authors I was mostly aware of from other contexts, or who had previously to now only done joke games. This was part of a general trend of a lot of really quite good games from first-time authors. I've ranted in previous years about how one should look at games that got an average of 5 in previous competitions, and if one couldn't at least reach that level, one should not bother submitting to the Comp. I still think this is true, but it was mostly actually done, and as a result the average quality of games was much higher than normal.
That said, this also meant that I tended to take interaction failures or grating stupidity as a personal affront unless it was in the service of something really cool, so these reviews are more than a little grumpy at times. But the general quality is quite good.
In previous years, I'd generally say that I'd recommend actually playing anything that I gave an 8 or above. This year, there are so many good games, and sufficient gradation between them, that anything that I'm giving a 6 or above is probably worth at least checking out (and would have been in the 8+ range in previous years).
Enough. On to the scores.
First, the games sorted by score (and alphabetically within each score level), and then reviews mostly in the order I played them. I have collected related works together when I have combined the reviews -- this was the case for the Manalive games (which I played in order) and the Paul Allen Panks games (which were scattered through the comp, but which are sufficiently similar to be dispatched with a single review).
Wow. Three Paul Allen Panks games submitted to the Comp this year. We are unusually blessed. I actually played these in the reverse order that I listed them above, and Green Falls was in fact the first game the randomizer gave me. After playing all three, I have concluded that the following sequence of events must have occurred:
First, he wrote Simple Adventure. Then he got really drunk and did huge violence to it, patching in random stuff from other games he'd done, and that was Fetter's Grim. Then he tried and failed to fix it, and that was Green Falls.
Why do I think this? Well, the basic map connections and rough layout of the maps is basically identical in all the games. Plot-specific stuff is in different locations, but these are all effectively the same game. This is evidence for continuity, at least. I deduce the drunkenness for Fetter's Grim in that the room descriptions occasionally detail the inebriation of the author explicitly. I conclude Green Falls is the last one because, first, it denies that the author was drunk, because it is the only one of the three that appeared to be unwinnable or unfinished, and because instead of using the bare names of objects in a room to announce them, it says "You see a(n) [object] here." No, it doesn't test for vowels. It actually says "a(n)".
What kind of puzzles can you expect from these? Well, here's me earning a victory over Simple Adventure:
You attack:
You wounded it badly.
Your HP: [ 22 ]
The dragon's HP: 2.23372E-308
The dragon died.
You killed dragon.
You received experience points and gold for your efforts.
You gained a level!
Awe-inspiring. It's also worth noting that most of the outdoors rooms are mysteriously dark and require a lantern; however, not having one only suppresses room descriptions and doesn't appear to affect your ability to act.
Simple Adventure says in its README "This is a simple text adventure game to show new programmers how to write one." Please, new programmers, look at TADS 3 or Hugo or Inform 7 instead. Read the Craft of Adventure in the DM4. Anything but this.
Though I admit that, at the very least, Simple Adventure was actually, like, playable, and was actually about what its premise claimed it was about.
Score: (Simple Adventure) 3 (Fetter's Grim) 1 (Green Falls) 1
6 rooms, two takable objects, no NPCs, no end condition. This differs from the PTBAD games it purports to parody in that it doesn't even include attempted jokes.
Score: 1
OK, After this and Waldo's Pie, I think it's official; ALAN 3 is by far the weakest of the systems people use these days. I had less trouble with the parser in some of the homebrews this year. Sure, it was worse with this game, because the walkthrough is nonfunctional due to some of the verbs being nonexistent; INJECT didn't exist, and TURN DEVICE ON didn't parse either. I'd complain about that latter not being standard, but this is pre-empted by X not working either. Pointing out that the SHOOT verb gave no indication that it failed or parsed wrong unless you used one specific syntax out of about 8 or 9 reasonable ones just seems unsporting at that point.
Given all that, I do give the author some credit. He wants to tell a story, but he's kind of random about it, and the interface was bad enough that I couldn't actually complete the thing. Still, I worked out most of it before giving up on it.
Score: 2
Yes. This is, in fact, what it is all about. I've only occasionally felt like I was an adventurer when playing IF. I'm not sure I even managed it in this. But this -- this isn't about being an adventurer. It's about being a hero. And it succeeds magnificently.
