Nitku's IFComp 2008 reviews

Excellent

• Nightfall by Eric Eve

Good

• Afflicted by Doug Egan
• Violet by Jeremy Freese
• Berrost's Challenge by Mark Hatfield
• Snack Time! by Renee Choba

Decent

• Cry Wolf by Clare Parker
• Escape from the Underworld by Karl Beecher
• A Date With Death by David Whyld
• Channel Surfing by Mike Vollmer

Weak

• Grief by Simon Christiansen
• Recess At Last by Gerald Aungst
• The Ngah Angah School of Forbidden Wisdom by Anssi Räisänen
• Ananachronist by Joseph Strom
• Dracula's Underground Crypt by Alex Whitington
• A Martian Odyssey by Horatio

Awful

• Riverside by Drew, Jeremy, and Vic
• Nerd Quest by Gabor de Mooij
• The Lighthouse by Eric Hickman and Nathan Chung
• The Absolute Worst IF Game in History by Dean Menezes

In Escape from the Underworld you are a demon fed up with torturing souls in Hell. Time to escape!

It is a fun little game but ultimately forgettable. The story doesn't go anywhere and the protagonist doesn't have much of a character, but because the puzzles are easy and the world is not overwhelmingly complex I would recommend this as an introduction to IF for new players (at least if some bugs will be fixed in later versions).

There's a show-stopping bug that makes the comp version unwinnable when played with Zoom, so use some other interpreter like Spatterlight if you're on a Mac.

Reminded me of: All Hope Abandon meets Fiendish Zoo

How to make it better: Give personality traits to the main character. Find a betatester.

Rating: decent

The author must have his own little competition where the goal is to get as low score as possible. Not wanting to play his game (in any sense of the word), I will not vote on this game.

Reminded me of: Drunk people after the bar's closing hour trying to pick a fight.

How to make it better: There might be a playable game somewhere there if you just changed the attitude, the title, the content and the author.

Rating: none

Snack Time! is in many ways a Lost Pig lite. The implementation is solid, it's light-hearted and it reacts to a large array of commands. There's even a baby-talk narrator voice.

The downside is that it's very short. It takes only about 15 minutes to go through and there's about as much content as in some of the longer speed-IFs. While it's not very long it is deeper than average and has the plus side of the setting not getting wearisome before the end. True to its name it is a refreshing snack between longer works.

On a side note, it bugs me to no end when people credit their protagonist/pet/child/imaginary friend for their work. It's either condescending (do they think the players are stupid enough to really believe it?) or disturbing (do they really believe so themselves?)

Reminded me of: A Bear's Night Out, Lost Pig

How to make it better: Stop pretending your dog wrote it.

Rating: good

A Date With Death is the third installment to Whyld's Back To Life series. The king, who tends to die and be resurrected again and again, gets an ultimatum from the Death who will be coming to get him for good at midnight.

The genre of this game would be slapstick. The comedy revolves around High Chancellor Verenor's urge to execute everyone in the kingdom, High Chancellor Verenor executing people, High Chancellor Verenor contemplating executing people (I've made a handy graph to show how funny this gets over time), people acting funny/illogically and non sequiturs. A Date With Death keeps firing the jokes without an end. Those who are fans of Whyld's previous comedic games are having a field day, others will grow weary of it very quickly.

From time to time the king is called for a meeting where he must make a decision of a given matter. This supposedly affects the endgame somehow (I didn't get that far). I find embedding this aspect in the game a poor choice. Whatever the player chooses it doesn't feel meaningful. So what if I start another war when there's a dozen meaningless ones already going? So what if I save a servant from being executed if Verenor lets other heads roll non-stop? Making these choices is preceded by an unholy amount of textdumps that should give the background information needed to make a wise decision, but they're just another set of jokes.

It looks like the game tries to be two mashed into one, but the genres just don't come along nicely. The excessive slapstick takes away all credibility from making meaningful choices. It's like trying to eat the main course and dessert at the same time by slapping some whipped cream and strawberries on meat loaf.

