So, as promised, some thoughts on some of the Interactive Fiction Competition entries I've been playing with the last few days. I know some of the readers are judging the competition, so I won't spoil any endings or solutions, and I'll give a heads-up before discussing. I'm starting with the Adrift entries, because Adrift is way hardcore, and I'll be going through them in chronological order.I encourage you guys to check these out along with me! If you've played one of the titles and want to submit your own comments or reviews, I encourage you to do so -- email me and I'll put it up on the blog. Again, you can get the whole package of games and interpreters here, and links to the individual games, if you already have a good interpreter (lots of Mac people use Spatterlight, I use Gargoyle), will be included in the reviews.
A Fine Day For Reaping
Author: revgiblet
Format: Adrift
Definitely a good concept, and a tone that combines vivid descriptiveness with more than a little humor. You're Death, you talk with a lisp, and your job of collecting souls whose time has come is not going to be as easy as you'd think.
Story: There isn't really much of one -- and in text adventures, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The biggest challenge, I think, for people writing IF is to balance prose with gameplay. For my part, a story that's too large and heavy tends to weigh the experience down. I want to play a game, not a novella, so I think it's generally plenty adequate if you get a good picture of the world you're in and why you're there, and if your actions are rewarded with enough detail for you to keep your head straight on what you're doing and where you're going. As Death, you're assigned a list of souls in different areas of the world -- you can reach your assignments by instructing your fearsome, ghostly horse to travel to the places on the list. Once there, though, the individuals on their last day of life, or the circumstances around them, will make it as difficult as possible for you to reach them.
Puzzles: Not very difficult, but I like how they're done -- it's generally clear what one is intended to do, but sorting out how to make it happen is a little tougher. You won't be able to solve puzzles in the order you arrive at them, though, so there's a traveling-around-and-gathering-info stage, and then it's collecting items from various locations to make it all happen.
Writing: It's good. It's sharp, clever, and since you're Death, a little bit of black humor (and even the classic chess game). I don't know why they gave the grim reaper a lisp -- maybe I'm missing a classic joke here, but it seems a bit like too overt a ploy for laughs, or oddball for it's own sake. It's some snappy prose, in general, though, that makes the game enjoyable. Most text adventures rely on a very specific, cheese-ified brand of nerd humor and Xyzzy in-jokes, so this one's a nice change.
Parser: It's average. There are a few confounding moments, as there always are when a game revolves primarily around human interaction. Texties haven't quite gotten it down. Then, there are some times I felt I really should have been able to wear something, and couldn't -- I knew I was on the right track because the game told me so, and suggested I change clothes elsewhere, but in several areas I found suitable, the game gave me the generic "you can't" response without explanation. If I have to consult a walkthrough and then find that I was trying to do the right thing in the wrong words, that's kinda an issue for me. If you can do a task under some conditions and not others, you should be told, when you can't, why you can't -- or, failing that, something other than the generic response you'd get if you did something the parser didn't understand.
Overall Difficulty: A bit less than average, though the challenging puzzles are pretty notable. Still, very finish-able. I find when I don't finish a text adventure it's because I become frustrated not by the difficulty level, but by the combination of a lack of engagement with a high difficulty level. I enjoy when the things I need to do are not at all eminently clear, and I need to search all over the place (one of my favorites I've ever played was an obscenely ridiculous send-up of the "escape the room" genre which involved me killing pigeons, overdosing on aspirin and requiring a lock combination tattooed on my own back). Searching through everything and solving the mystery of the premise is what drives me. So everything being up-front in AFDFR made it seem a little like light gameplay to me. But a good deal of the games I've checked out so far have actually been unfinishable for various reasons, so the fact that it maintains its tight presentation from beginning-to-end is a high mark in its corner.
Conclusion: B+ Play it, most def. It wins major points for having (I think) three different ways to handle each issue -- there's a direct way, a more complex way, and then a much more obscure method. It depends on the order in which you handle the souls, but the presence of a time machine for one of the individuals can help make things interesting, if you're a difficulty nut. Overall, this one's a lightweight, appropriate for casual fans of text adventures -- but there's still plenty to appreciate for more experienced players. Snag it here.
[CORRECTION -- Matthew Williamson called me out for slapping numbers on the different sections, after I had been recently griping about the same issue. Segmented numerical ratings have now been canned in favor of one letter grade for the overall experience.]
