IF Comp comes but once a year, which is why Spring Thing was invented. Spring Thing has an emphasis on medium-to-long works, doesn't run every year and gets a smaller number of entries; this year there are six games.
Spoilery.
Reviews of the first three, with bonus sketches.
Early on I ran into this little sequence:
Okay, this is a first attempt by a novice author, and it's quite an ambitious undertaking; lots of NPCs to manage over a substantial map, a dynamic, action-heavy, longish plot. Unfortunately, it's kind of a mess. There's apparently no conversation system whatsoever (much later on you can use ASK ABOUT, once). [Correction: I am told, in comments below, that this is not the case. But that was my impression from gameplay.] A potentially dramatic moment got drawn out and spoiled because I didn't have the right item, which I didn't have because to find it you need to wander around aimlessly in a "Lost in the Forest"-type maze. (You need to tediously traverse this region a lot.)
To put it another way: canoeing down a dangerous river after dark is kind of an exciting concept, and should make an exciting scene. Doing it multiple times is less exciting. Doing it multiple times, each time having to wrangle with inventory limits to get the canoe back upriver is awful design.
As might be expected of the teen-slasher genre, it's pretty exploity; Ugly Grouchy Girl dies first, then Drunk Hot Girl gets abducted, leaving her bra behind (when a story specifies cup size, you know you're in trouble). She is later discovered locked in an abandoned mine, stripped to the waist, but there's no way to, y'know, ask her if she's all right or what happened or anything. Oh, and earlier on she was so drunk that she took a piss in front of everyone. Stay classy, game.
Up to about this point, there's a reasonable amount of direction; the next thing you have to work on is always pretty clear, even though it may take a little while to get to the solution. After you rescue Drunk Girl, though, she and Buddy #2 flee the scene, leaving you to look for Hot Girl and Buddy #1. At this point it becomes mostly a matter of wandering around, picking up stuff and prodding at things. I started relying heavily on the walkthrough. The game relies increasingly on constrained-passageway inventory puzzles, which are tedious enough in walkthrough mode and would be excruciating if you had to work them out. (The game makes very little narrative sense when played in walkthrough order, but oh well.)
As I said, neither the genre-bound story nor the painfully old-school design are anything like my cup of tea. But leaving that aside, this is not a well-executed game. The writing needs a lot of work; the horror elements are a random grab-bag that never really coheres. Even if we assume that characterisation and plot aren't important, the prose is awkward and ungainly at the sentence level. Design-wise things are a little brighter: if we assume that bloated mazes, arbitrary solutions, unresponsive NPCs, great swathes of unimplemented scenery and a wretchedly pedantic parser are not problems, then... well, it's finishable, and I didn't run into any real bugs, other than the one that shows the girls already in a room and then describes them arriving.
The game credits one tester. This is obviously too few, but this isn't really a game that could be fixed by mere betatesting; it needs fundamental work on how its story is rendered as a game and as writing. Still, this is a My First Crappy Game; as such it can largely be written off. Everyone writes My First Crappy Games; the fortunate never release them.
Score: 3
I know very little about baseball. The game's help menu endeavours to teach me, but when I say "I know very little about baseball" I don't mean the core gameplay: that's just rounders, plus a penalty system that everybody knows about since someone thought it'd be a good idea to apply it to criminal sentencing. And I know a bit about the nostalgia-heavy, statistics-loving culture. What I don't know about is the technical terminology, the tactics of games or series, or any players whatsoever. The game does a really creditable attempt at explaining things, but they're not always the right things, and the net effect is still about half Gostak. Part of the problem is that all the baseball-playing scenes have a sense of urgency -- they could hardly not -- that discourages a leisurely perusal of the world. Under normal circumstances, I'd say that the mechanics were excessively fiddly: but in context, they produce the feeling of a big, complicated system, only a small part of which is within your control.
The way the story's told is that you already know that you're going to screw up horribly and be jeered at for the rest of your life. But you keep heading towards disaster anyway -- metagame, because you haven't reached a winning ending yet, and in-game because you don't know. But there's a layer generated between these two, one where Merkle keeps playing despite forseeing his doom because of... something kind of aw-gee, it feels, about sticktoitiveness or winners never quitting or something. And at the end you are Judged Kindly By History and gain applause and insider praise, but it's not really obvious why this results from choosing the screw-up rather than quietly avoiding it by means of a less conspicuous error, other than that you chose the thing that actually happened.