Reminded me of: Airplane! meets Fate

How to make it better: Separate it into two games: the comedy one and the moral decision one.

Rating: decent

The background story seems to involve some kind of time travelling magicians trying to destroy the universe by creating temporal paradoxes and a police force trying to unravel these paradoxes. Personally I think you should never use magic as a plot element when advanced technology could do the same thing, but that's just a matter of taste.

The game is very much lacking from coding to implementation to spelling. There are practically no synonyms provided for any of the objects. Room descriptions are so confusing it's a puzzle by itself to parse where the exits are (they are often not mentioned at all or wrong directions are given or the same exit is described twice or even three times). The descriptions (when provided) are inexplicably vague, like shown in this quote:

I didn't get very far before I stepped on a platform and couldn't get out of it. There wasn't much motivation left to restart (partly because I was expecting an All Things Devours puzzle and I don't like that kind of puzzles very much).

Reminded me of: Timecop (not a compliment)

How to make it better: Find a betatester and a proofreader. Write more concrete descriptions.

Rating: weak

I kind of feel bad bashing this because judging by the blog this was actually a serious entry to the competition. Nevertheless the painful truth is that the gameplay consists of nothing but going through four rooms and pushing a button. It takes less than five minutes to complete. Nothing has any descriptions (even room descriptions are just "You are now in the X"). Even basic concepts are lost: instead of the game actually ending, you just get a printed message with a hardcoded "***THE END***" (you can continue walking around afterwards). If I had to guess, I'd say the source code is probably about 300 words long, not counting the intro text.

Reminded me of: A featureles paper bag with an empty sheet of paper inside.

How to make it better: You have the start of a map layout, just add game.

Rating: Awful

Riverside starts as a murder mystery where the main character starts to investigate his friend's death. At the beginning there's a twist ending I truly did not see coming.

What possibly happened here is that the authors got to a good start, realized they've run out of time and instead of finishing and submitting it next year they turned it into a "joke". Which is a crying tragedy. The game truly had potential and it's a shame to see it go to waste. Based on the beginning I was actually looking forward to playing the rest.

If we concentrate on the "good part" of the game: Riverside has made a puzzle of many menial tasks, like eating breakfast or buying a ticket. These sequences are irrelevant and feel like chores rather than playing. Whenever you try to do something to advance the plot, the game goes "You should do [some action the game should take care of automatically] first." The game is in a curious inbalance when often the plot (the stuff that really matters) advances in leaps with just one command, but then you spend ten minutes looking for a telephone in your own apartment.

The first action goes too far, but the second does too little. The game is full of similar examples.

Reminded me of: Getting a meal in front of you and after the first bite the chef coming from the kitchen to spit on it. Not that this has ever happened to me, but if it had, I would've been reminded of it.

How to make it better: Lose the "joke" and finish the goddamn game.

Rating: Beginning – decent; Overall – awful

Cry Wolf is a horror piece about a vet who finds an injured wolf behind his door. The prose is generally good. Atmosphere is built with uncommon choices of wording, occasionally going over the top ("the toilet squats demurely in the corner"). It's annoying that the protagonist takes his sweet time realizing what's going on when most of the "twists" have been clear to the player for some time.

Unfortunately the game is a bit buggy and has an unfinished feel to it. Near the end I got stuck with either a bug or a guess-the-verb problem. Some tasks felt a bit tedious, especially the surgery scene. The game would benefit enormously from fixing these problems.

Reminded me of: Storm Cellar

How to make it better: Make the tedious bits flow smoother. Find more betatesters.

Rating: decent

Here's a game you just can't finish without a walkthrough. Can you guess what you should do next (don't mind the bug in the fourth line):

That's right – the magic words are FOLLOW SMOKE. Easy, huh? It doesn't help that the player never knows what the goal is or what they are expected to be doing. There's a martian that follows you around, but that's about all it does. So much for "interpersonal (sic) communication".

