IFComp 2009 Reviews

by Eric Eve

[comp09] Emily asks (of McMartin), "Are you the kind of person who eats your dessert first?

I'm really more the type that is flung about the entries by the capricious whims of fate. The Random Number Generator started me with Reconciling Mother last year. I'm owed this.

Ahem. Anyway.

Eric Eve is by far the most recognizable name in this year's set of comp authors, and he's as skilled as always. He says in his ABOUT text that he wound up cutting a lot of nonessential stuff to make it fit within the Z-Machine's limits, and it shows; some sequences have objects that are barely implemented or have seriously redundant descriptions, and there are some lengthy conversation sequences where you don't really have a choice about what to ask about, and the cuing is heavy-handed to the point of self-parody. That said, I do appreciate that it tried to add interactivity to what would normally be infodumps or cutscenes. It just felt like I was spending more time in those than in the game-y parts.

Design constraints aside, the game's as competent as I'd expect from Eric Eve; I only ran into a couple of technical glitches, and at least one of them was an interpreter portability issue.

The plot itself is kind of disjointed once you've finished it, in a way very reminiscent of Kevin Venzke's 2005 game Chancellor, but as long as you keep your mind focused on the game's here and now, it's a pretty straightforward, if grim, puzzly journey. I worked my way through and generally felt it played fair. It also played a bit more old-school, which isn't something I usually associate with Eve. He pulled it off, and I approved.

Then I got brickwalled at the very final puzzle in the game because I hadn't read quite closely enough to see that the state of the world had changed. This also meant that the hint did nothing for me and instead cued a move that made you lose immediately. So I had to go to the walkthrough for that. Between that and the narrative distance between the beginning and the end of the story, I found myself somewhat unsatisfied. This was a problem Chancellor had too.

Score: 7

by Matt Scarpino

A lot of my really gushingly positive reviews are for games that are actually pretty flawed. I've sometimes wondered if that's because I'm encountering them after a deadly march through piles of horrible, nigh-unplayable games and I'm thus so desperate that anything becomes a breath of fresh air.

Well, this is my second game this comp, the first was quite good, and while this game is deeply flawed, I enjoyed the heck out of it. So it's good to know that I haven't been liking games like this out of desperation, I guess.

Resonance admits that it was largely inspired by Eric Eve's Nightfall. In terms of complexity, it doesn't quite stack up, but the game I was reminded of more was a game from 2006 called Pathfinder. Pathfinder was pretty terrible, but the kind of tone it was aiming for and failing to reach, Resonance hits handily. I'm particularly impressed that they managed to fit supervillains basically laughing maniacally on national TV into a genre that is firmly noir.

The flaws are many. In playing, I was mostly exploring and messing around, and hit upon some ways to get to the final confrontation without going through all the work in the main path. In so doing, I wound up not really seeing everything I should have and thus got stuck. At that point, I wound up going to the walkthrough and then picking up the rest of the game from there.

by Emilian Kowalewski

It's a homebrew system for CYOA with objects. This is, purportedly, the first full game written with the system; we got to see an IntroComp-sized version of this with Project Delta last year. It was not a particularly stellar effort. For added fun, it also set off the antivirus warnings on half the judges' machines. At least that little issue has been fixed.

I say "purportedly" above because it's not like this is game is finished either. In this adventure, you are traveling to a town and fall down a hole. You then escape after solving a couple of puzzles, one of which involves turning two unrelated items into a magical item for no reason.

Oh, and only the choices of what to do were actually translated into English; the remainder not only remained in German, it was displayed by the engine using the wrong code page, so you'd be getting divided-by signs and sigmas and such instead of umlauted vowels.

Please don't submit half-finished games to the comp. This is the second time you've done this, and you're just going to get torn to shreds every time you do. A stand-up comedian doesn't walk up to a two-hour slot with a knock-knock joke, a shrug, and an "I got nothin'", even if it's amateur night.

Score: 1

by Duncan Bowsman

Suggested alternate title: Loquacious D and the Day Cravat of Destiny

This is a terrible, terrible game, and you should go play it right now.

This is another CYOA. CYOAs are a lot less interactive than standard IF, so that's generally a point against it. Not only that, this CYOA is "a Shake 'n Nod Adventure", which is to say, the only interaction you have with it is to say YES or NO.

