A plus or a minus by the score will indicate a bias (see my scoring definitions).

     Only 29 entries? I wondered if it was going to be down based on what I felt was a general lack of excitement in the community this year. Whatever the cause, there are fewer games for 2007 than I’ve seen in quite a while. Undoubtedly I’ll find a few gems among them. As always, I hope to have fun with the games, whatever the quality.

     I hope my reviews benefit the authors, while making for a good read in general. As in prior years, I’ll try to write each one directly after playing when possible, and in the order played. They’ll form a sort of “judge’s journal” as a result. I’ll also run transcripts (where possible). These will be available to each author for his or her own game, upon request.

     Where in prior years (as an entrant myself) I couldn’t vote, this year I’m honor-bound by the two-hour rule. I hit the mark during a particularly frustrating point in the game, where it’s possible to lose without knowing quite why (and without having what you need to avoid losing). I had already encountered a few other minor issues by then, but nothing major. I reviewed my own scoring guidelines and decided on an “8”.

     That’s the vote I’ll submit, and I played to completion afterwards. For all that’s good about Varkana, though, it suffers from a few technical problems that might have been resolved with a bit more time (and still could be, in a post-comp re-release).

     For instance, there seems to be one particular purpose for the art stand in the bazaar. It’s for a solution to a puzzle I solved in a different way (this is mentioned in the game’s walkthrough), but aside from that one purpose, it’s under-implemented to the point that I thought the game might be broken in a way that was keeping me from moving forward. It turns out I was wrong, but an exchange like this is still a frustration:

     >x stand
     Lots of art supplies for sale. You just love examining all those tools and equipment.
     >buy supplies
     Nothing is on sale.

     Examining the tools and the equipment results in the same message, and nothing is actually for sale (unless you hit on the one thing you can buy -- and it’s not paper).

     This exchange also had me wondering if the game was broken:

     >ask kids about paper
     Which do you mean, the simple, the bookshelves, papers, the paper or the papers?

     The work-around for the quirk mentioned in the game’s readme.txt doesn’t help, so I began to wonder if there was a disambiguation problem that would ultimately prevent me from getting what I needed. Fortunately, I found it elsewhere (and kicked myself for not remembering about it), but it was still a shame to find implementation bugs in an otherwise well-designed game.

     There were a few typos and grammatical issues (as mentioned earlier), including one typo early on where the NPC “Nivanen” was referred to as “Ninaven”. The exits from some rooms weren’t described, but this seemed limited to rooms where the missing exit was the direction from which you arrived. An in-game map was a nice touch later on (making navigation much easier), but I hesitated to use it at first for fear of getting spoilers just based on the layout or location names. All in all, it could just use some polishing.

     What bothered me most, though, wasn’t the minor bugs, small errors in the text, or even the plot switch-up near and at the end. It was the dead-end point during a key confrontation, and later, a puzzle that seemed out of place given the smooth flow of puzzles up to that point.

     In the case of former, it is possible to arrive in a no-win situation. The walkthrough, I found out later, advises you to “undo” out of the no-win, but I didn’t get a strong sense that the game was telling me enough to know I lacked something required to proceed. I thought about it and figured out what I needed to try (without the walkthrough), but I could easily have saved over my prior games or exited/restarted where “undo” would have become impossible. It may be hypocritical to criticize this, since my own Distress does this more than once, but in Varkana it seemed like a complete break from the game’s established flow. The game was generally forgiving prior to that (you could die by doing stupid stuff, but never inside a dead end this way), yet this was a situation where failure came a few turns later and in a way that’s impossible to avoid if you haven’t previously prepared for it.

     A little later, it’s necessary to command an NPC to take action. For this, I did use the walkthrough. I’m not sure I would have figured it out otherwise, because the game hadn’t introduced NPC directives earlier. Requiring a command like “John, climb the tree” (just as an example -- and a command like “tell John to climb the tree” works in this spot as well) isn’t unfair, but it probably should have been introduced earlier to establish it as a weapon in the player’s puzzle-solving arsenal. Re-reading the transcript, I can see that it was clued, but it seemed entirely to do with the NPC’s appreciation for the item in question and nothing to do with the NPC’s willingness to help. For that matter, the directive might have been unnecessary. This was an action the NPC, intending to help the PC, would probably have taken after obtaining the required item without even needing the PC to point it out (especially if this particular NPC wanted the item in order to help out).

     I found, too, that you can drop important items in the dark room, which you can’t retrieve. This is a minor issue, since players won’t ordinarily drop important items anywhere, but it can create potential no-win situations.

     The score for my review set is a point lower than the official vote I will cast for Varkana. This “unofficial” score is based on the rest of the game (played past two hours), and with more thought given to how it lines up with my scoring criteria. It’s a pretty strong entry with a few problems. I can recommend it even as-is. With a positive skew for such a detailed backstory in an enjoyable fantasy setting, it gets a “7+” from me.

     The “help” built into A Fine Day for Reaping works more like 2005’s Beyond than most other IF games. You’re whisked away to a whole new location, which is a good thing for any player to try as part of the overall experience. Once there, you don’t actually have to get hints (I found it a little under-developed, anyway, where some of what I wanted help with didn’t quite lead to answers).

     The “7” I scored it at two hours fits with the game as a whole, thankfully. It does have problems, but it’s an imaginative and fun story, and a worthwhile, recommendable game. I’ve tacked on a “minus” because of the frustrations with pausing and screen-clearing, but the score itself is unchanged.

     For me, the term pulp fiction carries two connotations. I think of something that’s probably entertaining but without substance; something hastily written, perhaps, as pulp fiction from the early twentieth century might have been; something that’s essentially throw-away literature. I also think of Quentin Tarantino’s excellent Pulp Fiction movie, which epitomizes some of the common, recognizable themes from pulp fiction while managing not to be hastily contrived throw-away entertainment.

     My Name is Jack Mills has a promising start. It’s set in the present (although the game carefully avoids telling the year), in a sufficiently generic city. Jack’s friend (a professor) has been jailed for assault. Jack rushes to help, and finds out that a certain item (a coin, described by the professor as being “a valuable historical artifact”) was stolen from him. Jack agrees to track down the thief (the professor already tried, which led to the assault charge) and recover the artifact. In Jack’s own words “this was going to become a long night.”

