Ratings & Reviews of the 2014 Interactive Fiction Competition

Whoa. Heavy on the purple prose and 50¢ words, straight out of Bulwer-Lytton.

I’m not a big fan of first-person narratives in adventure games. It lends to awkward phrasing and detachment from the player character.

Taste window.

This isn’t a wine tasting.

Corey Hart will be so disappointed:

Get sunglasses.

I won’t need my sunglasses tonight.

After searching the apartment for ten minutes, I finally gave up and hit the walkthru. Oh yes, Put album on shelf was an obvious action to take.

♬ I love the nightlife, I gotta bookie, on the disco ’round, oh yeah! ♬

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald

The PC is boring; too full of himself. Too obsessive, too broody, too emo. I really do not have any desire to traverse the litany of his lovers, all of which are equally superficial.

This reads like a contemporary romance novel, except without, you know, the good stuff. Either that, or a Japanese dating simulator. Most of the puzzles so far have been of the hunt-the-verb variety, and if my choices had any effect on the outcomes of each vignette it was subtle to the point of nonexistence. Not very satisfying.

Oh, this is supposed to be happening in Italy? That makes more sense. My Teutonic inhibitions are clashing with these Italian indulgences.

OK, what just happened? I got bored, hit the walkthru, and suddenly I’m a criminal fugitive. Undo, and… check the safe in the office. Yeah, another game where I’m a psycho. Looks like I screwed up a murder in the past. At least that explains how I got photos after one-night stands…

Oh, ho! The medicine cabinet. Not a bad twist.

Hard to judge this one. At first it felt like someone converting their fantasies to IF, then it took a sinister turn. Obviously the walkthru is minimal: I managed to get points doing actions not listed. Not really willing to fight for more than the four possible endings I found. In retrospect, perusing the album was really the prologue to the game proper, which took place in the final scene in the store. I suppose this could be viewed as another tacit rule of IF: don’t make your prologue be longer than the actual game.

“Support for screen readers” is nice; inserting arbitrary page breaks to force the reader to digest the prose is not. Most, if not all, interpreters will not scroll text off the top of the page if you do a huge infodump, and for the most part you should’t do that anyway. I prefer [PRESS SPACE TO CONTINUE] myself: less likely to confuse the player.

God, I hope it’s not an anagram-based game. I hate anagrams.

Hitting the walkthru. Without an example or a lead-in puzzle I am completely lost.

This resembles last year’s Threediopolis as it’s a single esoteric puzzle wrapped in a thin plot, and the criticisms I had still apply: solving the master puzzle — the only puzzle — is frustrating, and once it is solved the rest is mechanical repetition. It’s fun, but a bit intense for the competition.

Nord and Bert got away with this, but just barely. Even then, the unifying principle was presented as part of the introduction (albeit buried in text) and offered enough variation to be tolerable.

Like Letters From Home, this is one that I’ll definitely revisit after the competition but there’s no way in hell I could possibly make it through under two hours. There’s probably some unspoken rule that if the player has to write a Perl script to solve some of the problems, they’re just too hard.

I understand; I just don’t approve…

Huh. Hitting “F11” on my keyboard reveals a blank desktop. Is this a hint that I shouldn’t play this game?

Oregon Trail, Lemonade Tycoon — I suppose retro is cool again. But if this were really an Apple ][ simulator, the top line of the screen would be slightly skewed. (I loved that the Apple ][ simulator for MacOS X even did that.)

Oh fucking joy. Another game simulating the stoner “lifestyle.” Well, this is boring.

I was hoping that the little subplots wouldn’t repeat, that there was a finite number of cycles that I’d have to go through to reach some sort of conclusion, but alas my hopers were dashed.

I suppose I could play this until I have reached every possible ending, but I’m just not interested. On a technical level, the implementation is decent, if you are willing to ignore the gratuitous use of blinking text. As far as a puzzle or story goes — eh. There’s nothing compelling about the PC, and the whole slacker genre has been cornered by Kevin Smith and even he is getting tiring.

“Best experienced with…” Oh, we’re back to the browser wars again. Joy.

Ceci n’est pas un jeu interactif. Got it.