I realized this and figured that the best it could hope for was a 2.

But it turns out that this minimally interactive fiction is nevertheless more engaging than quite a few freeform IFs. The general mechanic is that the game begins telling a story, and then it will ask you, "Hey, do you want to do X?" or an NPC will do something similar. The sheer amount of random things it allows means that you still feel like you're doing something, even though the choices may be of no consequence. If anything, the choices of no consequence enhance what immersion there is.

The writing is mostly going for Generic Wacky, and comes off like a geeky 16-year-old on a serious Pixie Stix rush. It isn't good writing, but you can do Generic Wacky and fall flat, and this, I found, didn't really do so.

It's got a number of both good and bad endings, and the plot doesn't stall unless you try really hard to make it do so.

And, of course, the fact that the only inputs it really accepts are YES and NO means that the usual issues with the ADRIFT parser are entirely nonexistent.

So at that point, I figured that this would be Not A Waste Of Time, but still not really what we're looking for as a Good IF, so it would be a nice solid 4.

And then, I managed to work out how to get the best ending, which involves (rot13ed for Even More Spoilery Than Usual) npghnyyl rkcybvgvat cnefre reebef naq znxvat gurz cybg-fvtavsvpnag. This means that the player formulates an actual plan, and then executes it, and then it can actually work. All through an interpreter that only really accepts YES/NO answers.

At that point, I was sufficiently impressed that I had to consider this solidly a middle-tier game. Its precise score will have to wait until I compare it against the others.

Well done, Bowsman. This isn't really the kind of thing I'm looking for in the IFComp - it never had a chance at top tier - but it's really quite good for what it is.

Score: 5

by Utkonos

A grim period piece set in 19th Century Russia. The PC, the objects in his house, and the atmosphere all are frought with history. Unfortunately for me, I don't really have a lot of experience with this period, so I can't speak to its accuracy. It certainly felt appropriate.

The story itself, such as it is, is pretty depressing; as far as I can tell, the duel is unwinnable, and the "best" ending you can get gives you a score of 1 out of a possible 1, giving you the rank of not dead.

I say "best" in scare quotes because it's fairly clear that said ending can't be the true ending (the AMUSING challenges us to find "what really happened") though even then it's not too horrendously out of place.

As usual, I don't have a lot to say about games that are quietly well-written and solid all the way through. This is quietly well-written and solid all the way through.

Score: 8

by Brad Renshaw as "bloodbath"

This is so bad it's got to be intentional.

"Oh, come now, Martin," I hear you object, "it can't be that bad. Since when can you read minds, anyway?"

Well, let us fire it up and see what there is to see:

You were exploring the underground empire when it began to cave in! You are trapped!

Welcome to zork, buried chaos.

written by bloodbath, sereal number 099518.

Created with inform 7 build 5u92. release 1.

small room
You are in a tiny room in a building. North lies a big room and a hole is in the ground. Crates are everywhere.

An elvish sword is hanging on the wall.

A small crate is against the wall.

You can also see a brass lantern here.

>

In order to get this text, they had to replace the automatically generated banner text for the express purpose of adding misspellings.

And those extra blank lines and capitalization problems? There in the original. (Not shown: it's/its errors.)

And, of course, the game is bad Zork fanfic.

And no description is more than a sentence or so long.

And there are two mazes.

And stuff randomly kills you if you ever mess with it.

And when you die you are randomly teleported, quite possibly past points of no return into new sections of the map.

And, if you do everything right, you end up in a dead end with a single described exit that doesn't work. The walkthrough gets to this point and breezes past, pretending that it did. I must conclude that the game is unfinishable by normal means.

As a troll of the comp, I give it a six out of ten; it's very, very bad in every respect, but it doesn't have any hook to make you want to bother playing. That means that the actual pain inflicted is minimal. As an actual comp entry...

Score: 1

by Kevin Jackson-Mead

First a wry pun: "More like Gleaning the Verb."

Second, a cathartic scream:

MONTFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORT

And finally, a review. Ahem.

by Rob Dubbin and Adam Parrish

This one's going to be hard to review, because it was basically like catnip just for me.

The core gimmick is that you have a device that can wrench letters out of words in room or object descriptions, transforming either them or their behavior. And then you can hurl the letters back into other words, for similar effects. Things get out of hand fast, about the time you fill a garden with exotic pants.