     It’s effectively IF noir, rife with crime, unlikable characters, and seemingly complicated women. Jack switches to an internal monologue in transitional scenes. He’s perfectly out of place no matter where he goes, yet he’s never out of sorts. It’s all exactly what one might expect from a story like this, and maybe that’s the problem. As nicely as it emulates the idea of pulp fiction, My Name is Jack Mills never seems to build onto that promising start. It’s exactly what it appears to be, with no real twist, no innovation, and nothing that injects it with that “wow” factor seen in contemporary pulp-inspired stories like Tarantino’s. It demonstrates (even emphasizes) that the bulk of what appears in the annual IFComp is throw-away IF. It’s good for a couple hours of entertainment, but ultimately forgettable and buried under the accolades that will befall the competition’s better entries.

     That’s a shame, because Juhana Leinonen has put obvious effort (undoubtedly countless hours of proverbial blood, sweat, and tears) into My Name is Jack Mills. Some parts of the implementation really shine: the use of smell throughout; the clever way a partially covered page on the officer’s desk is shown; the ease with which Jack can navigate to points of interest around the city. Other parts, though, suffer: many instances of “you can’t see any such thing” for objects which the text has told me I do see (this seems to become more common as the game progresses); a problem with disambiguating “woman” in the restaurant; minor quirks (like a missing line break and an invalid response trying to drive to the park); and even a big game-killing bug when attempting to leave Emmy’s table at the restaurant (a long series of “block” errors shown after a variable stack overflow error).

     (Potential spoilers in the next paragraph.)

     It might be intentional (and I wouldn’t know, as I’ve never been a big fan of the gritty detective pulp genre), but the story is full of head-scratching plot holes and unanswered questions. What was so important about the Roman coin? If Julian, a very wealthy man, would trade the coin for an Egyptian mask that goes for $650 in auction, why wouldn’t he have simply bought it for himself? And if that’s the fair trade value he has assigned to the coin, why bother to steal it to begin with? It has some significance, else the professor wouldn’t make such a fuss. If Julian knew what the importance was, then why be willing to trade it? Might he have been planning a double-cross? It seems doubtful, given that you can win the game by making the trade.

     My Name is Jack Mills has at least two different endings -- probably three or more. (Ed: Source code is included, and I see that there are actually five or six different possible endings off the two main branches.) They’re based on decisions made around half way through the game. Well, not decisions so much as two different leads (or methods) for recovering the stolen coin. A series of puzzles (some with more than one solution) pave the way. It’s possible to close off certain solutions by earlier actions, and it’s unlikely the player will know this has happened. At least one of the winning endings is supposed to be open no matter what happens, and I found this to be true when I played.

     One ending I would have liked to see, however, involved waiting for the bad guy to arrive at a place where he just never did. After a different ending reached without assistance, I turned to the walkthrough for more. It makes an allowance for this no-show situation, but doesn’t really explain what I might have done earlier that caused it. It apparently involves a chase scene, and that might have been fun.

     I said earlier that the story has no twist. That’s not entirely true. It’s never clear during the story just who Jack Mills is, until the end. With more than one possible answer, though, it’s more gimmick than twist. It works, and it makes for a nice wrap-up, but it might have been nicer if the whole story had been in support of a single, more interesting conclusion.

     The writing is okay -- pretty good, even. The author does break some pretty firm grammatical rules, though. It may be for effect (I’m frequently guilty of relaxed writing myself), but I can’t think of any instance where a true comma splice makes sense.

     It’s just... hmm. It feels like film noir in Jack’s internal monologues, but it’s pretty ordinary otherwise. The author does work similarly clever bits into the general game, but not to the degree I expected. It’s as though the author was tackling a form of writing that exceeds his (or her?) proficiency. Back when this sort of pulp fiction was common, it may have come naturally to writers. Now, it probably needs a higher degree of exaggeration to really stress the point that this is supposed to be pulp fiction.

     It’s worth playing. It could definitely be improved, but I can still recommend it as-is. It’s a respectable “7” based on my judging criteria. It might have been a “6”, but I didn’t feel the puzzles were poorly-clued and I did like the tone and feel of the story. I’d like to see more in the future from this author.

     Consistency problems might be because the author has been working on the game for so long (according to some in-game info). In one scene, the author forgets which NPC is which. There, a woman who died early in the game reappears accidentally later on, but it’s caught and the right name is used as the scene continues. Then, in the room’s short description afterwards, she is listed with the wrong name again. This could be intentional if perhaps the author was going for an Eternal Darkness sort of insanity effect for the player, but I doubt it.

     This is the first Quest-based game I’ve played, ever. In some ways, I’m impressed with the system. It seems like a capable competitor for Adrift, and the author has demonstrated that it’s suitable for longer adventures. Even aside from the lock-ups (which I don’t actually blame on anything but my stupid, stubborn PC), there were oddities. I’m lost without running a full transcript, and it took a while to figure out that in Quest you can only enable that by launching the main runner (not a game file directly). Even then, it doesn’t flush all output to the file immediately (as though it’s working on a buffer). I liked that I could change the font size and colors (I opted to stick with the author’s intended color scheme of red on black, but I enlarged the font since I sit back a ways from my monitor), but that only applies to the main output window. I was stuck with a teeny-tiny input line, which I couldn’t read for accuracy at that distance. The stuff on the sidebar remained in a default font (small) as well.

     And then, there was something odd going on with saving and loading games. The longer I played and the more saves I made, the longer it took to save and load. There were times in the third chapter when it took (I kid you not) over sixty seconds to actually save and return control to the game. Late in the game, one save even took two minutes. Loading went a little quicker, but even it became painfully slow. These are small files in the 16- to 60-K range. Oddly enough, the file size did grow the longer I played and re-saved. Is a save a complete re-play of commands from the game’s start or something? Surely not.