The prose is, more than anything else, blunt. Extra points for atmospheric music. Too bad that's very much the only atmospheric thing in this work.

Reminded me of: A generic low-budget B-class 50s science fiction tv-series.

How to make it better: Describe things. Trade the atmospheric music in for atmospheric text. Make puzzles solvable.

Rating: weak

Here's another one that has an imaginary author. Violet is the protagonist's girlfriend's voice he (or optionally she) hears in his head – a fun choice for a narrator. The player has to finish a paper and must get rid of all the distractions to get the work done.

I ran into no bugs. Had to look at the walkthrough a couple of times. All in all a good, solid work, even if nothing ground-shattering. Best work so far.

Reminded me of: Kissing the Buddha's Feet

How to make it better: Stop pretending your imaginary girlfriend wrote it.

Rating: good

Not much to say about this one. It's another one of those maybe hundreds of games taking place in a school, this time written by a teacher though (but from a student's point of view). I ran into a showstopper bug that prevented me from finishing and had some annoying guess-the-verb moments. The plot or the game itself isn't exactly something you'd remember after moving on to the next piece.

Reminded me of: Any game of the same genre.

How to make it better: Add a story. Find betatesters.

Rating: weak

Another horror piece, this time with a bit more classical setting and gameplay. So far this is the best work in the comp – the story is meaningful, it's technically sound and it has just about the perfect length for the story.

The disgustingly filthy restaurant Afflicted takes place in is superbly described and is an excellent setting for the game. The descriptions build the atmosphere nicely and give a true feeling of disgust. But when it comes to player character's actions, the situation is different: whatever ghastly things happen, the PC reacts as if he found a blue sock in his red sock drawer.

Oh my a festering severed foot. I am so aghast. Let me just pick it up. Taken. Back to noting health code violations. It wouldn't have been much of a surprise if the twist had been that the PC is actually a robot.

A very big plus is that the parser reacts intelligently to a large array of commands. Especially the handling of collective nouns is very player-friendly: for example, X FEET gives one description of both feet collectively, instead of asking which foot did the player mean or giving the description of both feet separately.

Reminded me of: Vampire: The Masquerade

How to make it better: Give the protagonist emotions.

Rating: good

Right in the beginning after a pointless dream sequence the first thing you see is this:

At this point it's so blatantly obvious the kid's going to die that it wouldn't make any difference if it was said straight up right there. When the protagonist wakes from a nightmare and sees sunshine and lollipops and marshmallow unicorns, and the game is called "Grief", it's pretty much the only option. Thus the entire gameplay from beginning to end is just waiting for the moment when that happens – and that just takes away all the emotional response the player might have if they really cared.

I can easily see the reasoning behind this design choice though. The author tries to build a paradise that suddenly turns into a hell. Unfortunately it doesn't work as he intended: the world is not believable enough to sustain the contrast and the excessive underlining of the happy happy joy joy works against itself. Then when the tragedy occurs it's just a sudden blunt "he died oh bother", which is not nearly enough to make the player react in any way. Where's the other parent? Maybe the game could have started in a situation where the player character is mourning the death of his/her spouse. Then getting the kid killed as well would have been unexpected and maybe more meaningful.

There are many ways to get to the end, each with a different way of the kid dying. When you get to the "real" ending, where you get through the day with everyone staying alive, you are explained that the car accident is what really happened and everything else is just you going through all the options in your head how you could have saved him. This is actually quite clever and it's a shame that the execution is so flawed. If these are "what if I had done this instead" scenarios, why is the kid getting killed in arbitrary ways? Ok, in that state of mind you might think that "hey, if he had stayed home, maybe he would have started a fire or something and I still wouldn't have saved him". But if that's the case then the ending where he doesn't die doesn't make any sense: what was so special about this situation that he is spared? You do have to drive home from work too? (Maybe the point is that you have to keep an eye on the kid all the time to protect him. The paper-pushing work is apparently so important that both of you staying home is not an option.)