The player-PC knowledge gap was big enough, in my playthrough, to somewhat reframe the story. When played by someone who doesn't know much about baseball, the story becomes something like: Merkle screwed up because he was a clueless teenager, in way over his head, barely scraping by; some kind of screw-up was inevitable. What the author wants the story to be is another thing entirely: Merkle was actually a very savvy player of moderate skill who was screwed over by rules-lawyering, inconsistent enforcement and a generally confused situation. We're meant to like him because he tries hard and doesn't give up even though he's in over his head and forsees his doom, but these aren't actually true in-world. The whole thing makes most sense as a recurring dream; but the choices we make in dreams don't, contra Thoreau, say very much about our character. And the uplifting note it ends on is pure Hollywood: a few moments of applause do not make up for a lifetime of vilification. So the story's emotional arc works very well in its general shape, but doesn't make quite as much sense in detail.
If this is a first game, it's an extremely promising one. It's well-implemented, it has an adept sense of pacing and tone, it's strongly-written, it's aware that it's doing something tricky and has put a good deal of work into trying to offset that. It got me interested in its story even though I don't give a tinker's toss about baseball and have zero interest in learning more. It balances documentary, narrative and gameplay -- with considerable sacrifices and generating nontrivial problems, true, but you don't feel that any one of them has been horribly fumbled.
Score: 7
What else? Magical realism ages well, humour, monstrous nastiness, the weird and grotesque, the esoterica of alien adulthood. ("You'll know what my riddle means / When you've eaten mangosteens.") This feels gentle to a fault; there's a certain amount of melancholia, given that we're healing an injured kingdom, but it's quite low-key. There are antagonists aplenty, but they're all paper tigers. Tone is huge: a common failing in kid-lit is a sense of forced enthusiasm, often twinned with a clean-cut lack of transgression. Alabaz occasionally feels this way: it suffers from a surfeit of exclamation marks. Trig in particular needs to lay off the sugar.
Oh, yes, Trig.
Yeah, we mostly hang out at my place because his mother's kind of scary.
I suppose that part of what's making me uneasy, here, is that the classic children's-fantasy-adventure arc starts out with the children doing things without adults, or despite them. Hiding in a wardrobe, going down the wrong chimney or through a door that's not meant to open, sneaking into Retiring Rooms or over garden walls, or just waking up late at night. If children are going to drive the plot, there needs to be a reason why adults aren't doing so. Adults can be hostile, incompetent, absent, oblivious or constrained; if they're not, and they cheerfully allow the most important parts of the story to be driven by children, things feel suspicious. Why aren't you getting in the transcombobulator, Uncle Scientist? As it turns out, that feeling of suspicion is sort of justifed; but this only becomes clear in the endgame.
The worldbuilding is conspicuously Zorkian, with perhaps a touch of Oz and Myst around the edges; widely varied according to no obvious pattern, sparsely inhabited (though it adds up to a substantial cast), device-rich. The puzzle structure, too, is low-detail, big-map, collect-the-treasures. In classic CYOA style, you're encouraged to think of the PC as yourself. On the other hand, there is a very modern casual-game feel: the tutorial virtually has sparkles coming off it, making progress is generally quite easy, achievements are showered down upon you and every miscommand is painstakingly explained. (I would expect an eight-year-old to grasp IF conventions a great deal faster than a novice of thirty, but that's just a guess.) There's a journal which tracks all your achievements and keeps track of current goals. The slick, all-modern-conveniences format is spoiled a little bit because it uses something resembling Threaded Conversation, but still requires you to name your interlocutor every time, and sometimes behaves oddly if you don't:
It's not bug-free. From the outset, the journal displays a goal that I have never encountered (fix the racing gondola). When I actually reach the racing gondola, it turns out that the gondola race displays a few other bits of weird behaviour. For a game this size it's mostly pretty damn robust, but since it's pitched at novices the bar is rather higher.