I needed the walkthrough ready to hand for at least one scene in the game, but when I was in the same headspace as the game, I was very happy indeed.

Another fun piece of the game is that it uses Glulx's windowing capabilities to provide an additional status line of sorts at the bottom. It basically provides the PC's running internal monologue and this is both entertaining and informative. It clues a number of puzzles and maintains a consistent atmosphere even when everything else has gone mad.

by Sarah Morayati

You know the type so well. They cling so they can take you down. It's not like they're really capable of liking anyone unless there's something in it for them. And they'll go up to you after they screw up your whole life -- not your life, Lottie, you're better than that, dumb people's lives -- and just smile. Yes. You hate people like that. So you hate her too.

Yes, it's another glorious entry in the very proud tradition of bitter, scheming, unlikeable PCs who must crush the everliving snot out of all their rivals so that they may gain or maintain petty power and/or glory.

The quote above is, of course, given without the tiniest hint of self-loathing or self-awareness on the part of the PC. Even though Adam Cadre seems the only one who's worked in this space that's taken the trouble to make sure that the people you're crushing are all even more unlikeable than the PC, this technique worked reasonably well for me.

It's also awesome that your mom is scum too - she is in fact the hint system.

And then the ending. God save us all. I'm going to have to revisit it and play through it again after the comp to try out the things in AMUSING.

Downsides are few. The most negative thing I can say about this is that it was (for me) too big for the comp, so after 90 minutes of chaos I had to shift over to the (excellently divided and structured for minimum spoilage) walkthrough. That won't be a problem for those who come along afterwards, though.

Highly recommended.

Score: 9

by Richard Bos

This was the author's game he wrote to learn his development system. It's properly implemented, correctly spelled, tolerably written, and has a hint system and stuff while not being complex enough to really need it.

That alone would put it above a sizable fraction of most comp entries - or so many judges would lead you to believe.

It's a pity that the author forgot to not make his game be a complete waste of time, what with being a pretty flagrant tutorial adventure and such.

Simple numbers aren't really enough to represent this, but I think I have a new suggestion. My usual suggestion about how you shouldn't submit to the comp unless you think you're better than the stuff that was averaging 4.5 or so in previous years still holds, but I think I must now add this rule:

Should you disregard the previous rule, at least have the decency to be an epic trainwreck. More Gathered In Darkness or wHen mAchines aTtack, less this.

It's actually somewhat ironic that, while I was grading how effective zork, buried chaos was as an entry trolling the IFComp, and grading it poorly, Eruption's stated purpose was, I think, sincere. But if it weren't, as a troll it would have been a good nine out of ten for giving the more vocally grousy judges what they said they wanted, and making them regret they had asked for it.

As I have found myself saying many a time before, please do not submit homework assignments or personal exercises to the Comp.

Score: 3

by Lea Albaugh

Short but sweet. If I were feeling uncharitable, I'd say that it's basically just a maze with a cute gimmick; but it's a very cute gimmick.

No plot to speak of, but the central puzzle is a lot of fun. I can't really rate it too high because it's so slight, but this is pretty clearly an author to watch.

Score: 6

by Oliver Ullmann

This story begins with 3 pages of over-the-top transhuman space opera, and then the scene suddenly shifts and you're some guy in a bar.

And then the bartender gives you an exotic fruit and ruins the mood entirely by saying, "Please accept this as a present from the house, great warrior. It is very yummy and will give you strength."

It's kind of odd to actually write this, but this game would have been better if it were more generic. The frame story is a total distraction and makes the nature of the game itself kind of a letdown. It also, in order to fit the game itself (a straightforward explore-abandoned-base adventure) into the intended broader narrative, it finds itself making the plot proper an exercise in futility so that it can be Part I of a larger story. Not really a good breakpoint.

That said, the main game is quite adequate for the explore-abandoned-base genre, even if it is a bit hoary now. This is one of the only games I've played where pointless random combat encounters not only weren't pointless but actually increased suspense at a couple of points. I'm pretty sure the odds were rigged in those points so that it wasn't just a "you have an x% chance to lose", but if it's not, then it's easy enough to fix. The progression of puzzles also was decent.

If you can get past the beginning and the end, it's not a bad game to visit.