The biggest problem is that there's no emotional bond between the player and Thomas. He's just a simple automaton that follows the player around like a toy dog on a leash. The ABOUT said there were multiple endings and one final (presumably the kid-doesn't-die) ending. But after reaching the first end I just didn't care enough to go poking the game any further and just went with the walkthrough (besides I thought the point was to stop the accident and I didn't see any obvious or less obvious ways of doing that; skipping school or work didn't occur to me as a choice. You can't stay locked indoors forever. Wouldn't "we'll just walk home or take the bus" have been the most reasonable option, instead of stuffing your child inside a closet?)

I'm probably being too harsh here. The coding is solid and the author should be congratulated for the sheer ambitiousness of the game, but I always get worked up over missed potential. This game has a lot of it.

Reminded me of: Adam Cadre games, at least the influence is clear.

How to make it better: Make the emotional impact bigger.

Rating: Idea – good; Execution – weak

It's a complete mystery to me why someone would want to write their own parser for their comp game. Well, I can think of some reasons:

1. They don't know any languages designed to write IF (TADS, Inform, etc), so they use a generic language they're familiar with (Java, C, etc)...
   • ...but by the time they've written even a semi-decent parser they would've learned a specialized language.
2. They want to share/sell their engine so others can write games using their system...
   • ...but the system is not nearly as good as the mainstream languages.
3. There's something they want to do that's not possible with other languages (Internet, advanced multimedia features etc)...
   • ...and this is possibly the best reason to write your own parser, but not the case with the comp games (with some rare exceptions).
4. They want to practice computer programming by writing their own parser...
   • ...and this is another good reason, but your practice work's only justified place is your own hard drive or /dev/null.

Looks like Nerd Quest falls into category #2. Unfortunately the system is so incredibly simplistic and awkward to use that it's hard to imagine what's the whole point of it. It seems to be on par with most of the simpler BASIC games out there.

You have to LOOK AT, the parser doesn't recognize X or EXAMINE. You can't browse through old commands with the cursor keys. Every turn ends with ==WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?== (thanks, but I understood the first time that I'm supposed to type a command at the prompt). Instead of handling the action correctly, the game tells you to micromanage your actions ("Climb on the table first").

Add a meaningless story, sparse writing and unfunny humor, and you have secured yourself a rank on the bottom five of this year's comp.

Reminded me of: Games by Dunric, the King of Homebrewn Parsers

How to make it better: For starters, rewrite it with a real IF language.

Rating: awful

It's a strange comp year – the IntroComp entries are exceptionally long and many IFComp entries are much shorter than them. The something-stuck-in-the-throat School of Forbidden Wisdom is a prime example. There are only three puzzles that look like they're just a part of the introduction but when you're through with them the game just ends.

The first puzzle shows a picture of strange symbols and then gives a verbal description of similar symbols the player character sees. The player then has to match those descriptions with the picture to solve the puzzle. This kind of puzzle design is just frustrating. If I have a piece of paper with symbols on it and I can see the exact same symbols in front of me, please don't make me play pictionary to match them. You should never make a puzzle out of something that would be trivial to the player character in real life.

Fortunately the last two puzzles are decent even if a bit on the easy side. You can die but you are auto-resurrected to the start of that puzzle which is cool. The ending is nice and fits the mood but feels a bit distant because we know next to nothing about the characters involved.

The game is made with Alan. I have no experience with that system so it's hard to tell which of the game's quirks are caused by the system or the library. It certainly has some awkward responses and limitations. Saying that UNDO works but might cause erratic behavior is definitely not a good sign.

Reminded me of: Chinese action flicks, without the action.

How to make it better: Continue where the game ended.

Rating: weak

The author tells us that Berrost's Challenge is a homage of sorts to the Enchanter series. This is all ok and while I haven't played those games myself, the game does have that old times charm. But when you make a homage to old games it doesn't mean you have to repeat the poor design. In this game you have a hunger timer, a sleep timer, and inventory limits, both by bulk and weight. I have not yet heard anyone going "man, I sure miss those games when you had to juggle inventory and take care of eating and drinking" – I'm quite sure the classics had their charm in something else.