You know, I remember when people bemoaned that every competition had a deluge of dragons; now it seems we have a profusion of PC psychopaths. I wonder how long it will be before someone submits a game where the PC is a psychopathic game designer that documents his murders of snarky reviewers in “Twine” then submits it to a semi-famous competition…

This is… interesting. Touches of Dexter obviously, and the presentation is very linear. The parallel conversation was cute, but they should have been synched rather than independent.

Seriously. Almost every page is basically [Click here to continue] and nothing more. This is interactive in the same way a book is interactive in that it requires you to turn the page. I have no control of the plot — entertaining and disturbing that it is — and while I think that may be the author’s intent (the PC is not in control of his psychosis; it’s the other way around) it is only by the loosest of definitions could this be classified as interactive fiction.

An interesting diversion. Damn good writing, but not much of a puzzler. Only one real decision point, and the outcome of either choice was obvious.

Not a good sign: the game crashes with a number of JavaScript errors on start. Checking to see if there is a fixed version… Juuuust in the nick of time. Had there not been a replacement, the score would have been brutal.

Nope, still getting JavaScript errors. Looks like the XSS blocking features of the browser are the cause of the problem. OK, I will give this one more chance by playing on-line…

I cannot play on-line. What is the point of your error dialogs telling me to play on-line if you do not have a link allowing on-line play? The other option was to use FireFox, which will probably require an update or six after I dust it off.

Why do I get the feeling that most of these choices are irrelevant, that no matter what I select I will end up in the same place with the same plot?

Epicanthic is a nice 50¢ word, but not really necessary. A dead body does not need ethnologic tagging, unless this is some parallel universe where the Cold War went hot and we are locked in mortal struggle with the Red Chinese. Which I wouldn’t put past this author except that I’m pretty sure that storyline is from Star Trek and not Doctor Who.

I think I saw this movie on the Afternoon Thriller, which showed just after Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot on U52.

OK, I’m going to take a short break from reading through these walls of text to wax philosophical. One of the key components for decent IF is to give the player a sense of accomplishment early on, by giving the PC a minor obstacle that can be overcome with some mental effort. This is needed to establish a link between the player and the PC, not necessarily an emotional bond but an interest in seeing the PC through to his or her destiny. Even games like The Black Lily and The Urge manage to do this even though the PC is reprehensible. CYOA games lose their luster as we age because we gain more control of our lives and our choices, so entering a world where our options are severely limited is less satisfying than making a selection from the menu of a restaurant. Either that, or CYOA games tend to blow in terms of plot and pacing. Your call.

Sadly the author lost a chance to reference George Underwood Edwards Institute of Technology…

Basically my responses boil down to “Durrr” and “Gee Whillickers, Mr Wizard!”

“You, a novice Enchanter with but a few simple spells in your Book, must seek out…” Remember, kids: always bet on the plucky underdog apprentice. Never fails.

Nice callback to “Colossal Cave” and Adventure.

I seem to be collecting the prerequisite motley crew (but, alas, not Mötley Crüe) required to support a plucky but undertrained hero on an impossible quest.

The naked prisoner thing was from The Stainless Steel Rat’s Revenge.

Oops, got the bad ending, but not enough time to run through it again.

Not as charming as Doctor Who, not as amusing as Borgel, not as puzzling as Möbius, not as wonderfully goofy as The Cross-Time Adventures of Colonel Tick-Tock — this defies classification. It wasn’t really a challenge as I suspect all paths led to the same conclusion, the only difference being the points awarded and possibly the end-game. I am impressed by the sheer volume of text, but then again, a little editing would not be amiss.

Historical fiction has been really underrepresented in the last few competitions. This will be a nice change.

I shall not, I repeat not, get back on my hobby horse about naming player characters — it is a lost cause. (“Andrea,” especially, has unpleasant connotations for me.)

I found some minor capitalization errors, nothing too egregious.

Not sure I like the tone of this game. While in retrospect, the way the Church treated Galileo was abominable, in the context of the time I doubt many would be so judgmental. The PC is coming across far too sympathetic.

The Bible shows up as a blank line in the inventory.

Specificity is the soul of narrative:

You can see five Potato plants, seven Carrot plants and two Apple trees here.

And the Matt Barringer Memorial Award for An Object that Appears in a Room Description After You Take It goes to… the key in And yet it moves!