The game progresses through mostly disjoint episodes, and is framed with a prologue and epilogue. I'm fond of this structure, it gives us a lot more leeway in the kind of stuff we do.
The ending invites us to reinterpret what come before. This wasn't really necessary, but it certainly didn't detract. It also explains away some handy details that were slightly odd or that looked to my cynical eye like implementation convenience. It's effective without screaming "Why hello there I am an IF game, ha ha."
The only real niggle I have is that for some reason, I could not save and restore on my Hugo terp on Windows. I'm not actually sure this is the game's fault, as my Linux machine could load and save just fine, but this might be something to look into. (I don't think you can actually die in this game, either; at the very least, I didn't.)
The competition for top spot this year was fierce, but this managed to take the spot.
Score: 10
OK, this is the second game after A Light's Tale to attempt the "abusive narrator" technique. Unlike A Light's Tale, it actually has a plot reason to attempt this. Like A Light's Tale, it fails. I think this is because an unseen NPC abusing the PC isn't actually any fun, while the narrator (as unseen NPC) abusing the player is, or at least can be, hilarious. The door that isn't there in the first room is an example of this technique working.
The implementation is kind of thin, the plot is hinted at by the abuse the narrator heaps on the PC throughout the game, but then explained in a huge infodump. After this infodump, you win.
Except, by "win" I mean that it dumps you back in the first room, leaving you to explore until you quit.
Or rather, until you notice that the author disables >QUIT the moment you "win". I had to kill the frotz process from another terminal.
I believe the current response on this Intertron thing to such situations is "die in a fire."
Score: 1
This is listed as a first game, and it's really better than I'd expect for a first game. The author's instincts for a story are pretty good, and I didn't run into any implementation glitches.
There were, however, a few things that weren't terribly well-clued, so I did end up hitting the walkthrough fairly early on. While doing one of these things the PC's interior monologue had him wondering why exactly he was taking the (necessary for victory) actions he was. If you catch yourself writing this, your instincts are trying to tell you something!
They're probably also trying to tell you something when the PC draws upon his experience playing IF -- though in that case it's mainly that the puzzle being used is kind of hackneyed. (Also fiddly, so full points for coding the thing up right, but it wasn't really any fun...)
But yes, all this aside, this was a perfectly competent first work, even if I wasn't terribly enthralled with it.
Score: 5
Lots of neat setting stuff here. I really liked the taboos in the society, and the backstory and interaction were both a lot of fun to discover and work out.
And yet, I still found myself kind of uncompelled by the game as a whole. This wasn't really because of the bugs (one minor disambiguation problem with various pieces of paper, and two major issues with scenes), and I'm not sure how to get around my problem without fundamentally changing what this story is.
Basically, you're being put into a complex and messy situation in which there aren't really any good options and it's rather debatable even what the least bad option is. Deciding upon and acting on that is largely the point of the game. However, this degree of choice didn't feel terribly liberating, precisely because it isn't easy to feel good about the results, ever. I'm guessing it will win plaudits for the freedom of action, though, which is unusually good. I just wasn't happy about it.
The way the choice is registered, on the other hand, should have felt way more artificial than it did. Rituals really do make it easier to set up combinatorial results, and given the generally cold nature of the civilization I was dealing with, it didn't seem out of place.
Score: 7
There's lots of lovely and creepy imagery here, and the puzzles all worked out reasonably well for me too. I had fun working my way through, and the writing's pretty good, so I don't have a lot to say.
Well, one thing. The ending, like The Traveling Swordsman, invites us to reinterpret the events that came before. This one, however, was much less successful, because the reinterpretation doesn't really have a payoff.
Score: 7
This is my first experience with Quest. It would probably have been a better first experience had it not required 4 references to undescribed exits and objects in the first eight moves.
One novelty was real-time constraints. That is to say, you have to walk through a door within two seconds of opening it, not within one turn. This adds nothing and detracts much -- the humble > WAIT command has raised vastly in my esteem.
The only real puzzle in the game is a real-time maze. There are various other things you can do, but all any of them seem to involve is giving you more time to solve the maze. Every single one of them is optional, as long as you enter the navigation commands fast enough. After you finish the maze, you then sit back and wait for the cutscene to time out. And no, not > WAIT. You sit there and twiddle your thumbs.