The quest idea is that you have to collect pearls, each of which allows your ship to travel to another island. The puzzles are all fair, well-clued and straightforward; the main design problem is that quite a lot of back-and-forth navigation is needed to solve things, which is a bit awkward when movement is variously constrained by devices and mazes. It doesn't make an immense amount of narrative sense, either; I know that the ship's really just a big nautical linking-book, but the adventures-at-sea thing is sort of scuppered if the ship functions as a teleportation device. I get the impression that a core design goal was to produce something that wouldn't be playable in a single session, that you'd come back to on successive evenings and mull over in the meantime; and it certainly has this effect, but a lot of this is just because of annoying run-back-and-forth puzzles. Which is odd, because in a lot of respects it's very stripped-down and efficient: short paragraphs, little in the way of extraneous scenery, tight puzzle focus. But the thing is: we have here a story that's basically about a fantastic journey, and the travel is the most tedious part. (GO TO, I remembered after I'd finished the game, allows you to quickly move about within islands, but apparently doesn't help with inter-island travel or other fiddly stuff.)
And, yeah, Trig. Some years ago a few people put together AAS, an April Fool's joke that was intended to be an IF system entirely made up of bad design decisions. One of the awful ideas that was suggested was Lampy, an animated lantern and desktop adventure assistant. This was before the rise of casual gaming: we thought we were making a joke, not a prophecy. I managed to tune Trig's incessant helpful advice out to some extent, but the experience was a lot like being followed around by a know-it-all eight-year-old rather than a sense of having a buddy. I'd have parked him permanently on the ship, but that seemed out-of-character; and besides, I did need a hint system some of the time. But I did spend quite a lot of time wanting to throw him overboard. (Yeah, yeah, he can be turned off, so I really shouldn't be complaining; but doing that kind of dramatically changes how much his character features in the story.)
My (very uncertain) guess is that this would be a pretty good game with which to introduce a child to IF; the main caveat is that map-traversal is too pedantic. It doesn't translate too well for me -- there's too much Spielbergian, Saturday-morning innocence and not enough darkness, and the world doesn't have quite enough of an overarching distinctive character. As an objection, this is pretty weak; and writing excellent fiction for children is probably trickier than doing so for adults. It's a large, light, friendly puzzler; nothing earth-shaking, but fun enough and solidly designed.
(Also, did Michael Gentry really name his kids Nick and Nora? I am not sure if that is totally awesome or a little creepy. Has he got them mixing martinis yet?)
Score: 7
Spoilery.
Reviews of the first three, with bonus sketches.
 | Night of the P-Zombie Buddies You are about to drive out to meet some friends for a camping trip on Halloween night. Everything seems to be going according to plan, but the unexpected can always occur. If it did, you would need to rely on your wits. Hope that you are not scared out of them. In other words, this isn't going to function as horror; it's going to iterate the symbolic attributes of horror genre, rather than look for ways to horrify. It's set in the late eighties, so I'm immediately picturing coiffed actors in their mid-twenties playing teenagers. The prose is decidedly poor. Insofar as tone is established, it feels as if it's being written for an audience a little younger than the protagonist: boys who haven't quite graduated to beer, cars and girls yet, and are really easily impressed by same. The protagonist is as good-looking as ever. There's a definte feel of that sort of earnestness, beers and smokes aside, that typifies a certain kind of young-adult work; not novels, so often, but movies, CYOA, videogames. The location is kept carefully generic. |
Early on I ran into this little sequence:
So, yes, exactly as if it's 1987. (In other respects period isn't particularly well-established; there's a cassette recorder, I suppose.) By this point, it's pretty clear that essentially all of the author's production goals are things which I heartily dislike, and the writing is dull and full of errors. So -- after entering maybe a dozen commands -- I am more or less convinced that there's no way that this is going to earn more than a 4.
In the blue car is a can of WD-50.
>x wd
You can't see any such thing.
>take can
The blue car isn't open.
>open car
Which car do you mean, the green car or the blue car?
>blue
The blue car is locked.
>unlock blue car
What do you want to unlock the blue car with?
>blue key
You unlock the blue car.
A pink jeep arrives from the road, and parks beside of your car. You see three girls step out of it.