Such a nice bank, giving out money like that.

I feel like I’m in Repo Man with the fruit items and meat items. Remember, kids: it isn’t food if it has to remind you that it is.

“Noranges” is an urban legend. It became “Orange” when translated to French. I’m pretty sure English is not the author’s primary language, so I’ll let this one slide by.

Not a bad diversion, but nothing special either. It was an interesting concept but needed serious proofreading and the whitespace errors were distracting.

I was thinking this would be a Vietnam simulation, but no… it’s WWI.

Not looking forward to this one, it looks really depressing.

The prompt is curious: a single colon. Not sure if this is a bug in the interpreter or a deliberate choice of the designer.

Lots of typos: mostly missed capitalization at the beginning of sentences and missing spaces. Nothing egregious but still noticeable.

But I am waiting!

Wait.

The shells continue to drop nearby so you need to wait until the shelling stops.

Oh, it’s going to be one of those games (BoPR §3.12 — Not to depend much on luck):

East.

Your luck runs out as a shell lands on top of you and explodes. You have died!

This game really needed some serious proofreading. There are entire paragraphs that repeat.

Taking a look at the map to figure out how far I need to go. The map is gorgeous: wish more people would include them in their games. The maps included with the Infocom hints were always in this style: simple, informative, and not giving away too much information.

Geez, this is a huge game. Just took a quick stat of the walkthru: 708 lines long. That, plus the sheer number of “You forgot X! You have died!” puzzles have changed my mood from depressed to apprehensive.

I have just lost all interest in this game when I found out that the verb I spent five minutes looking for was crap. I suppose to be an adequate simulation of life in the trenches the game has to include the “daily duties” of a soldier, but this is bordering on puerile. Points for the size and detail, but points off for the glaring errors and shift of tone. I realize that it was a crude, brutal time and the tone of the text should reflect that, but there’s a difference between using profanity in the NPC’s speech and in the descriptions. I guess this was simply the straw that broke this player’s back.

Livid stripes on the the carpet… Talk about purple prose — literally.

As I am currently under treatment for insomnia, I can relate.

Finally, a chance for interaction. And it’s… examining things.

It doesn’t sound like insomnia at all; it sounds more like diabetes.

OK, if I have a full bladder, why can’t I go to the bathroom? Why must I search for the door through random room descriptions?

Oh, it’s all a dream. What a cop-out.

Bluebeard, anyone?

The stylesheet on this game is terrible. I’m constantly having to do horizontal scrolling.

Up until the photograph, the PC had been gender-neutral. Arguably, sitting on the toilet implied a gender, but one could also account for that as being careful in the darkness.

Nobody told me there was going to be algebra on this test!

I once convinced a friend that, alongside imaginary numbers like i, there were numbers based on the surreal number z = 1/0.

I’m reevaluating my previous diagnosis and leaning towards synesthesia now.

Lots of references to math here — the homework, the fractal in the library… Basically Alice if Lewis Carroll had been suffering from schizophrenia.

This map is getting huge, and not in a good way.

OK, either this is a bug or a purposeful dead-end: trying to eat the tray of sandwiches.

Woof. Had to restart, and that’s unfortunate. By the time I would reach the place where I was the time limit would have expired. An interesting story, very linear at first but then had a number of difficult puzzles at the end. Having to click through and wait for the text to display was annoying and slowed my progress. Wish I could have seen the end, to have my guesses about the plot confirmed.

Hoo boy. “Character Creation.” This does not bode well…

Well, at least consideration was made to the transgender & asexual communities.

“It’s a UNIX1 system! I know this!”

With aching slowness, it [the Internet] was transmitted into space. “Making sure that cat videos would survive, even if humanity did not.”

You want to bootstrap an AI using the Internet? Even Nicholas Negroponte would laugh at such a concept.

Anyone remember the old Prisoner games on the Apple ][? This feels a lot like that, with the ASCII graphics and assigning random meaning to symbols. It’s certainly no NetHack as navigation is a pain.

OK, is there any significant original prose in this game? Every place I visit seems to use a long excerpt from a published work in lieu of an actual description.

This game doesn’t hold much state. While I cannot take data from a location twice, if I visit another location and return, the data is refreshed and ripe for the taking.