I don't think this is salvageable, even as a component of a larger game.
Score: 2
The problem with games that hinge on plot twists is that most of them have already been done; especially for plots simple enough to express as IF. The precise details aside, I called this one from turn 2.
It's also not really a terribly good game. It's easily the most tasteless in the comp; you aren't even remotely sympathetic; and you get some baffling refusal messages such as "You can't reach [the NPC] through the ." I worked through it, rolled my eyes a lot, and then moved on.
Score: 3
In reviewing the 2002 Comp game Color and Number, J. Robinson Wheeler wrote "D O N O T P U T M A Z E S I N T O C O M P E T I T I O N G A M E S. Can that be any clearer? How is it that authors still don't know this simple rule? If you're going to put a maze into a Comp game, it had better be so damn clever that you win a Best Puzzle Xyzzy Award the following Spring. In other words, you have to be more clever than Andrew Plotkin, because he already did it once and the bar is that much higher." This clears that bar. The core puzzle -- the primary gimmick -- is, in fact, a maze. But it's a really, really cool one in more ways than I can describe in this review, and I may need to produce a spoilerful analysis of it at some point -- the way pacing is controlled was a particularly good stroke.
So, uh, yeah. The good part is the maze. The bad part is just about everything else. Most of the puzzles in this game are puzzle-book puzzles, and working out a cryptogram isn't interactive just because it was posed to me by an EXAMINE command. This is made worse because, except for the very first puzzle, the only way to really have the problem properly defined is to go to the hints file. The entirety of the hints file should be in some sense worked into the setting. And really, the cryptogram should either go entirely or be solvable by some kind of solver machine. (See Savoir-Faire.)
Score: 6
Mmmn. A one-joke game. I even checked with TXD!
This is not to be confused with a one-room joke game. This only has one room, but it's also only got one joke. This is a problem. I mean sure, it's a funny joke. I laughed. Once. But if you're going to make a one-room joke game, you need to put in lots of funny things to do. I should never see a default message. (The model here is Pick Up The Phone Booth And Aisle.) My reward for playing your game is to see the silly messages, and so my goal is to poke at stuff randomly.
Also, dude. It's a one room game with. like, three objects. You don't need a .z8 for that.
Score: 1
This, on the other hand, is how you do a joke game. I got it just after Sisyphus, and the comparison is instructive.
If you took it on its purported terms, it's no fun at all. The puzzles are completely impossible and the backstory is ridiculously contrived. However, that's the point, and not only is it the point, the metagame makes this very clear.
As I mentioned in the Sisyphus review, my reward in playing a joke game is getting the silly messages from poking at stuff. In this game, you get no points for solving puzzles. The puzzles are there to space out what plot there is, and when you decide to solve them, you go to the hints. And the hints are funny to read! Thus, I am entertained, and all is right with the world.
Something I haven't seen before is that it nevertheless has a scoring system. You get points for poking at the world to get funny messages. If you manage to get all the points in the game, you've basically seen what there is to see. This is a really cool use of the scoring system, and I commend this to all others who write joke games.
The writing was funny, and the coding is decent. There's still a few bugs. One thing that's supposed to kill you doesn't seem to (death by headache). The aspirin bottle's counter doesn't match the plot properly. The band-aids need to understand more ways of phrasing things to work.
Scoring this is tough. It's not a good game. But it's really the best possible bad game. So I guess I'll hand it the highest score that isn't in the "excellent" range. You want to play with this.
Score: 6
Horror games don't really do a lot for me, I'm afraid. I kind of liked the idea of one where you had the opportunity to choose which tactic to take, though.
Unfortunately, the choice it offers is false - only one of fight and flight actually let you win.
There was really very little clued here; I wasn't terribly clear as to what needed doing, and even though some of it made sense, a lot only made sense too late. I ended up going to the walkthrough a lot more that I really should have.
This needs some polishing to be a really good game, but it's not bad. The intercutting between scenes in particular was very well done.
Score: 5
First, a brief excerpt, because it is awesome.
> TURN ON TDU
You put on your Tactical Display Unit, which activates automatically."Nicely done, imbecile. Have you at least read the mission profile?"
> NO
"You will address me as Sergeant!" barks the Sergeant.> NO, SERGEANT
"Read it!"