>x girls
Try examining one of the girls individually instead.
You see three girls walking to the west.
>undo
Roadside
[Previous turn undone.]
>l
Roadside
You are standing out by the road, and a large mountain looms on the other side of it. You can barely make out the faint, white noise of rushing water coming far from the southeast. To the west of you is a clearing in the briers which provides an entrance to the woods.
You see a pink jeep (closed), Rachel, Brenda, Lola, a green car and a blue car here.
You see three girls walking to the west.
Okay, this is a first attempt by a novice author, and it's quite an ambitious undertaking; lots of NPCs to manage over a substantial map, a dynamic, action-heavy, longish plot. Unfortunately, it's kind of a mess. There's apparently no conversation system whatsoever (much later on you can use ASK ABOUT, once). [Correction: I am told, in comments below, that this is not the case. But that was my impression from gameplay.] A potentially dramatic moment got drawn out and spoiled because I didn't have the right item, which I didn't have because to find it you need to wander around aimlessly in a "Lost in the Forest"-type maze. (You need to tediously traverse this region a lot.)
To put it another way: canoeing down a dangerous river after dark is kind of an exciting concept, and should make an exciting scene. Doing it multiple times is less exciting. Doing it multiple times, each time having to wrangle with inventory limits to get the canoe back upriver is awful design.
As might be expected of the teen-slasher genre, it's pretty exploity; Ugly Grouchy Girl dies first, then Drunk Hot Girl gets abducted, leaving her bra behind (when a story specifies cup size, you know you're in trouble). She is later discovered locked in an abandoned mine, stripped to the waist, but there's no way to, y'know, ask her if she's all right or what happened or anything. Oh, and earlier on she was so drunk that she took a piss in front of everyone. Stay classy, game.
Up to about this point, there's a reasonable amount of direction; the next thing you have to work on is always pretty clear, even though it may take a little while to get to the solution. After you rescue Drunk Girl, though, she and Buddy #2 flee the scene, leaving you to look for Hot Girl and Buddy #1. At this point it becomes mostly a matter of wandering around, picking up stuff and prodding at things. I started relying heavily on the walkthrough. The game relies increasingly on constrained-passageway inventory puzzles, which are tedious enough in walkthrough mode and would be excruciating if you had to work them out. (The game makes very little narrative sense when played in walkthrough order, but oh well.)
As I said, neither the genre-bound story nor the painfully old-school design are anything like my cup of tea. But leaving that aside, this is not a well-executed game. The writing needs a lot of work; the horror elements are a random grab-bag that never really coheres. Even if we assume that characterisation and plot aren't important, the prose is awkward and ungainly at the sentence level. Design-wise things are a little brighter: if we assume that bloated mazes, arbitrary solutions, unresponsive NPCs, great swathes of unimplemented scenery and a wretchedly pedantic parser are not problems, then... well, it's finishable, and I didn't run into any real bugs, other than the one that shows the girls already in a room and then describes them arriving.
The game credits one tester. This is obviously too few, but this isn't really a game that could be fixed by mere betatesting; it needs fundamental work on how its story is rendered as a game and as writing. Still, this is a My First Crappy Game; as such it can largely be written off. Everyone writes My First Crappy Games; the fortunate never release them.
Score: 3
 | Field of Ignominy A fictionalised story about 1910s baseball and a legendary screw-up that clouded an entire life. This is clearly a carefully-researched piece. Structurally it owes a lot to Photopia: simple scenes, linear track, much foreboding, undisguised yanking on the heartstrings. It's also reminiscent of 1893: A World's Fair Mystery, but in ways that are likely to be true of any fictionalised-documentary IF: establishing photographs, coincidental meetings with people who will be famous later, strong sense of time and place. It's considerably more effective as narrative than 1893 is, too; stock narrative techniques, but it employs them well. There's a principle in screenwriting that you should always do something in the first ten minutes to establish that the protagonist is a nice guy. The introductory section feels very much like cinematic technique: establish the setting, let us know that we like the protagonist, play for time -- ostensibly because the credits are still rolling, really because we're being eased into the world. Usually when IF is drawing on cinema it's an ugly mismatch, a cinema-shaped narrative transferred to IF because the budget and skills aren't available; it's strange and pleasant to see it used to the good. |
The way the story's told is that you already know that you're going to screw up horribly and be jeered at for the rest of your life. But you keep heading towards disaster anyway -- metagame, because you haven't reached a winning ending yet, and in-game because you don't know. But there's a layer generated between these two, one where Merkle keeps playing despite forseeing his doom because of... something kind of aw-gee, it feels, about sticktoitiveness or winners never quitting or something. And at the end you are Judged Kindly By History and gain applause and insider praise, but it's not really obvious why this results from choosing the screw-up rather than quietly avoiding it by means of a less conspicuous error, other than that you chose the thing that actually happened.