     But what of the game’s story? I found it intriguing enough that I remained interested the whole way through. It’s sufficiently shocking in spots, as tales of evil, demonic cults are wont to be. A mystery surrounds the converted resort complex, its staff, and the recent gathering of guests.

     (Be warned -- possible plot spoilers in the next two paragraphs.)

     Suspension of disbelief is vital, of course, but some parts of the plot do seem to fall on the wrong side of coherency. For example, while others are brutally murdered and left scattered (or sometimes hidden) around the hotel, the PC suffers an attack that is best described as a malicious inject-and-run with a slow-acting poison. After that, he is left to roam around (and casually escape confinement) in search of an antidote.

     Security is complicated by code-only doors, special keys, and secret locks that require very specialized skills to open, yet the PC gets through easily with the right skills and the general incompetence of those who are probably supposed to keep these things out of his hands. In retrospect, that’s not all bad. It reminds me of Silent Hill, and it’s not out of place in a story like this. Still, I think it’s possible to improve upon these tropes of IF, or even replace them with something better.

     With only three chapters of a nine-chapter tale, it’s possible (even probable) that the author has a really good reason for these things. Answers may come with the rest of the story. The author plans to release the complete game after the IFComp has ended.

     Locked doors and secret passages are only a part of the puzzles that weave the story together. I found a lot to like in the game’s puzzles. The macabre nature of the story lends itself to a few that really stand out as well-placed and original. It’s not often that a game can find an important use for a mixture of shredded skin and genetic solvent. I never found the puzzles too difficult to manage, except sometimes when it came to finding or noticing certain concealed things. (In Gathered In Darkness, it pays to look around in all boxes, under beds, and on shelves.) Also, because each chapter isn’t entirely self-contained, some things that were intended for later chapters were just red herrings in the game’s truncated version.

     I did like Gathered In Darkness, but it’s hard to recommend in its present state. The writing needs serious editing throughout, and the various quirks could be ironed out if the game was beta-tested to a larger extent (assuming it went through any testing at all). If chapters four through nine are the same, it would make for a recommendable game if polished up and released in full. At two hours, I scored it a “5”. That’s “below average” on my scoring criteria, but still a game I enjoyed. That vote stands as my review score as well, after completing the competition version.

     If Orevore Courier isn’t a pun on “au revoir, courier,” it really ought to be. Given the verb/noun gimmick in Brian Rapp’s previous entry (2004’s well-written Goose, Egg, Badger), I think it’s possible.

     An isolated security officer (you) remains seated at a control console while all havoc breaks loose in the other areas of a small courier space craft. In Orevore Courier you push buttons, turn dials, view surveillance, and attempt to influence the events that threaten to destroy the ship (and you along with it). The standards of IF are gone here -- no directional movement, very little use for inventory, very few actions that aren’t related to operating the console -- but it still feels like traditional IF. That’s probably because standard commands are still recognized. They’re simply rejected in legitimate, in-story ways.

     The story is delightfully absurd. It asks the question “who would win in a battle of wits and instinct when the participants are the ship’s crew, pirates, zombies, and a dangerous metal-munching blob that must be kept cool to be kept docile?” Another game might have asked this in a grim, even grisly Alien-esque setting, but not Orevore Courier. I mean... c’mon! Zombies! Pirates! A brain-like blob! You can’t expect complete seriousness from a build-up like that.

     This is a game in the “big puzzle box” genre (if such a thing exists). Players are given a few tools to work with (in this case, the abilities of the control console). Players learn the rules of the puzzle (in this case, how the controls are used and what can be done to influence others). Pieces move around with their own agendas and must be influenced (in this case, the aforementioned zombies, pirates, crew and “orevore” creature, all in an indirect fashion). If you enjoyed All Things Devours, Delightful Wallpaper, or Mobius, you may be delighted with Orevore Courier.

     The game includes separate files -- graphics -- containing a map of the ship’s layout and a diagram of the control console. The latter is nice, but I found the former to be absolutely essential. Fearing spoilers, I didn’t check them right away. I should have. I just never got a clear picture from the text exactly how the rooms are connected. I would strongly recommend printing both images, just to keep handy while playing. They’re not spoilers. They’re key facts about the puzzle you’re working with.

     It’s a very interesting and well-constructed puzzle (being the game as a whole). However, I think it’s probably far harder than the author anticipated. In other learn-by-dying games, you can generally make a little more progress on each play-through, because each death or failure points you toward taking the right actions the next time. I think that’s why All Things Devours works so well.

     The construction is different in Orevore Courier. You only need to manage a small number of controls and a small number of rooms, but in general you will only get clues if you happen to be viewing the right room on the right turn. This results in far more trial-and-error (and far more restarts) than might be expected otherwise. The trick is to figure out what’s going on everywhere. Even that’s not so daunting, except that the same things won’t necessarily happen on each play-through if you’ve successfully influenced the various “pieces” (people) in the game that time around. So, it’s possible to play for several turns and then make a single change to the course of further events that has to be reproduced on each successive play-through (or frozen as a jumping-off point via a saved game) if you intend to explore the possibilities that might branch from there.

     I did moderately well at this for an hour and a half. In retrospect, I probably should have been working harder to figure out goals. For instance, if I don’t want the pirates to break into the freezer, what actions should I take in time to stop them? If I want to protect the pirates from the zombies (else I end up with more zombies), how should I accomplish that and still keep the orevore safe? I don’t think I ever quite figured out what my goals should be. It’s all very open. Things that can’t lead to victory are allowed because you’re given the freedom to do anything allowed by the control console. In a way, this also makes it a little like a sandbox game -- albeit a sandbox that ends your life after a dozen or two turns.

     After I felt that fun was leaning towards frustration, I checked the walkthrough and played entirely from there. I found that I had some things right and some things wrong, but it really reinforced my conclusion that success really depends on being (excuse the cliché) in the right place at the right time. Randomness, thankfully, doesn’t play a part in this. It’s still maddeningly difficult, and (unless you are far more brilliant than I will ever be) impossible to solve in a meager two hours.