Score: 6

by Hannes Schueller

This experience of playing this game is best shown, not told.

> THROW PIZZA OUT WINDOW
I only understood you as far as wanting to throw the pizza.

> THROW PIZZA OUT
What do you want to throw the pizza out of?

> WINDOW
Recognizing you can't eat it anymore, you throw the pizza out...

Oh, wait, this one is even better:

> W
Adrenaline is rushing through you as you take the step into your boss's office. There is nobody in there [etc etc etc]

You can't, since the boss's door is in the way.

>

And then...

> SET CLOCK TO 12PM
No, you can't set that to anything.

> SET CLOCK TO 12 PM
You set the clock to 12:00 pm.

Oh, and not only did he forget to make your mailbox fixed in place, the walkthrough accidentally picks it up with a casual TAKE ALL command halfway through.

Oh, right, I suppose I should talk about something besides implementation failures. So, the plot is that you've become invisible, and so you are out to Show Them All and otherwise wreak revenge on those who have wronged you. This involves petty larceny and vandalism. This is intentional; the hints point out that revenge-crazed mad scientists never seem to make much of themselves.

But dash it all, they usually at least try. The throwaway bonus ending where you destroy the entire solar system in response to an illogical command was better than the entire rest of the game. Not that, as you might have guessed, this really says a whole lot.

Score: 2

by Darren Ingram

Ah, the ancient judges' lament. If it's been said once, it's been said a hundred times. "Please do not enter your exercise or practice games into the comp." But if you must, this is basically the way to do it.

This is a "toybox" game, where there's a bunch of random mostly-unconnected things, and you poke at them, and eventually you got tired of it and leave.

It's also pretty clearly a first game. There's a fair number of beginner mistakes like unimplemented scenery, and actions taken in the room description (an object can be called out as "catching your eye" even if it's gone, for instance). Custom verbs have no default behavior, so trying them on unexpected objects just gives you a prompt.

A running gag throughout the game is that the game pauses for you to hit a key constantly; a complex description will easily have six or seven components. This lends a staccato rhythm to the game that is unusual in IF. It manages a few jokes that otherwise wouldn't have worked, but I don't think it works as a general technique.

Oddly enough, this game would also be improved with a score; the frame story says you're testing a virtual environment, and a score would be a handy way of accounting for how much of the game we've seen. It would have an in-game justification and an out-of-game use; as it is, we have to type WALKTHRU to see what there is to see, and we aren't allowed to spell it right, either.

This seems like a litany of complaints, and it basically is. And yet, it's still got its high points. The writing is generally pretty decent, and some of the toys were fun to play with. (I'm a huge nerd and actually sat down and worked out the probabilities to get an optimimum strategy for the dice game; but hey, that means I was engaged, right?)

Score: 5

by Ben Vegiard

The ABOUT text reveals that this game was first designed in 1984 by the author when he was 14, where it was first partially implemented in Commodore BASIC and...

Wait! Come back!

Anyway, the author invites us to come back to 1984 with him to relive what he thought would be a worthy game then. Of course, I was five in 1984, so maybe we should instead fast forward to when I was 14 or 15. And so now, you know, you'll be competing with Eric the Unready, but I've got time on my hands because I just finished my first replay of Star Control II...

...And it's not bad at all. In fact, it does better if we fast-forward to modern times, because 30-ish me is more likely to only mark down a little for "On the bed is a keys" and is also more likely to be pleased by having an NPC wander around evincing goal-seeking behavior and such.

Both young and old me liked how you had trouble with your... well, your interface... in the first few moves of the game.

By modern standards, the plot is nothing special - it's got wacky uncles and mad scientists and robots and stuff - but hey, wacky uncles and mad science. And it's got, you know, a plot. So for an old-school game it's actually quite in line with what I tend to think of as the current fashions.

It could use a more careful pass of people explicitly trying to break it and then having the game handle it gracefully. It also appeared to me that an optimal playthrough would still end up missing a bunch of points, but that may just be because I didn't actually solve everything.

Score: 7

by Chris K.

This was a rather less pleasant old-school treasure hunt. The setup wasn't bad, at least:

• You have a spaceship that can travel to various star systems.
• Within a system, you have a teleporter that will let you go to various places of interest.
• There is a major trading post where you can trade treasures you find at the various places of interest for additional navigational codes.