The player-PC knowledge gap was big enough, in my playthrough, to somewhat reframe the story. When played by someone who doesn't know much about baseball, the story becomes something like: Merkle screwed up because he was a clueless teenager, in way over his head, barely scraping by; some kind of screw-up was inevitable. What the author wants the story to be is another thing entirely: Merkle was actually a very savvy player of moderate skill who was screwed over by rules-lawyering, inconsistent enforcement and a generally confused situation. We're meant to like him because he tries hard and doesn't give up even though he's in over his head and forsees his doom, but these aren't actually true in-world. The whole thing makes most sense as a recurring dream; but the choices we make in dreams don't, contra Thoreau, say very much about our character. And the uplifting note it ends on is pure Hollywood: a few moments of applause do not make up for a lifetime of vilification. So the story's emotional arc works very well in its general shape, but doesn't make quite as much sense in detail.
If this is a first game, it's an extremely promising one. It's well-implemented, it has an adept sense of pacing and tone, it's strongly-written, it's aware that it's doing something tricky and has put a good deal of work into trying to offset that. It got me interested in its story even though I don't give a tinker's toss about baseball and have zero interest in learning more. It balances documentary, narrative and gameplay -- with considerable sacrifices and generating nontrivial problems, true, but you don't feel that any one of them has been horribly fumbled.
Score: 7
 | Kid Knight Super Gem Collect! This is a children's story. One of the things that immediately struck me about this is that in book form, it's very easy to judge the approximate target age for children's fiction, but that this is mostly a matter of visual cues: the style of cover art, the size and style of the typeface, how much illustration there is and so on. Clearly IF isn't going to be all that suitable for children who aren't ready for books without illustrations, but other than that I'm having trouble catching cues. The other thing is that, not being a parent, I have no real idea of whether this would be attractive to its target audience; I can only judge it on how well it works for an adult. I'm not sure if there are uniform rules for how well children's fiction translates to an adult audience. One major factor: stories that don't feel that, because they're for children, they must therefore be simple. Diana Wynne Jones, quoted in a eulogy by Neil Gaiman: "Children are much more careful readers than adults. You don't have to repeat everything for children. You do with adults, because they aren't paying full attention." Alabaz is not small: it extends across ten islands, has a midgame involving a lot of back-and-forth, and relies upon traditional adventure-game puzzles. But it is definitely pared-down, focused on the functional elements more than atmosphere or emotional range. |
What else? Magical realism ages well, humour, monstrous nastiness, the weird and grotesque, the esoterica of alien adulthood. ("You'll know what my riddle means / When you've eaten mangosteens.") This feels gentle to a fault; there's a certain amount of melancholia, given that we're healing an injured kingdom, but it's quite low-key. There are antagonists aplenty, but they're all paper tigers. Tone is huge: a common failing in kid-lit is a sense of forced enthusiasm, often twinned with a clean-cut lack of transgression. Alabaz occasionally feels this way: it suffers from a surfeit of exclamation marks. Trig in particular needs to lay off the sugar.
Oh, yes, Trig.
It's your best friend, Trig.
Yeah, we mostly hang out at my place because his mother's kind of scary.