This is extremely tedious…

I stand corrected. Some places have infinite data; others you can steal only once.

All that clicking for one of the most understated dénouements ever. There was barely any story here and equally few puzzles. The implementation triggered some nostalgia but that was quickly tempered by the tedium of having to pass through so many previously explored locations to collect more data. I might have given a higher score if I could have warped to locations rather than click-click-clicking my way there. Better beta testing would have shown this to be the case.

And why was there character creation at all? My gender and name never appeared in any of the prose.

“Tea Ceremony” was a sample game included in the DM4, or at least suggested by it. Setting up the samovar, getting the firewood, and then the offhanded remark that a tea ceremony as a puzzle might be interesting. Doubt the author was inspired, but you never know.

Nope, it’s (thankfully) space opera, with a splash of Judith Martin.

I have a feeling that 90% of this game is going to be commands like Consult book about…

You, dear author, may not win the competition (as your text fails to contain the prerequisite nauseating bathos) but you certainly have won my heart:

Get embarassing hat.

Speaking of embarrassing, watch your spelling–remember, two Rs, two Ss.

Nice callback to Hitchhiker’s Guide:

Consult guide about ntrm.

A proper drink for a polite afternoon party or grrbog, originating on Glorpon-42. Sometimes described as being almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

That was a fun one. Just enough of a storyline to give the player some impetus, but not too much to overwhelm with trivia. Lots of little easter eggs in the game, only a small fraction that I found. Almost perfect length for a competition entry: this is one of those rare cases where I wish the game went longer. My biggest quibble was the use of the now-tiresome measuring cup puzzle, which has been seen in countless competition entries in the past. Something more original would not have been amiss.

Took a long time to load… either the server is overwhelmed or it has a lot of frills… Considering the introductory music, I’m guessing the latter.

One decent quote, one from Tumblr. Basically a wash.

The music is keeps cutting in and out. Not sure if it is my browser or the implementation.

Glitter eyeshadow? I guess the PC is either a girl or a crossdresser. Hope it’s the latter; it would make for an interesting change. Or maybe I’m a pet.

Not much interaction so far, just some annoying pictures with false coloring and bad transitions.

I think most people would agree that small towns are much more scary than foreboding forests. From the overlays, it looks like my character is either crazy or has too much of a rich fantasy life.

OK, seems that I can’t die no matter how stupid my decisions are. That’s tolerable given that I don’t have the ability to save a game.

This music is annoying. Time to mute it.

Well, at least this point ’n’ click actually has some interaction, even if it of the simplest kind. But the story is spotty and the photos are more distracting than helpful to the plot. Points off for being so large that it took almost two minutes to load.

I love how the maintainer of the competition had to warn people that the one .EXE file in the game was not, in fact, an .EXE at all. The title alone leaves open a whole realm of possibilities: A Four-H club meeting where an ‘H’ is kidnapped? A simulation of the psychopath Henry Howard Holmes (the first documented mass murderer) if he worked for Microsoft? Time to find out!

I wonder if the corrupted image that is displayed on a mouse-over is an error or done intentionally?

Are random H’s going to be emphasized throughout the text? I hope not; that would annoy me to no end.

I think I’ve played this game before… the monkey mask is somewhat familiar.

It’s dark out; religiously dark.

That amuses me for no reason.

Why would Hugo own lipstick? Is the theme of this year’s competition “Transgenders & Transvestites”?

“Another visitor. Stay a while. Stay forever!! Bwahahahahahaha!”

Oh wait, I’m a girl. Sorry for the earlier confusion.

Wait! We have a late entry for the Matt Barringer Memorial Award: the candle remains in the picture after you take it!

This is just like the cheesy haunted houses at Knott’s Scary Farm except, you know, not scary.

NetHack. You win plot points for that, a whole lotta points.

And… and… anticlimax! Well, that was an interesting twenty minutes. Some nostalgia value, but not much. Roberta and Ken Williams would be spinning in their graves were they dead. Loads of points for referencing the classics, but technically still a point ’n’ click.

On the subject of classic IF, Mystery House was the first program my mother bought for me when I got my Apple ][. This year’s competition is just rife with nostalgia.