     The writing is effective and seemingly flawless. It’s also admirably bug-free, except for a single quirk where Ghee seems to be dead in the docking bay and finagling his way out of the engine room at the same time. Actions, which do become repetitive, are aided not only by abbreviated button names, but by button names as complete actions. For instance, you can enter “push docking button” but you’re less taxed by simply typing “dock.”

     In many ways, my own voting guidelines are rubbish. I’ve tried to describe what makes a game deserving of a given score by outlining what I look for in a good game. One like Orevore Courier can hardly be faulted for featuring a story without any real depth when it’s supposed to be a puzzle box, not thought-provoking literature. These guidelines are supposed to keep me on track, so that all entries are judged fairly against all others. I’ll stick with it until I come up with a better plan (maybe for next year), but it’s probably making me too critical of the entries I play. What matters most is simply how worth playing a game may be. If it’s supposed to be fun, then is it fun?

     Orevore Courier may be a godsend to those who enjoy complex brain teasers. Those who look for epic and serious stories without the difficulty of puzzles along the way may find little to enjoy here. I think I’m in the middle. I liked what Brian Rapp has done here, and I appreciate that obvious effort has gone into constructing a small-scale but consistent and branching logistics puzzle. At the same time, it might have taken me ages to solve on my own, and it ultimately began to feel like too much brain-work for me. I’ve rated it fairly highly, as an “8” with a “plus” for such cool subject matter. If current trends hold true, and with just twenty-eight other games to compete against, I expect Orevore Courier to find an easy spot in the top ten.

     The middle parts begin to hint at possibilities that can only be explained by the supernatural or metaphysical. More than once, he is mistaken for someone else. It could be that these people just see through his disguise, but even The Master himself begins to doubt that it’s quite as simple as that. It’s as though he lacks all the facts about his own identity. I was reminded of the scene in Fight Club where “Jack” follows a trail of clues to a bar where his cohort Tyler Durden had been the night before. The bartender is somber and respectful, somehow mistaking Jack for Tyler. Disguise and impersonation just aren’t enough to explain it away.

     With that kind of build-up, it’s easy to expect a big payoff at the end. But -- and I don’t know quite how to describe this without blatant spoilers -- there’s sort of a catch-22. To win, you must take a specific action in the final scene (David even warns of this, in the introductory text). If you haven’t figured out what The Master is capable of, hoping it will be revealed near the ending, then you don’t know what winning action is necessary. So you can’t win. But if you have figured it out, then there is no twist or revelation at all. You must have already known it in order to win. I had to get it from the hints, because I just hadn’t figured it out. It’s hinted near the beginning, but (a) it’s not something every player is guaranteed to see, (b) it’s near hints to many other possibilities as well, which come during that first scene, and (c) is distanced enough from the end that even if you take notice of it, it might not trigger whatever spark of imagination allows a player to extrapolate actions from clues.

     I had expected a different construction entirely, that late in the game. Because there are three initial disguises, and because there is some sort of specific action at the end, and because some sort of repetitive, do-over theme was present and foreshadowed, I convinced myself that the trick was to play twice more (once as each of the other two characters). After one time through, it doesn’t feel like a very long game, so this kind of thing made sense. I think you can learn a little more by playing again with different options, but it’s not necessary that you do. All paths lead back to the same scenes. It seems constructed this way not to necessitate re-plays as a means of solving that final puzzle, but simply to give players a wider range of choices and to make re-plays worth the effort.

     What I thought was going on -- and what would probably make an interesting short game in its own right -- was that some import clue from a three-piece puzzle would be identified by playing once as each of the available characters. It would be necessary for the player to combine the one thing learned from each in order to deduce that final action. The order of play wouldn’t matter, and a complete re-start (as opposed to having the game “put” you back at the beginning) wouldn’t hurt things. Once you reached the end for the third time, you would simply know what to do.

     Perhaps because it didn’t work that way, or perhaps because there remains a mystery behind The Master’s true identity even at the end, I wasn’t completely satisfied by the story. I really bought into the premise, though, and they say the journey is its own reward. I had fun, even though I wish David hadn’t opted to leave it open for theories. I would have liked to know for sure just what was going on in The Master’s past.

     Then, a few things that never made it fully into the game (more detailed notes available at the game’s end explain this) added to the mystery without ever sharing in the conclusion. For instance, the guy who picks up The Master (in the guise of a Gentleman) in a limo was intended to be part of another sub-plot. Who runs the Chamber, and what’s their agenda? Until I read the walkthrough, I hadn’t even realized the Chamber and the Montalban were related (I thought I had been taken elsewhere). This was supposed to be a bigger, more epic game. It’s probably good that the point is explained in the author’s notes, otherwise it would be easy for a player to think he or she simply missed finding those answers during the course of the game.

     The story is written in third person past tense. In other words, “you see a tree” is expressed as “he saw a tree.” Maybe it’s to force a disconnection between player and PC. Maybe it’s to support that these are events that have already happened. Or, maybe it’s just to set the game apart from its peers. Whatever the reason, I’m not sure it was necessary. While it affords the author an ability to cast emotions and memories onto the PC which the player may not share, it suffers from a few unintentional lapses into the more traditional present tense.

     The writing has a few other minor problems (misspellings, odd and obvious typos, etc.) in a few random spots. I noticed very minor bugs and implementation issues too, but nothing substantial enough to dwell upon. It really moves along at a nice pace overall, avoiding many of the parsing and implementation problems that are the bane of other Adrift games.

     Part of this is certainly the author’s skill with so many games under his belt, but on reflection, it’s more than that. At times, the story felt as though it was on rails. It usually wasn’t (at least, not to the degree one might expect from the term “on rails”), but almost any stray action will redirect the player back, making it clear that this other location or this specific distraction doesn’t merit further attention. Beyond that, the text is written in a way that somehow provides vivid enough mental images without offering an abundance of “stuff” to interact with. So, there’s less for the author to have to implement, and less for the player to concern himself or herself with.

     The puzzles are pretty light fare, except for one particular sticking point outside the Montalban (in disguise as a thief), and of course at the very end. Most of the puzzles are probably just plot-pacing devices. The more difficult sequences to manage -- conversations -- are done through multiple-choice dialogue menus.