The ultimate goal is to trade your way up to the point where you have the ability to travel to and successfully loot a fabulous treasure, thus winning the game.

So, what went wrong?

Well, first, I only learned all of the things I described above by reading the walkthrough, entering 50-100 moves of it, and studying the results. The controls are not only completely opaque, my first attempt to leave the ship actually rendered the game apparently unwinnable, reliably getting me killed later with an unhelpful error message. The PC appears to have no knowledge of his own ship or systems, as well; an absolutely critical item (the device that lets you actually return to your ship once you have left) is never described more specifically than "a shiny gizmo" and if you are not capable of being transported back, the failure message is simply "Nothing happens. What were you expecting?" Someone who hasn't read the walkthrough would reasonably conclude that the device was worthless as opposed to repeatedly necessary to get anywhere at all in the game.

Cluing: not optional. Descriptions of things that the PC knows but the player doesn't: absolutely mandatory.

In addition to not really being discoverable, the transit sequence is extraordinarily cumbersome; dozens of moves, including a half-dozen GO commands, for what should really be two commands - maybe even just one.

The trading post is also problematic, in that the treasures you find are not of equal value and there does not seem to be a way to reliably appraise them. That is, a merchant that doesn't have anything that's more expensive than is tradable for a 'moderately valuable object' will appraise everything as either worthless or 'moderately valuable'.

As a result, it's far too easy to trade yourself into an unwinnable position because you purchased items in the wrong order or overtraded an item. Worse, some event triggers seem to be so finicky that the game becomes unwinnable even if you trade items of equal value to the wrong merchants. The CUBE chip never spawned for me until I restarted and played back to that point following the walkthrough exactly.

Not cool. This needs not just polishing and debugging but some serious thought put into reworking some core mechanics before it's even adequate. But once that's done, it will jump up to "cleverly structured treasure hunt" immediately.

Score: 2

by Will Conine as "Red conine"

In a way it's kind of refreshing that I managed to get 2/3 of the way through the comp before finding a game this bad. I'm sure some of it is ADRIFT 3.9's fault - in particular, a number of actions the walkthrough suggests only work when phrased just so thanks to ADRIFT's horrible non-parser - but I'm actually inclined to give it a pass given the various other issues:

• In a crowning glory of world modeling not seen since Detective, objects are listed in the room description with 'you'd better take this' and are of course still there and still something you'd better take even after you've taken and used it.
• In fact, every object basically does this. "A meter maid is here. You should ask her about quantum chromodynamics."
  • Well, except that example is funnier than anything in the game.
  • Also, better spelled and punctuated.
• The author is apparently unaware that "women" has a different spelling when used in the singular.
• There is a filing cabinet, with a plot critical item inside it. OPEN FILING CABINET however pushes it aside revealing a secret passage. The only way to actually, like, open it is to use the command OPEN CABINET FILE, a phrasing that appears nowhere in the game and is only casually mentioned in the walkthrough.
• At one point you are locked in a room with an NPC you must give something for a plot-critical item as well the keys to leave the room. However, from this point on, giving anybody anything simply gives the reply "You can't give that here!" which means the game is now unwinnable.
• But you aren't locked in the room; you can just walk straight through the wall because the author never bothered to implement locked doors.
• But it's still unwinnable because the final winning move is to give somebody something, and you can't give that here.

It turns out that he also left the debugging data in, so people with more skill with ADRIFT than I have were able to pick it apart and see whether it was actually winnable. Turns out, it's not; the GIVE actions that are supposed to advance (or complete) the plot aren't flagged as being valid in any room at all, and so they will never, ever fire. Even with abuse of debugging verbs the game is uncompletable as written. It's inconceivable, as a result, that the author even bothered trying to play through his own game.

I'm pretty sure I spent more time writing this review then the author spent writing the game in the first place. Learn to use your tools, dude. This includes the English language. Normally I'd suggest writing in something like I7 instead of ADRIFT, too, since it is a superior free tool that runs more broadly, but I'm not convinced that the author can write coherently enough for the I7 compiler to accept his text.

Then again, maybe "capable of writing sentences acceptable to the I7 assertion parser" is a good minimum bar to clear for your writing before you submit something to hundreds of hostile critics, hm?