I could practically give it its 7+ right there. But it's also a really good (if short) puzzlebox game. I say "short", but "short" is relative given that it took me 31 tries to solve it.
You'll notice I didn't say anything about what the puzzlebox is. Indeed I didn't.
Score: 8
Not a lot to say here. Go visit area and collect widget because authority figure said so. It's a school project.
Please don't submit your homework to the comp. Or if you do, implement SAVE and RESTORE before submitting, even if it wasn't part of the assignment.
More thorough debugging would be nice, too; one of the survival endings claims you die, and the ATTACK verb crashes the application with an uncaught NullPointerException.
Score: 3
This is really a single game split into two parts, so I'll review both at once. It's an adaptation of one of GK Chesterton's novels, and the games split at the Part break the way the books do. (This reminds me that The Man Who Was Thursday has been on my list of books to read for awhile. Hmm.)
The game is really on rails, but it's infectiously madcap, much as the PC himself is. I had a grand time working my way through it.
Part II, however, was a great deal weaker. Part of this is because you don't really get to do much. It was fun to read, but it's mostly other characters talking to one another and unleashing text-dumps. There's something to be said for giving me a conversation menu where I only have one option, but the lecture hall sequence worked far better for these things. (Though I had some trouble with event triggers even there.)
Still, this is great stuff. If one of the goals of the author was to get the work of Chesterton into an audience and make them want to read more, he has succeeded quite admirably!
Score: (Part I) 9 (Part II) 4.
There is a huge amount going on in this game. There's an enormous amount of background, and a lot of stuff to pore through and over. The underlying mystery wasn't terribly mysterious, but watching the pieces fit together was fun.
Near the end I shifted over to playing from the walkthrough, but when you're mostly doing so to see everything in the two hours, that's usually a good sign.
Score: 7
This is an implementation of the old Hunt the Wumpus game in ADRIFT. A prototype to IF, yes, but not really IF. There's some original work here, particularly in room descriptions, but, well, you're competing with Hunter In Darkness (and, in a different way, Magocracy) here.
Score: 3
Explore a huge and thinly implemented school and get random objects because an authority figure says so! Look through, under, in, and behind everything to get keys to get items! Wade through uninspiring descriptions to find these things!
This was written primarily to get a class of students somewhere in Ireland interested in IF. I fear they are more likely to hate IF forever. If you want to introduce students to the brilliance of some art form, don't give them something you whipped up in your spare time; go find the high points of the form!
I'd give a bonus point for the map that lets you navigate quickly (the PC knows the area well, after all), but it doesn't actually work; it just gives a "I don't know the verb transport" reply.
Score: 2
Hmm. I usually don't have much to say about games that were really good. Moon-Shaped is really good. And it's a first effort, too. Huzzah!
As for the game itself, one could call it Mother Loose with angst, but this isn't fair to either.
I like the map layout a great deal. The core "hub" of the game uses a layout that I haven't really seen before but that nevertheless makes perfect sense.
Recommended. Go play.
Score: 9
This is another literary adaptation, like MANALIVE -- this time of a Conan short story. I wasn't really that familiar with Conan stories before this, and in particular I didn't realize the Conan universe partook of Lovecraftian weirdness and Cayce-level stupidity at the same time.
As a game, this needs more polishing and implementation depth. Major bonjus points for not being on rails -- you can deviate quite widely from the actual story plot. Polishing suggestions:
Still, I had fun with it.
Score: 5
I thought this was going to be Paranoia with the serial numbes filed off. It's not, though, not really. What it is is fairly cool.
Well, in terms of setting and plot. As a game, it's slightly buggy, and the text is in serious need of editing. (Actually, the writing in general this year has been very good, especially in the seriously intended pieces, which this is. In any other year, writing at Unauthorized Termination's level wouldn't even rate anything beyond mild and general grousing, but it jumps out as noticable here.)
Score: 6
This is a lot like Mortality, the last Comp entry by Whyld; it's widely branching, but there's not a whole lot of motivation to explore the plot shifts. Unlike Mortality, the choices are a lot more sensible -- you generally can see why you'd want to do the things you do.
The actual final story -- particularly the optimal ending -- didn't really hold together for me, though.
Score: 4
This tries some pretty bold stuff, but it doesn't work as smoothly as I'd have liked. In particular, the character has enhanced smell, but > SMELL doesn't really work that often. However, the room descriptions mostly make up for this.