     In The Mind Of The Master is a pretty strong entry. Its weakest point, however, is that it poses too many questions that remain unanswered and left up to the player’s imagination at the end. In a story-centric game, I think players deserve a little more. Unless it’s the lead-in for a sequel, it should probably be a lot more. Otherwise, the entire premise -- the driving question that propels a player to take such interest in discovering an answer -- seems like an unfulfilled promise.

     At two hours, I rated the game an “8”. That’s also the score I’ve kept for the review, although it gets an unfortunate “minus” for building a mystery that isn’t quite resolved. It could use a little more polish, but it’s still a deserving and recommendable entry.

     Other bugs are numerous. As announced at the IFComp website, you can’t buy anything at the store because the game never believes you have any money. I corresponded with Dunric and he sent me an update (I intended to use it to see the rest of the game, although I can’t base my score on it), but even that version seems to have some problems in the same area. “Examining” things (among other potentially useful and necessary actions) frequently results in blank responses. You can find a fern shield, but (believe it or don’t) an Ice Dragon is what actually ends up in your inventory (this, I noticed, was fixed by the update). In early battles, if you attempt to use an item (from the battle menu), you’re seemingly stuck. It wants an item number in response, but the list is empty, and there is no “0” or “nevermind” option. I had to just “ctrl+break” then “enter” to force my way out of the game entirely. In dealing with Bruce Lee you can sell things you don’t even have, and unknown nouns usually result in Bruce thinking you’re selling the Ice Dragon. There was a strange quirk where nothing would happen when I tried to listen to the band’s music, but later it worked. Some bad line wrapping in a few places results in words that are split from the end of one display line to the beginning of the next.

     Here’s the one that had me throwing my hands up in exasperation:

     Raiythius arrives.
     >talk to raiythius
     The object doesn't understand you. Only Raiythius or C/C++ programmers (employing the latest 633K 5P34K) can decipher your nano-blabber.

     Paul implemented “X” for “examine” (which is nice, even given the introductory lecture on why it shouldn’t have been necessary). He even added an “alias” command to create shortcuts to two-word actions. The top of the display shows function-key shortcuts to several verbs. A text map is available in-game. The problem is that these are the advanced features Paul has included to prove that he’s growing as an IF author. The game structure itself is still antiquated and obsolete.

     The beginning, for instance, is a CYOA-style prologue with a couple of prompts (and not command prompts -- you are expected to type “go west” and it’s not routed through general parsing). That wouldn’t be an issue except that you can’t skip it on later play-throughs, and you can’t load a saved game until you move through it into the game proper.

     I really tried to get past these things and put effort into playing a game Paul has put such effort (even if misguided) into writing. It’s just... an exercise in frustration. It’s a shame, because some of what Paul writes hints at brilliance. The rest, sadly, is an incomprehensible mesh of disparate ideas that don’t seem surreal or inviting, just confusing and strange. It ranges from beautiful imagery and well-imagined originality to exhausted elements rehashed from his prior games and toilet humor. The PC is a huge female beetle (spelled “beatle” in the game) accompanied by a comically sadistic hellhound who isn’t quite as funny as Paul thinks he is. This female beetle, it seems, can not only elicit friendly flirting from a concubine bartender, but she can engage in “romantic intercourse” with yet another woman (some opium-smoking guild master). As awkward as much of the story seems, I think it might have made an interesting and surreal adventure if not marred by so darned many technical issues.

     The ending is equally strange. I couldn’t get to it the intended way (is the game truly unwinnable?) so I looked in the source code afterwards. At the risk of spoiling the conclusion to a story somebody out there may wish to play, it involves an NPC called Dunric who commits seppuku (a specific suicide of Japanese origin) with a knife. What precedes it is the PC’s apology for the suffering Dunric has endured, and Dunric’s calm answer that “the competition” will never change him. This is surely just a figurative flight of fancy for the author (I sincerely hope that it is), but if there is any correlation between Dunric the NPC and Dunric the author, it’s a chilling way to end a story -- any story.

     It would be easy to vote the game a “1”. Most judges will. I think if anything is good about a game, it deserves at least a “2”. I’ve gone up from there, though, based almost entirely on the effort that went into the game, not the result. Plus, there are a few well-written and visceral passages that make it clear Paul had something big in mind for Ghost of the Fireflies. I’ve rated it a “3”, but with a “minus” for being so technically unsound and generally a pain to actually play. I can’t recommend it, and it’s probably going to rank at or near the bottom in the final results.

     To wrap up, I would recommend (again) to Paul that he pick up Inform, or TADS, or even Adrift. Please don’t be so adamantly against learning something new and taking on a new challenge. I’d like to think we’ve always been on friendly terms. I’ve offered suggestions, sent information about bugs, written reviews far lengthier and more open-minded than most, not dismissed your games based on by-line alone, avoided (I think) the Panks-bashing that sometimes felt like a daily routine, and even beta-tested one of your games. So, please consider this the friendly, well-intentioned advice it’s meant to be. Just consider it. Your games would benefit by it. I really believe this.

     Hard puzzles aren’t inherently bad. They usually provide a higher challenge rating than I’m comfortable with, but I can usually recognize them as fair and solvable after the fact. The puzzles in Beneath (which, incidentally, had me thinking of 2005’s Beyond on title alone, despite dissimilarity otherwise) aren’t hard -- they’re obscure. It’s easy to make a little progress through the first parts of the game, but then it becomes nearly (if not completely) impossible. Success often depends on knowing or guessing things that seem entirely unclued and counter-intuitive. Some assistance is provided in the form of in-game hints that the game is in an unwinnable state, but the hints seem too sparse to cover all the ways the game might become unwinnable. Plus, it’s never really clear why the game is unwinnable, or what might be done to prevent it.

     The following is an example (and a possible puzzle spoiler) right from the game. The PC can buy an owl, which flies away upon exiting the pet store. This turns out to be a good thing, but it’s described as not really mattering (probably so players won’t think it was a mistake). But, because nothing happened, I didn’t even bother with the owl when re-playing later. Further in, a certain item can be found and dropped as bait of sorts for this owl. The puzzle relies not only on having released the owl earlier, but in somehow deducing that it would be interested in this item. Even if you do figure that out, it’s ultimately pure coincidence story-wise that the owl helps you escape a pursuer while going after this particular item. It’s just not the kind of thing a player could plan for and work out a correct solution. That’s just one example among several.