I'm not going to repeat what other people have said about punishing for disabling the annoyances, complex magic system that you are discouraged from using and vagueness of the setting. I agree with them all. There are also bugs, unfair puzzles and an overall sense of looseness of implementation.

Then again this is the first game in the comp of which I wanted to play more after I had reached the two hour mark. I hadn't found any of the five items I was looking for so there's much more to play. The game is harmless fun and some of the puzzles are quite clever. Being fun to play outranks technical merits in my book so I'll give this one a relatively high rating.

Reminded me of: Them good ol' adventures.

How to make it better: Tighten up the gameplay. Lose the hunger and sleep puzzles and inventory limitations. Find beta-testers.

Rating: good

The game tries to make two points: that what comes out the TV is mostly crap, and that big companies have a large influence in politics. These subjects have been critiqued for possibly centuries (well, not the TV thing obviously) and unfortunately Channel Surfing brings no new revelations to the discussion. So I just took the game as a game and put the background story mostly aside in my mind.

One thing that this game desperately needs is real testing. Barely any of the scenery items are implemented; there are at least two chairs in the game, neither of them can be sat on; there's food that can't be eaten... At the very beginning there's a remote control that can be operated only with CHANGE CHANNEL TO (number), no other commands work or even hint that the remote would be operational.

The puzzles are easy and possibly only there because "it's a game, it needs to have puzzles". Overall Channel Surfing is not something you would particularily remember playing after it's done, and that's not a good sign for a game that tries to make a point.

Reminded me of: The Phoenix Move

How to make it better: Find beta-testers, preferrably someone who don't call themselves "blaznazn" and "paxtonator".

Rating: decent

Finally a truly good game! Nightfall is well written, has a meaningful plot and is professionally executed.

The map is huge and I was sure at the beginning that I couldn't finish the game in two hours, but it did in fact take more or less exactly that time to reach the end. There seems to be a "better" ending than the one I reached which would take a bit longer to find.

The biggest problem I had with the game is that there's a lot of information about the background and game world if you explore it thoroughly, but the game actually discourages this. There's a GO TO command which auto-directs you to the place you want to go, which is all good in a huge map like this, but it does discourage exploration. When you go somewhere you get some intermittent task to do, then you just GO TO that place instead of spending time looking around.

It doesn't help that there's a time limit to the game. I might have explored more but now I always thought I have to keep on with the plot before the time runs out. Having the time limit is not a very good choice here – usually timers are used to discourage poking things too much and to keep the player following the plot.

All in all this is the best game in the competition so far and the first one I could imagine giving a 9 or a 10.

Reminded me of: Old spy movies.

How to make it better: Encourage exploration more. Lose the time limit.

Rating: excellent

The title makes me nauseous even before running the game. It's one of those general BASIC adventure titles that doesn't promise much at all. There's a disclaimer right at the start:

If you know there are bugs and you had to rush it, there's only one solution. Don't submit the game to the comp. Finish it and submit the next year. Unless you're terminally ill and you know you won't live to see the next October, there's no excuse to submitting a half-finished work.

Ok, I'm grumpy already. Maybe it gets better? Nope, a typo right in the first sentence. Then comes the banner:

How did the author not notice that? It's right there in the banner! Then a room description with lists of items set in seven paragraphs.

Ok, on with the game. This is possibly the best example of a game that really, really should be tested thoroughly. Or at least more than not at all. Spelling errors and annoying bugs abound. Then I die and really don't care to continue any more. Oh well.

Reminded me of: Most of the average ADRIFT games.

How to make it better: Find beta-testers and proofreaders. Then find more beta-testers and proofreaders. Ask programming questions in the Usenet or forums, not in the game's ABOUT text.

Rating: weak