[As promised, examining some of the entries in this year's IF Competition; 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.]Previously:
A Fine Day For Reaping]
In The Mind Of The Master
Author: David Whyld
Format: Adrift
You are a mysterious master of disguise, caught in an intriguing conspiracy to bring about the death of an evil Cardinal suspected of using black magic. The protagonist's identity is a mystery too -- as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the Master has some past beef with the dark Cardinal, but the way the conflict plays out remains to be seen.
Story: Strictly in terms of story elements, I love it. It starts out with you given only a short time to choose one of your disguises -- police officer, postal worker or gentleman -- and flee, before some nefarious pursuers kill you in your hotel room. On a dark and rainy night, you grab a disguise and find a way out through the hotel lobby. The whole in medias res feel of things, while not an uncommon device in IF, makes figuring out who you are, why you are, and most importantly, what you're capable of, part of the adventure.
Puzzles: Here's where it founders. There aren't too many actual puzzles to speak of -- gameplay consists of reading between the lines to figure out where you're supposed to go and when. If you combine having completed the right tasks with carrying the right inventory, in general, the story is largely motivated by simply arriving in the appropriate place. The bright element is the way that different game puzzles can be navigated in different ways depending on which disguise you've chosen. The Master is apparently such a disguise whiz that, by changing his uniform, he's literally unrecognizable, and different areas will be accessible -- or not -- depending on how you're dressed. Some events in the game will proceed differently, and NPCs treat you differently. The major issue here in the game is with inventory items; as far as I can tell, they can only be employed as part of events, and whether or not you can look at them or attempt to use them on your own time is a little spotty. The biggest issue I saw was when wearing the gentleman disguise, a letter you can pick up in the beginning is only read-able, and registered as held, if you exit the hotel a specific way, which taken in context doesn't seem as if it should be the case -- that's just one example. I don't want to give away spoilers, but there are more instances like this further on.
Writing: Decent, but there are a few significant errors that break the experience -- like a typo during a plot scene that makes it unclear who it is you're being told to kill, and is subtle enough to be confusing. To be fair, I was playing this game in Gargoyle even though the readme file suggested there might be some bugs outside of the Adrift runner, so maybe the occasional random text spasms can be attributed to that. There are some nice moments of personalizing the Master, but generally, descriptiveness is inconsistent.
Parser: Not too great -- again, though, it's tough to tell which snafus can be blamed on the game being a touch buggy and which ones are the parser's responsibility. Generally, though, one must be very specific with phrasing, and on more than one occasion, there's only one way to do things.
Overall Difficulty: Not very. The difficulty lies in trying to figure out work-arounds to be able to do things that it's obvious the game wants me to be able to do -- there were a few cases in which I found the game unfinishable, but those were due to things that didn't quite make sense, and less because of me being stumped.
Conclusion: C-. This was really disappointing, because so many aspects of the overall concept -- the interesting exposition, the engaging story elements, the nonlinear gameplay with three ways to play -- were so promising. I quite get the impression that the author started out with an ambitious concept and then became highly pressed for time, leaving a well-constructed facade and then a sequence of empty rooms.