     Guess-the-command problems only make it worse. The game is far too picky on what it will understand. It’s possible to take the right action but in a slightly wrong way, and never quite know that you almost had it right. I don’t think an author has to account for everything a player is prone to try, but the more variations to an action that may exist, the more coverage that particular action should get. One spot that merits a mention involves a newspaper and a paper bag. The game doesn’t ask for disambiguation on “paper” -- it just seems to assume the bag every time, and often without making it clear that the action you are trying for the newspaper doesn’t work because it was actually routed to the bag instead. (I was close to kicking that darned dog, and it wasn’t the poor thing’s fault after all.)

     This issue was spread across the game as a whole, but the “buy” action is another easy example. Buying anything is particularly troublesome, as the game expects this to be handled in a specific (and frustration-inducing) way. Instead of pooling my money and allowing me to “buy” things by name, I must identify the purchase amount by bill or coin name, “pay” it to the merchant or clerk, and then ask about the thing I intend to buy. Nobody makes change, so to spend your dollar (for instance) you need to find the one thing that’s priced at $1. At one point, this involved multiple levels of “ask” (another instance of something I couldn’t have solved without help, considering that this particular NPC seemed pretty unresponsive to a variety of things I had already tried to ask) in order to negotiate the price down. This isn’t because you can’t afford the asking price, but because the author has matched one buyable item to one or two specific coins in your inventory.

     Some of the design problems could be the standard author-knows-but-player-doesn’t kind of thing that tends to work its way into interactive fiction when based on some existing work of fiction. I haven’t read the source material, but if these puzzles are also based on elements of the Robert E. Howard stories, maybe the author just failed or forgot to make them meaningful for the uninitiated. Others have written veritable essays on the importance of thinking like a player, and it’s just as important when adapting a story that may be unfamiliar to that player.

     An inventory management limitation was another sticking point for me. I think that if you’re going to do this in a game, you really have to make it smooth and automated. “Look in bag” should imply that I intend to open it. I should be able to take coins from the bag and pay a merchant without hitting an inventory limitation just because the game intends to put it in top-level inventory before handing it off. The bag, for that matter, could have been given a larger capacity.

     Here’s a general tip for future IF authors. Keep things believable even when the story you’re telling is pure fantasy. Requiring that your PC order food and sit down where the lighting is just right in order to read from a book is somewhat unnecessary. There are two reasons this puzzle actually works in Beneath (the PC intends to read for quite a while so being comfortable makes sense, and the pieces/clues are in place to make it a solvable puzzle), but later it’s as though he can’t bring himself to read even a single page unless he finds the perfect light. If the town was that dark, it really wasn’t portrayed well enough in the game, and if this was just a device to separate plot sections (as it appears to be), then it might have been handled in another way.

     I stopped at two hours, voted the game an optimistic “6” (hoping that the parts I hadn’t yet seen would justify it), and then ran through from the beginning with the walkthrough at hand. This is the author’s first game (according to the “about” text in-game), and as such, it’s not too bad. It has the potential to be a pretty good game, but it’s not solvable in two hours (if at all) given what feels to me to be a poor design with clunky command-guessing and puzzles that rely on precognition. My review score drops a point after seeing that these issues seem to persist to the end. I have scored it a “5-” (the minus being awarded for bogging down an interesting story with puzzle that can’t realistically be solved without the assistance of the walkthrough).

     I have been looking forward to Lost Pig on premise alone, while hoping it wouldn’t turn out to be a joke (or in-joke) entry in the vein of Pass The Banana. I’m happy to say that familiarity with Grunk’s illustrious career in the military (see Grunk’s blog here) isn’t a prerequisite for enjoying Lost Pig. It’s funny, but it isn’t a joke entry.

     Lost Pig is told from the decidedly simple perspective of the main character, an orc named Grunk. A new player might mistake Grunk’s broken English and seemingly unambitious goal as laziness on the author’s part. After only a few minutes of play, however, it becomes pleasingly obvious how much effort has gone into creating Grunk’s world.

     It’s easy to spot the problems in a game (any random game, I mean). A player will probably recognize when he or she has encountered some bit of difficulty, be it rampant mistakes in the writing, puzzles that are unfair and impossible to solve, verbs that require a mental checklist of synonyms to deduce, objects that can’t be referenced by the important words that describe them, humor that falls short (or attempts at drama that just seem silly), useless or superfluous locations, bugs that kill (or injure) the game, or any of a countless list of other detractors. It’s not so easy to notice when a game is doing almost none of those things. Most things work so smoothly in Lost Pig that Grunk’s choppy narration is the only thing that really stands out at first. It’s consistent, humorous, well-written and completely intentional, but it tends to draw attention away from how incredibly smooth the game plays. It’s easy to sink into it after a little while, and then the game’s nearly flawless design really shows through.

     Lost Pig could be the proverbial poster child for all that’s right in puzzle-game design. Commands don’t rely on one or two specific verbs or phrasings. Puzzles have alternate solutions, making it harder to get stuck looking for one specific but obscure solution. Items work together and are often used for multiple purposes. The game doesn’t span a maze of rooms, opting instead for a minimum area with more than one purpose to each (this also avoids the tedium of traversing wide and confusing geography for puzzles that rely on elements found in different places). Puzzles are clued well and often in multiple ways (ranging from vague to somewhat obvious), making it more likely that a player will pick up on at least one of the hints while still feeling pretty clever when figuring out the solution. A potentially repetitive action (getting another brick) is made simple after Grunk takes note of the process. Grunk’s design philosophy was apparently “I need to write an interesting puzzle game told from a unique perspective, and with challenging but fair puzzles, all while doing everything I can do to keep players focused on playing without the tedium of meta-game frustrations like verb-guessing, spotty implementation, and bugs in the coding.” Grunk... mission accomplished.