Other than that, not a lot to say. More synonyms are needed, and more first-level nouns should be present to point me in the right direction. I need to search debris carefully to win, but debris is often not implemented when it isn't important.
The setting is pretty fun, though.
Score: 5
OK, first things first. "Comeuppance." Also, "Tolerance."
Lots of other problems. Timed warning events assume I'm in my house even when I'm not. The first room doesn't mention its exits. Entering the Big Tunnel without a light source renders the game unwinnable and nonsensical. Putting the tape in the deck when the computer is off renders the game unwinnable. Oh hey, GET TOWEL is a required move! Where was that towel mentioned in the room description, you may ask? Oh yes. Nowhere. Awesome.
And all of this is taking place under a situation in which you're very tightly timed and every move counts.
So, yeah. Proofread. Debug. Get more betatesters.
Score: 3
This is another well done first effort. There's really only a couple of problems I saw with it while I was playing; first, when clearing the screen in the middle of a cutscene, the first line was cut off by the staus line. You need to open with a [paragraph break] when you clear the screen in cutscenes like this. The control stick in the final scene needs quite a few more bits of syntax; in particular, > PUSH STICK and > PULL STICK should work sensibly.
Other than that, my only real complaint is that the game is short, and this means less stuff.
Score: 8
This is a sequel to last year's Xen: The Contest, which I kind of liked despite it being a bit weak. The sequel's a bit weaker, and I liked it less.
You need a proofreader as well as a spellchecker. Otherwise, you'll run into problems with lines like "A unformed policeman sits on the bench, reading a newspaper."
There are also lots of interaction glitches. If a mind-reading NPC tells me that I have a question burning through my mind, > TOPICS should probably suggest what it is. When all the NPCs are staring in horror at something, that something should be in scope. The primary gimmick in Xen is that the PC can burn stuff with mind powers, so (a) spending lots of the game messing around with improvised weapons seems a little silly, and (b) the verb BURN should really not be giving the default response.
(On a more general note, you should never have some action for which the only acceptable verb is USE. USE is the lame generic verb for when the player can't be bothered to come up with a proper verb.)
Score: 5
Hey, I got points! And ran a few errands! And then objects mysteriously disappeared and I couldn't actually continue with the plot!
Strictly speaking, this is way further than I usually get in Santoonie games.
Score: 2
There are five verbs implemented. The only puzzles in the game are of the form USE X WITH Y. Seriously. With USE. And the writing would be a teenage-goth failed attempt at serious writing if it weren't even incapable of doing that.
The intro ends with "Type Q to quit, and you may as well."
So hey. Who am I to argue?
Score: 1
OK, this is the best "You may not do this action because it will lose you the game" technique I've ever seen. I think it only works once, though.
This is really funny. It's sad and wrong that the best parser in the homebrews this year was in JavaScript.
UNDO was buggy, though. It interacted poorly with one of the countdown timers. The game is irritatingly cruel, so having reached the game and finding the game unwinnable because of an two actions I didn't take near the beginning, and which could not be rectified, I just went to the source code to read the last two messages.
(Update: OK, actually I misread the walkthrough, and I can win anyway. But one of those actions is mandatory and unclued except for the "get everything, it's an adventure" assumption. It should really be possible to summon the will to tear the letter yourself once you have an extremely strong reason to.)
I think this may be the first homebrew I've ever seen that ranks Excellent for me.
Score: 7
Yarrrr. Mention exits, please. Critical objects also should show up in the description, not as part of random atmospheric messages. The game as a whole is also trying far too hard to be ominous. The opening managed it all right, but by the time you get to "A place for fun has turned to a menacing abandonment," however, it's far, far too late.
It tries to have a point, but it doesn't really succeed. I'm all for shadowy evil conspiracies, but they have to actually do something besides snoop and rob people of their free will to be interesting.
Score: 5
Deeply, deeply weird. I love it. Once we get into the story, that's also pretty well done. It works, which is not easy for a work with this kind of PC.
Any given playthrough ends up kind of short, but you have a lot of different paths to explore.
Score: 9
In this game, you are a mysterious sprit of old-style mystery stories, seeking to arrange the intent and inclinations of people not yet present so as to set up an evening of good cheer and horrible doom.
