Black Rock City (review)

"Black Rock City" is a web based game by Jim Munroe, entered in the 2016 interactive fiction competition. I chose this one next because I was drawn to the cover photo, and also because I hoped it would allow me to experience the Burning Man Festival without having to use drugs or suffer a week in the desert. Also, I've been on Jim Munroe's mailing list for years, and bought a copy of a short independent film he produced some time back "Ghosts with Shit Jobs". It was really good. You should buy your own copy.

"Black Rock City" employs a novel interactive interface. The player chooses one of two verbs from the bottom of the screen, and drags it up to the relevant noun within the current text description. Usually there is only one noun available, but sometimes there are other choices. The story moves along in a sort of dreamy, disconnected way which reminded me of the style of the old "Choose your own adventure" paperbacks. In that series, one's choice would fundamentally warp the direction of the story, but often not in a logical or predictable way.

There are multiple story arcs available in "Black Rock City". The blurb claims they all have six choices, which would suggest up to sixty four possible paths. I replayed enough times to confirm that the stories are always short, always have the same dreamlike quality, and always end in a dust storm.

When I felt finished, I went back and read the subtitle: "Choose your own burn-venture." So my sense of Munroe's literary influence may be correct.

Mirror and Queen (review)

"Mirror and Queen" is a web based interactive fiction entered in the 2016 interactive fiction competition. I chose this game from near the top of a randomized list, in part because I recognized the author's name "Chandler Groover" as a talented writer from last year's competition. Groover has experimented with some interesting ways to make parser based games more accessible to new players. Last year's entry "Midnight Swordfight" understood an exhaustive list of object words and conversation topics, but the player was trained during the game's opening turn to limit their verb choices to a short explicitly defined list. Once the player accepted that convention, the game became a highly immersive experience.

"Mirror and Queen" takes that one step further, inviting the player to "think about anything" and removing actions altogether. The player character (an aging evil queen) stands in front of her mirror reflecting on whatever actions, objects or abstracts the player types, without ever taking action herself until late in the narrative.

This isn't the first time I've seen this mechanism in an IF game, but Groover carries it off beautifully, delivering unique evocative responses to everything I thought to type, and fostering the illusion that the parser really understands the player's commands. (only once, during the very first turn, did I read a response which hinted I might be working outside the parser's vocabulary. I had typed the word "llama". After all, it had prompted me to think about anything.)

For an open-input game, this is highly accessible. On the flip side, this game design does not provide for the highest level of player agency or branched path story telling. But if you accept that, "Mirror and Queen" is a solid piece of writing.

Cactus Blue Motel (review)

"Cactus Blue Motel" is a Twine game by Astrid Dalmady entered in the 2016 interactive fiction competition.  About ten minutes into playing this, I felt like it needed a soundtrack to go behind it, so I found "Apache Tears; native flute music."

Spoilers after the break

All I do is dream (review)

"All I do is dream" is a hypertext type story entered in the 2016 interactive fiction competition. I recognized the author Megan Stevens as the author of "Our Boys in Uniform" an antiwar story which I reviewed favorably in the 2013 competition. I believe she has also published some more recent Twine games which I have not played.

In rough summary, this game is about the lethargy experienced by someone with chronic depression. This is not the first time IF has been used to examine the problem of serious depression. It is uncomfortable to review such games, because the reader assumes that the author may be representing something of themselves through the story and doesn't want a critical review. It isn't a theme that wins competitions. But there too, not everybody enters to win.

The first time I played on my primitive stone-age Ipod, I played up to a point where I got stuck in an endless loop. I liked the writing well enough that I blamed my Ipod and loaded it again on a chrome browser (the whole story only takes about fifteen minutes). Then I hit the same dead-end.  A link that reads "Maybe tomorrow you'll play it again?" clicking on it does nothing but repeat the same message. Maybe that's the point, that chronic depression feels like an endless dead-end loop. But the story is already so short, the dead-end felt instead like it was a programming bug. 

I think this could have been a powerful story if it was a little longer, and if there was just a hint of hopefulness at the end.

How to win at rock, paper, scissors (review)

"How to Win at Rock, Paper, Scissors" is a Glulx game by Brian Kwak entered in the 2016 IF competition. This game was not at the very top of my first randomized shuffle, but it was the first to catch my attention with its intriguing blurb, and simple but clever graphic.

I've been playing the IF comp since 2003, and have written two well-received games myself-both published in 2008 ("Pascal's Wager" and "Afflicted"). I had a child in 2009, and in the years since my only contribution to the IF community has been a number of reviews, often scattered over the internet under different pseudonyms. Looking forward I plan to keep all reviews on this blog.