     Detail is everywhere. The pig watches what Grunk does, and it even has a mischievous little personality. The gnome is a talker (in good English), and can comment on more topics than might be found in ten similarly-sized games combined. Grunk is hapless but well-intentioned. Scenery is well-implemented. Disallowed actions are well-covered. Dialogue and interactions are well-written and witty. Library (or parser) messages have been reworked to help serve as additional narration for Grunk. Items can be wet or dry, dirty or clean, attractive or repellant, and it all fits together in one consistent world model where any item can potentially influence another.

     This wouldn’t feel like a Sidney Merk Review without a bug report as well, but I tell you, it’s a stretch. I noticed two or three minor mistakes in the text (discounting Grunk’s intentionally-fractured narration). Some kind of command disambiguation issue is at work in the statue room, where items in Grunk’s inventory are sometimes mistaken for similar items depicted in the paintings. And... hmm. That’s all, I think.

     I could have won the game in exactly two hours (and without hints), except that I misunderstood a solution to one late-game puzzle. Once I learned that I didn’t need a specific item to solve the puzzle (just something that would work the same way), I struggled a little to find something else suited to this task. One particular idea (involving wet pants and a hat) seemed like an ideal solution that I just couldn’t make work. This puzzle was really my only sticking point in Lost Pig, and a great case can be made that this was my mistake rather than the game’s.

     Lost Pig is easily the strongest entry I’ve played so far this year, and probably one of the most fun, well-constructed puzzle games of any IFComp I’ve reviewed before. It lavishes the player with a detailed, always-smooth adventure, yet remains a simple puzzlefest with likable characters and a challenge that feels just right. I voted it a “9” at two hours, with a “plus” for such an outstanding level of detail. Even unsure of the potential goodness to come from the remainder of my IFComp play list, I can imagine Lost Pig landing a well-deserved spot in the top five (perhaps even top three). It could even manage the top honor if voters are willing to trade the more traditional serious, story-heavy pick for something on the sillier side this year.

     Note: I bumped the game up to “10” as my marginal favorite of this year’s IFComp, after completing all other eligible entries. However, having played past two hours, I can’t increase my vote (which remains at “9”).

     The Immortal feels a lot like A Light’s Tale and On Optimism, two previous IFComp entries by Zach Flynn (entered as “VBNZ” and “Tim Lane,” respectively). Nothing really suggests that Rob Anthony is a pseudonym, but if it is, then that would be my guess. Even if the similarities in style and the types of problems encountered are coincidental (as most likely they are), it’s enough to say that if you liked those games, then you might enjoy The Immortal as well. I had enough fun to make it worth the effort, but it’s not really a recommendable game in its present state. It fits in at “4” on my scale, with a “plus” for the weird but interesting sci-fi setting.

     I have a feeling this is one game most judges won’t feel too strongly about, one way or the other. On one hand, it’s more polished and it plays more smoothly than some of the larger, more ambitious games in the competition. It tells a simple and touching (if slightly predictable) story. On the other hand, it is pretty short, and while effort has certainly gone into its creation, it’s probably not to the extent seen in many of the other entries. It doesn’t deserve a low rating, but at the same time, it’s difficult to rate it on par with longer, more developed entries (another example of how my rating criteria fall short). That’s why I’ve scored (and voted) it a “7”, with a “minus” for brevity.

     If one were to watch the first hour of Stephen King’s The Langoliers, play Simple Adventure by Paul Panks (or any other poorly-conceived text-based combat RPG), get a little drunk, and then program a game in .NET, it would very likely turn out a bit like The Lost Dimension.

     The story in The Lost Dimension (and really, it’s not all that lost; it’s just like every other strange monster-infested real-world-becomes-fantasy-land setting we’ve seen) is that all passengers on a plane have disappeared, except for the initially-sleeping main character. The plane lands (and subsequently disappears), leaving the protagonist to fend for himself (well, the “snore” audio is decidedly male) against various crazed beasties that ordinarily wouldn’t all belong in the same story. All the while, he must hunt for five magnetic stones (could be “relics of power” in any other game) as the key to escaping this strange realm.

     In spite of its many problems, I liked this game. I have to say that first, before I launch into a lengthy discussion on everything that’s wrong with it. This is another game with a custom-made Windows-only engine, but it takes a different approach than the typical home-brewed IFComp entry. It features a point-and-click interface that’s intended to entice players for whom typing is a turn-off.

     The author claims that The Lost Dimension can be played completely via keyboard or with the mouse, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it work right strictly by typing in a conventional way. Unrecognized commands (such as “x me”) don’t result in anything but a warning tone. Verbs recognized by the game (such as “look”) bring up a pick list before you even finish typing, making it impossible to enter complete commands. Some actions (such as those listed sometimes in the “special options/actions” section) don’t seem to be recognized as text input at all. (Edit: I see that you can reference special actions at the command prompt by number, just not with any verb or command phrasing.) If, however, you play the game strictly by its point-and-click interface, it works reasonably well. Granted, it takes a little while to become comfortable with an all-click interface for a text adventure game, but it’s easy to manage after only a little while.

     The game’s greatest weakness is that it throws away the power and flexibility of a real command text parser without replacing it with something equally robust (such as visually appealing graphics with point-and-click hot-spots). At any point in the game, every possible action for every potential object is pre-calculated. This allows the game to list all possible actions, or to populate pick-lists when selecting an action that requires an object. Thankfully, it does play more like a point-and-click graphic adventure game than a CYOA-style game, and that at least keeps the feel of interactive fiction intact.

     As the game progresses, the interface does begin to feel more natural. I can see what the author intended by it, even though I suspect most IFComp judges won’t agree. It’s really not a bad engine. To really shine, though, I think it needs work in a few areas.

     It should automatically resize to fit your resolution (instead of downsizing your resolution to fit the game). The trick here (if I can be so bold as to make the suggestion) is to call a generic routine on the INIT for each and every form element. If you’ve based the default layout on 800x600, simply calculate the actual screen size (possibly as a global on startup, or any time the form itself is resized) and change the position and size of the control based on the adjustment of its default size and position. You can resize fonts the same way (although a custom user-initiated font selection is probably a better idea).