Score: 1

by Matt Wigdahl

Grounded in Space borrows a lot of flavor and style from the Heinlein juveniles, particularly the ones like Farmer in the Sky. The hero, a strapping young lad who is also a skilled engineer with a distressing disregard for human life, endangers people he cares about and is thus condemned to death by his primary caregivers. (As in all young-adult tales, adults are only there to be meddlesome villains, to get their priorities all wrong, and to generally be in the way of our teenaged or preteen heroes, who are maybe a little impulsive but ultimately Know Better.)

So you get to maybe not die, thanks to your aforementioned engineering skills, and you get to save the day and impress the girl next door thanks to your aforementioned disregard for human life. Hooray! A wholesome learning experience for all involved, assuming your disregard for human life didn't actually get anyone killed. Then they kind of lose out, but they were just stubborn grownups anyway.

This sounds a little dismissive, but I don't really mean it that way; it's just that, well, this is every inch a story in the tradition of the classic SF boy's adventure stories, and you would do well to get into that headspace first before you start playing. Fortunately, the writing is clean and energetic enough to carry the mood throughout.

The gameplay, however, didn't quite measure up to the writing. There were three basic modes you were in at any given time: linearly following a fairly strict script, solving the kinds of puzzles you find in brainteaser books, and lastly, timed crisis situations that involve taking tactical advantage of everything at your disposal (which the linear sections handily introduced you to).

The third part was excellent, and the first was well-enough written to keep me engaged (and it familiarized me with the systems I needed to know later). The second part, however, was a hackneyed geometry puzzle that was still impossibly finicky even after you'd solved it on paper. I also found the question poorly posed; I was over halfway through a solution that didn't work before the reason it wouldn't work became clear, and it was something that the protagonist was, I think, supposed to be immediately aware of.

So, that was somewhat annoying. Also, the phrasing for the solution I found to the ultimate crisis (which also turned out to be the one in the walkthrough, happily enough) had impossibly finicky phrasing, and required referring to one of the mining probes as a "station" - something I don't recall it ever referred to as on the text. This either should have been made more flexible, or we should have gotten to do stuff with the station before the first crisis hit.

So yes, this could use a little polishing, and it's short, and some people don't like Heinlein-style boys adventure stories, but this is well-crafted and hits its mark.

Score: 6

by Duncan Bowsman (as "Tiberius Thingamus")

"In this game... ye riddling gnome"

MONTFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORT

Arrrgh, argh argh argh argh argh.

If we're going to write in Ye Olde Butchered Englishe, could we maybe butcher it with a sharper cleaver?

by Jack Welch and Ben Collins-Sussman

For a linear plot, this is an incredibly complex game. There are three stories going on at once:

1. The "real" story, which is about a space race between Earth and one of its breakaway colonies, and about the relationship between two of the people involved in it.
2. An AI who started as a scan of one of the two people, interacting with a limited environment that looks a whole lot like her apartment, going about her daily routine. Which would be horrible and boring except that...
3. Each of these morning routine actions is tied to an important function of the starship that the AI is (only partially knowingly) commanding.

The plot begins with you having to repeat various actions to get your morning routine correct, and to allow the designers to beta-test the software. This serves both as tutorial, and as a mechanism to let the outside plot progress; their differing reactions to your routine are part of the plot.

(Important side note; in this part, a lot of dialogue that was supposed to appear apparently did not do so in Spatterlight or Gargoyle. WinGlulxe and Zoom both showed it fine though. Be warned.)

Once the program is tested, you're sent out to do your mission in earnest, and, as one might expect, Things Don't Go Entirely According To Plan. This is where the game starts to really shine. You have an entire ship's worth of systems at your disposal, there are vast numbers of alternate solutions that you can deploy in sequence, and you understand the systems because you'd been paying attention to all three layers in the beginning.

However, your interface remains the "in the apartment" interface, even though at this point you are getting information in a more "AI controlling a ship" sort of way. This means that you find yourself saying things like "Oh, no; I've got to hurry; all will be lost if I cannot BRUSH my TEETH in time!"

Once the story is concluded, the AMUSING text then grades you. I did fairly well (3/4, 3/8, for those keeping track at home), and I didn't ever really need hints, either. So I thought the difficulty was well-pitched.