A mystery! A murder mystery! This actually is a good sign: Twine mysteries are usually tolerable, at least recalling last year’s Who Among Us.

Juicy! A man, his wife, a mistress — a formula for murder. At least what almost every episode of Hart to Hart has told me.

Hm. It looks like I’m not given a chance to read more than one letter per day, and subsequent days do not give me the chance to explore the meanings of the odd symbols marking the envelopes.

This whole game (if it is one) seems to be based on codes. But I’m worried that I may be barking up the wrong tree, that I may spend more time fighting to decipher the code rather than restarting and choosing an alternate path through the story.

Ah, hint mode. This makes me feel better about not writing down the code triples in the final message. My guess is that they are a phone book code, except the letters are the key. The problem here is presentation: this would have been a great game to have been implemented in Inform or TADS or anything with an inventory management system. Anything that would have allowed me to return to the letters at the end of the game and extract the various keywords. Still, I have time for another pass…

Second pass: got four out of seven correct. Turned out that each puzzle was independent of the others, which makes my objection to this being Twine untenable. The hint mode helped: once I learned what the key was, deciphering the messages was easy. One was a guess, however, and I’m not sure the reasoning behind the solution. Still, I never thought I’d give a Twine game such a high score. For this story, the format was perfect.

OW! The choice of font is painful. Not sure I can read this for any extended period of time. Normally, I just quote text, but this deserves a screenshot:

Thin, spindly fonts do not work well in low-contrast media. There are non-standard tricks you can do (optimizeLegibility can help) but simple choices are better. I may have to abandon this: my eyes are watering.

Ah, the infamous “Prisoner’s Dilemma.” Not really a dilemma if you allow consequences, but in isolation it does pose a problem.

Not sure what kind of puzzles these are. Most break down to a choice between two equally inane actions.

Damn, I’ve hit the longest infodump of them all. This is just going on for pages.

This wasn’t very interactive, and my guesses didn’t make sense after-the-fact (BPOR §3.13 — To be able to understand a problem once it is solved). Story was trite imperial space opera, with a strong dash of The Matrix tossed in. Basically, your average Twine submission.

But yeah, horrible horrible font choices.

Nice use of unicode for the arrows.

This might have been a good case to use nouns as shorthand for verbs, as another game (which I cannot remember) did long ago. Having to repeatedly type Think about X is tiresome, even if I can abbreviate it as t.

Well, that was short. Basically a variant of the standard conversation maze, a contrivance that I wish had gone out of fashion. Pity there were only three choices at the end; I feel there should have been more. This is another game that would have made more sense to have been implemented as a point ’n’ click.

Last one: I’m down to the wire with only 2½ hours to the deadline. Stopping after this even if I finish early, just in case the next one deserves a full two hours.

Saying “no” twice is pretty much admitting “yes.”

Oh good lord. I thought I’d be safe from incidental music with a zcode game. Thank God music off did the trick.

It’s not a ripoff of Zork: it’s a ripoff of Harry Potter. “Magical Law Enforcement” indeed.

Wow, this parser is awful. I had to leave the crinkly scroll outside of the trading post in order to get the other scroll, and it still referred to the crinkly scroll when differentiating nouns!

I mean, it’s nice to get into the classics, and let’s face it, Zork is the reason we’re all here. But you have to be careful when introducing RPG elements into IF: the balance has to be near-perfect or you’ll alienate fans of both genres. Beyond Zork probably came closest to perfection, but even it had problems. RPGs also require some epic investment of time, which a two-hour limit on competition reviews do not afford.

Good ol’ Sorcerer had a limit of six characters for nouns, so I’d often refer to the mail receptacle at the beginning of the game as recept. Muscle memory is kicking in here.

Examine receptacle.

In the receptacle are a letter, a guilt-edged scroll, and an orange vial.

“Guilt-edged”? What did it do that lies heavily on its conscience?

Me, I would not have missed the opportunity to add “This letter will self-destruct in five seconds” to the end.

And… I’ve been killed by a werewolf. And the music restarted without prompting.

Not a bad little diversion; didn’t get very far because I kept getting killed. Force of habit (from my NetHack days) kept me from remembering to save often enough. Still, a reasonable entry even if the prose needs a bit of cleanup.