I suppose that part of what's making me uneasy, here, is that the classic children's-fantasy-adventure arc starts out with the children doing things without adults, or despite them. Hiding in a wardrobe, going down the wrong chimney or through a door that's not meant to open, sneaking into Retiring Rooms or over garden walls, or just waking up late at night. If children are going to drive the plot, there needs to be a reason why adults aren't doing so. Adults can be hostile, incompetent, absent, oblivious or constrained; if they're not, and they cheerfully allow the most important parts of the story to be driven by children, things feel suspicious. Why aren't you getting in the transcombobulator, Uncle Scientist? As it turns out, that feeling of suspicion is sort of justifed; but this only becomes clear in the endgame.
The worldbuilding is conspicuously Zorkian, with perhaps a touch of Oz and Myst around the edges; widely varied according to no obvious pattern, sparsely inhabited (though it adds up to a substantial cast), device-rich. The puzzle structure, too, is low-detail, big-map, collect-the-treasures. In classic CYOA style, you're encouraged to think of the PC as yourself. On the other hand, there is a very modern casual-game feel: the tutorial virtually has sparkles coming off it, making progress is generally quite easy, achievements are showered down upon you and every miscommand is painstakingly explained. (I would expect an eight-year-old to grasp IF conventions a great deal faster than a novice of thirty, but that's just a guess.) There's a journal which tracks all your achievements and keeps track of current goals. The slick, all-modern-conveniences format is spoiled a little bit because it uses something resembling Threaded Conversation, but still requires you to name your interlocutor every time, and sometimes behaves oddly if you don't:
>ASK ABOUT LAVA
(I assume you mean the fresh water.)
You can only do that to a person!
It's not bug-free. From the outset, the journal displays a goal that I have never encountered (fix the racing gondola). When I actually reach the racing gondola, it turns out that the gondola race displays a few other bits of weird behaviour. For a game this size it's mostly pretty damn robust, but since it's pitched at novices the bar is rather higher.
The quest idea is that you have to collect pearls, each of which allows your ship to travel to another island. The puzzles are all fair, well-clued and straightforward; the main design problem is that quite a lot of back-and-forth navigation is needed to solve things, which is a bit awkward when movement is variously constrained by devices and mazes. It doesn't make an immense amount of narrative sense, either; I know that the ship's really just a big nautical linking-book, but the adventures-at-sea thing is sort of scuppered if the ship functions as a teleportation device. I get the impression that a core design goal was to produce something that wouldn't be playable in a single session, that you'd come back to on successive evenings and mull over in the meantime; and it certainly has this effect, but a lot of this is just because of annoying run-back-and-forth puzzles. Which is odd, because in a lot of respects it's very stripped-down and efficient: short paragraphs, little in the way of extraneous scenery, tight puzzle focus. But the thing is: we have here a story that's basically about a fantastic journey, and the travel is the most tedious part. (GO TO, I remembered after I'd finished the game, allows you to quickly move about within islands, but apparently doesn't help with inter-island travel or other fiddly stuff.)
And, yeah, Trig. Some years ago a few people put together AAS, an April Fool's joke that was intended to be an IF system entirely made up of bad design decisions. One of the awful ideas that was suggested was Lampy, an animated lantern and desktop adventure assistant. This was before the rise of casual gaming: we thought we were making a joke, not a prophecy. I managed to tune Trig's incessant helpful advice out to some extent, but the experience was a lot like being followed around by a know-it-all eight-year-old rather than a sense of having a buddy. I'd have parked him permanently on the ship, but that seemed out-of-character; and besides, I did need a hint system some of the time. But I did spend quite a lot of time wanting to throw him overboard. (Yeah, yeah, he can be turned off, so I really shouldn't be complaining; but doing that kind of dramatically changes how much his character features in the story.)
My (very uncertain) guess is that this would be a pretty good game with which to introduce a child to IF; the main caveat is that map-traversal is too pedantic. It doesn't translate too well for me -- there's too much Spielbergian, Saturday-morning innocence and not enough darkness, and the world doesn't have quite enough of an overarching distinctive character. As an objection, this is pretty weak; and writing excellent fiction for children is probably trickier than doing so for adults. It's a large, light, friendly puzzler; nothing earth-shaking, but fun enough and solidly designed.
(Also, did Michael Gentry really name his kids Nick and Nora? I am not sure if that is totally awesome or a little creepy. Has he got them mixing martinis yet?)
Score: 7
3 comments | Leave a comment