Highly recommended, but this isn't a game to pick up lightly. You'll need to pay a lot of attention. That said, of the three games competing for the top spot this year, this was the only one I could beat without hints. I think that means that I give it the nod for Best of Show. As such...

Score: 10

by Owen Parish

MONTFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORT

At least there were only two riddles in this one, and one was inoffensive while the other was actually clever.

The eponymous Grand Quest was for the Holy Grail, and the opening text made me hopeful that we'd be going on some metaphorical journey through the soul to find the true meaning of virtue and all that.

The game does touch on this at a few points, but it's a very few. However, except at the very beginning and the very end, the moral questions, such as they are, are universally "are you willing to give up that which is Good for that which is Best?" and the answer is always "yes".

This includes taking or at least simulating actions that would normally be considered sins, which we must commit or fail.

I'm pretty sure this is not how holy quests, of which The Grail Quest is a paragon, are supposed to work. If the quest consumes you, burning away who you are, the parts it burns away are supposed to be the bad parts. That's a big part of what makes it a holy quest instead of an unholy obsession. In fact, I blew the first few tests precisely because I figured the rules were that if you were willing to give up the Good, you did not deserve the Quest in the first place. (The treasury and tax room were fine, though not particularly challenging; the tax room in particular you simply followed orders and proceeded.)

The stuff that wasn't riddles or committing sins was logic puzzles and one immensely complicated multistep machine puzzle that I fiddled with for about 10 moves and then played the over-50-move solution straight out of the walkthrough. It didn't even grab me well enough to reverse-engineer the mechanic.

So yeah, no. One could probably write a good grail-quest game where every single move command was > NORTH, but this is not that game.

Score: 3

by Tom Murrin

Not a whole lot to say about this one. It's short. It's oldschool. You kill things. With weapons. And then take their stuff, because, hey, points. It's stuffed with anachronisms. Eventually you run out of map, and thus escape and win.

My only complaints really involve the transportation between the upper and lower levels; it was not really clear to me that the initial transit was going to be safe (a 20-foot drop onto rock?) and the action required to get back was not obvious. (I think I'd suggest having the object be dirty, since it will already be activated as a side effect of CLEANing it.)

Short, sufficiently diverting, but not really the kind of thing you'd be pressing into the hands of other players.

Score: 4

by Mark Jones as "A Delusioned Teenager"

This was submitted semi-pseudonymously, but since the contact info was his name, just enl33t3d, I feel comfortable pointing out that this was by the same author as Press [Escape] to Save and wHen mAchines aTtack. It's actually good that I determined this, because it colors the review a bit.

For you see, this work is serious business. It will even chide you about it if you try to XYZZY or SING. And it's also a Work Of Teenage Angst, which means that On Optimism is the other local touchpoint.

And it's actually better than all of these, all told. This is the first game by this author where I was never actually stymied by bugs; I only had to go to the walkthrough when I missed a cue. I'm not sure if that's because he forgot to cue them or if I simply missed it in the reams of breathless text that are Jones's signature style.

The writing is, as you might guess from this, still pretty bad; but the reaction is, for most of the game, more just the kind of faint embarassment you would get when flipping through a teenager's composition book. Even taking the tortured metaphors, strained phrasings, and breathless naration into account, though, this is miles better than On Optimism, which was cringeworthy all the way through.

Then the personification of the PC's guilt causes him to, uh, crucify himself in the garage and then set himself on fire, if I followed that bit of the plot right. So if you're here for the trainwreck, it does come eventually.

I can't really recommend this to others to play any more than I could its predecessors - but if you did like those, this does deliver, and more generally competently. If you didn't find his writing style problematic in the earlier games, you're quite likely to actively like this and be annoyed with me for giving it such a low score.

But, well, I just can't deal with the writing here. My recommendations to the author would be to focus now on improving his writing, perhaps joining a composition seminar or the like for additional practice and faster feedback. The programming ability shown in this one was a dramatic improvement over its predecessor, and was indeed solid enough to stand unashamed alongside the other entries this year.

I am happy with the trajectory Jones is on, though; even though I consistently give him low scores he's also one of the authors I consider worth watching. This is more evidence for that.

Score: 3

by Dave Horlick

Man, such a great title. It really needs a good baritone and a ton of reverb:

GATOR-ON, Friend to Wetlands!