In the first half, the environment is actively hostile; passages open or close on almost every step you take. The walkthrough -- which is pretty minimal -- requires roughly 75 moves to navigate to the target room that lets you finish this part. In the second half, you need to navigate the house (which is more compliant now) to rearrange the various intentions of the characters to produce the necessary death and destruction.
The problem with this, such as it is, isn't really lack of interactivity; it's that there's too many side effects along with your actions. Without a Suspended-style game board to track your progress and work out side effects in advance, or possibly something that lets you determine the status of every piece of machinery whose workings the PC has worked out.
That doesn't change the fact that this whole first part is one humongous maze, and one where you need to track global state. (I cheered about Labyrinth's maze earlier, but one thing it has that this doesn't is that in Labyrinth everything you need to know to make your next move is in the room with you. I think that's important.) The second part doesn't use moves more complex than > GET X and > PUT X ON Y.
So, there's a ton of stuff here, but there's also almost nothing here, at the same time. A dogged explorer might have a lot of fun with this, but he won't do so during the comp's 2-hour time limit.
Score: 4
Short, seriously underclued, but basically good-natured. I got 10 of the 18 failure endings.
Implementation is spotty; among other things, I could wander off with the transmitter and it stayed plugged into the ceiling I was no longer able to see. Other objects didn't have their descriptions updated after I did things to them.
The little mood indicators in the upper right were hilarious, as was the hint mechanism.
Also, one final little note about the walkthrough; both it and the hints pointed at "the most boring route through the game". This really isn't wise because a lot of players will be tempted to rate you based on the worst you have to show. (On a related subject, an AMUSING list that actually lists all 18 failures might be worthwhile too.)
Score: 6
Man. This is totally the year for "Dude, this guy has a comp game?!" This is by the author of the excellent parody IF Quake.
I don't care how sleepy I am, it shouldn't take me 10 minutes to notice that all I'm carrying is a keychain. Other than that, the caffeine/energy mechanic is pretty cool, so I like this.
The design document was also enlightening reading. Kudos for an office game that's actually about, like, office stuff.
Score: 7
> X ME should not give me snark about my grammar, especially when it uses a rhetorical question it's not prepared to take a reply to, and most especially when it gives the same snark unjustifiably to > X SELF.
And then it gripes at me for using > X PAGE instead of > READ PAGE. This is despite the fact that by default in Inform, EXAMINE and READ are in fact synonymous.
So let's generalize here. If you know what I want, do it. This is particularly irritating in the EXAMINE/READ case, where you're breaking default behavior just to make my usual methods of interaction not work, to no good effect. If I am examining a paper, I want to know what's written on it. We may take this as read. There is no excuse for being snarky about a perfectly reasonable command, and this goes about seventeen times as strongly when said perfectly reasonable command is a synonym for the syntax you want unless you break this.
Alright, rant over. Well, almost. In a similar vein, the whole point of including Locksmith is so that I as the player don't have to ever, ever, ever, ever, ever see this:
> OPEN DOOR
(first unlocking the featureless white door)
I've got quite a little collection of keys going here; you'll have to specify which I ought to try.
Yes, there's a purpose for it. But this didn't work at all for me, and you'd already gotten me not on your side by being a twit.
The ending was, um. Sudden. I can't help but think I've missed a whole bunch of backstory somewhere.
Score: 4
Oh my God, it's <SPOILER DELETED> meets H.P. Lovecraft. Something about the setting makes me think that you can't possibly have access to the information that you're getting from the narrator, but after I noticed that this should be the case, I was unable to catch the narrator in an error, so.
The equivalent of the Shining Trapezohedron forced me to stop playing for about five minutes so that I could stop laughing.
So, yeah. This is kind of silly, and the ending's a little forced,
Score: 8
It's Jesus of Nazareth, but in a wacky puzzle romp instead of MUD-style combat. There's actually, like, stuff to do here, though I mostly looked stuff up in the walkthrough instead of actually checking the relevant Bible verses (which the game expected me to do).
This is Superhero Jesus, who always kind of personally annoyed me, but that works much better for games, I suppose. An event trigger bug rendered the chariot puzzle unsolvable, however; that should probably be dealt with.
Score: 5
Didn't play it; I can't read German.
Score: Not Rated