2007 was the first year judges were allowed to post comment during the competition. That rule change had a hugely positive impact on the competition, generating more buzz than it had seen before. Over time, that buzz has lead to a greater number and variety of games/stories displayed in the competition in the years since. 2016 will be the first year in which the game designers themselves can participate in the conversation. Most reviewers are polite and most designers have a thick enough skin, so I am cautiously hopeful about the rule change.

I realize that many of my links to last year's games are now broken, pointing to the 2016 competition page instead of the 2015 games. I will try some new ways of linking to this year's games that should be more permanent.

If you came here for the review: "How to Win at Rock, Paper, Scissors" is a function parser game, with a few funny moments. Implementation is sparse but adequate. There are several puzzles, with a repeating puzzle dynamic reflected in the title. I completed the game in under two hours, with a single reference to the hints, which I probably could have gotten by without. The external walk-through file is formatted in ROT13, which I like for preventing spoilers. Recommended if you're looking for something light and inconsequential.

trigger warnings in IF comp 2016

There are two games in this year's interactive fiction competition which contain trigger warnings. Stories and IF games have long had "content warnings". I'm OK with those. But trigger warnings...that's some trendy new slang.

A content warning advises "This story about the Rwandan Civil War contains scenes of graphic genocide". The content warning speaks to a variety of readers, whether they are an actual survivor of the Rwandan conflict, or simply don't care to read about it. Because really, lots of people are averse to violent content, but rarely does the gravity of that aversion rise to the level of a defined psychiatric disorder implied by the word "trigger."

Furthermore, the particular themes which are listed most often as potential "triggers" are the product, to large extent, of a social construct about what we ought to accept as a valid source of anxiety. A quick internet search turns up hundreds of specific phobias likely to trigger a panic attack in affected individuals. So why do we never read "This story about the circus contains graphic depictions of clowns"?

Somebody reading this right now probably thinks I'm an insensitive lout who doesn't care about combat veterans or suffering victims of past abuse. But believe me, I understand panic disorders and have my own peculiar sensitivities (not clowns...I love clowns) that don't ever show up in anyone else's trigger lists. Can't we just stick with content warnings?

Sub Rosa: The Seven Deceits of Confessor Destine (a review)

"Sub Rosa (The Seven Deceits of Confessor Destine)" is a parser-style interactive fiction written by Joey Jones and Melvin Rangasamy for the 2015 interactive fiction competition.

"Sub Rosa" is part mystery, part spy intrigue set in an alternate meta-verse.  The writing is remarkable for the detail and uniqueness of the alien culture it describes.  From the moment I checked my inventory, I was sucked into this game.

[transcript]
>x llama suit
From feet to appendages to head, your form is completely covered by a thin-weave suit made wholly from the wool of the pellucid llama. It renders you undetectable to all the senses that matter, including your own.

You wove it yourself under the tutelage of the master weaver, White Widow. For her knowledge and silence she only asked for the whereabouts of her seven wayward sons. As you wove the invisible thread, she slowly and solemnly sapped each one, all the while instructing you on how to avoid dropping unseeable lines.

Your lower legs are splattered with mud from the trek through the Mambling Plains.

>remove suit
Merely wearing the suit would be pointless, anyone would see straight through to the person beneath. No, in order to make use of it, you had to weave it into your own skin. In time, the suit will peel off as your skin is shed, but not today.

[/transcript]

As the blurb suggests, the goal of this game is to infiltrate the compound of a corrupt theocrat and uncover evidence of his deceitfulness.  The puzzles are clever and approach a level of difficulty I have not seen in modern IF, perhaps not since "Spellbreaker".  There are only seven points (seven deceits to discover) but each one requires pulling together information or using tools gathered from multiple different source locations.  But the game is so solidly coded that I felt the puzzles were fair, and I did not turn to the walkthrough until halfway through the game, well after the two hour judging period had ended.

In a game this large there are, of course, a few minor bugs in the implementation, but overall I was impressed by the professional quality of the writing, programming and game design.  The Confessor's compound includes a library with over a hundred books.  And unlike so many of the libraries I've run across in past works of IF (where reading the tomes individually returns a default message 95% of the time) the Confessor's books have been individually implemented, each one with a brief, interesting and often useful piece of information.  I will say, however, that I wish the library had not been at the center of quite so many of the puzzles.  Reading through every one of those books, some of them more than once, became a little tedious and non-interactive after a while.

Really a great game.  One of the top in this year's competition.