     The command prompt, when input is so restricted anyway, is probably better left out entirely. A transcript feature would be nice. An “undo” feature is sorely missed, and the single-file save game ability (based on the name you supply when starting the game) would have posed a problem if I hadn’t realized you can just copy or rename the saved files outside of the program to manage as many different saves as you like. Knowing (instead of guessing at) weapon and armor stats would have been nice, considering your main character stats are on display anyway. Auto-mapping would be nice. Items in the “special options/actions” list are infrequent enough that I sometimes overlooked them until later. Somehow drawing the player’s attention to that area, when options are shown, would be helpful. The color scheme is pretty chaotic, and would do well with some toning-down.

     It could also use a better, more original game to showcase itself. A big flaw I see in home-brewed entries like this is that plenty of effort went into making the engine, but not enough effort went into writing an interesting game. It’s as if the game is secondary, being cobbled together from random elements to form a nonsensical and generic story. It shouldn’t be that way. This engine could be used to create something far more interesting, original and worthwhile.

     The game is also plagued with typos, misspellings and wild grammatical failings. English seems to be a second language for C. Yong, and while it’s a nice effort if so, it’s still difficult to be enthusiastic about what’s basically very simple, generic writing. Room descriptions are short and rely more on the player’s imagination to fill in the gaps than any real visualization of what the author has supplied. Responses to most commands are brief and choppy.

     My notes hold a few unintentionally amusing quotes:

     "Any physical beings including you cannot pass through it."
     "Stone Ape attacks with its Stones but MISS !"
     "The room is covered by various pale paintings of agony-looking human faces."
     "The Little green alien is slained."

     Being a little gun-shy of broken battle systems in home-brewed IFComp entries before, I was leery at first of the RPG elements in The Lost Dimension. I think it’s probably possible to waste the healing “holy water” (available in limited supplies) and the limited-use attack items (like guns and grenades), leaving your character too weak to progress in battle, but that didn’t happen to me until the final (and optional) fight. It actually worked pretty well for me, with well-balanced experience points, hit-points, leveling-up and stat-building that reminded me of what I like about simple combat in RPG’s. Once I noticed the “next” button at the top of the combat progress window (which can be clicked over and over to speed things up), I really started to enjoy the various fights I encountered.

     Still, the combat left me with a few concerns. First, it’s always in seven rounds. The “monster” always goes first (as far as I noticed), meaning it will get four attacks to your three. If the battle isn’t over, the seven rounds can be repeated with another attack (meaning your opponent gets an extra hit for each round of seven). Monsters in some rounds even attempt multiple hits to my one. The balance and fairness seems okay, though, so maybe this was done to maintain a challenge. Also, some “monsters” didn’t really seem like monsters to me. Why am I fighting a mule? Maybe it was a Dire Mule? Or did the author just run out of wacky ideas for monster types?

     Aside from poor writing, nothing major is wrong with The Lost Dimension in the way of bugs. It never crashed on me... uh... except at the very beginning. This was due to an older version of the Microsoft “MDAC_TYP” library on my PC. I figured it out from the .NET exception report, downloaded and installed version 2.6 from Microsoft, and then it ran fine. Non-techie types are likely to be stuck if the same thing happens, though (hint: be sure you’ve installed .NET 2.0 and updated to MDAC 2.6).

     A few general bugs in the game logic could be ironed out with an updated release. It is possible to cross the river to the west from a dead-end area (it’s obviously unintentional, because you can’t cross to the east). A loose brick in a tunnel is either described in a room one west of where it actually exists, or it’s implemented one room east of where it’s described. Sometimes, a big hit in battle will lower your HP to less than zero (and without an “unconscious” range as might be seen in D&D, it doesn’t really fit here). Some of the text at the bottom of the winning end-game pop-up was covered and hidden. Some doors that can be opened will only stay open when broken. I’m sure I noticed others, but without a transcript I only have my quickly-written notes to consult.

     The game features MIDI for music and WAV for sound effects. It fits the game’s style, but sometimes the specific selections seem to be poor choices. For example, the level-up music is a lullaby. The sound effect played when putting on armor or refilling a gun sounds like a bug being squashed. One of the battle victory themes is some classical piece I can’t quite place (but probably should -- it’s very familiar -- and the easily-recognized “Ode to Joy” bit from Beethoven’s 9th is there in the MIDI folder as a monster theme, even though it doesn’t seem to actually play in the game).

     The game isn’t just monster combat, throw-away storyline, and public domain sound files. It’s also a string of simple puzzles that generally require just “looking” at the right thing and then using what you find there at the appropriate location. I wasn’t really bothered that it didn’t feature a deeper implementation than this. The game kept me entertained for just over four hours (stopping at two to cast my vote), and somehow I never got stuck. That’s surprising, when a couple of the things I passed easily should have been far less obvious (such as, spoiler here, digging inside the hut). Maybe I just got lucky. This is one of several instances where I wonder if the puzzle was clued well enough, if at all. I think the limited choices inherent to the game’s interface probably made these things more solvable than they otherwise might have been.

     It isn’t necessary to map the first section (on the plane), but the game really opens up afterwards. I did well enough with a hand-drawn map (otherwise I’m sure I’d have gotten lost easily), but the author includes nice graphical maps in the game’s “solutions” folder. They don’t show hidden rooms, however. Any player looking to solve 100% of the game is wise to mark a hand-drawn map anyway.

     So yes. Somehow, I did like this game. I finished with 88% (although without defeating the monster in the northern cave due to low health), and that feels like enough of the “extras” to really get a feel for the game as a whole. Still, it’s a tough game to recommend to players in general. It will probably appeal to anybody who likes similarly styled games (such as those written by Paul Panks). Point-and-click fans who want the novelty of something entirely text-based might enjoy it. Or, if you’re an IFComp completist with a job in .NET development (like me), you might enjoy it. I’ve been as generous with the score as I can (a “5” with a “plus” for the unique and surprisingly non-broken engine), but I can’t bump it up any higher without conflicting with games that really are more polished and more fun. On my scale, that’s still a “below average - plus.”