Archived from groups: rec.games.int-fiction (More info?)
As part of an attempt to post more reviews, I am posting more
reviews. Like all my reviews these are archived on my website at
http://www.drizzle.com/~dans/if/reviews.html -- if you're reading this
post after a few days there may be a more updated version there.
First up, two one-room games:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Solitary (Kahlan) Z-Machine:
Enh, I dunno. Solitary is about an 18-year-old college student who
writes about being sad, and I suspect this is also a fairly accurate
description of the game's author. I'm not really in a great position
to poke fun at this, since I too was 18 lo these many years ago, and I
too sinned and wrote poetry. But, right, the thing that was true then
and is still true now is this: you can have feelings that are real and
true and right, but that doesn't mean that you've necessarily done a
good job putting them into a piece of art for other people to look
at. And when they look at the art, they don't see your original
feelings, only what you put down, so if that's not great, the art
won't be great. And Solitary isn't great.
Kahlan's goal was explicitly to create a puzzleless story-biased
one-room game. Which is fine. The trick, then, is how to set the
atmosphere and cue the reminiscences in a natural way. Unfortunately
Solitary punts on both these points: the latter is handled by having
the hint system tell you to do "THINK ABOUT X" (this command doesn't
appear anywhere else in the game as far as I know), and the former is
handled, well, like in the description of the vase of flowers:
It's a glass vase of flowers, artfully decorated, but the flowers are
wilted and tired, perhaps a week old. They were roses, when you could
recognize them, but now, they are just red spheres, soon to become
just dust, like your true love. Your heart shudders again as you read
the tag attached. Something inside you just wants to cry out, and
never live again.
(Ow, my heartstrings.)
I've skimmed over the grammatical issues, the weird gameplay
decisions, and the bugs (most glaringly, "QUIT" is remapped to "JUMP",
and then a few places are missing rtrues and so on), but probably you
can get the idea just from the quoted passage above. Overall, Solitary
is like the poetry I wrote when I was 18 -- deeply meaningful to the
author, a necessary step in learning to write, and shouldn't really
have been shown to anyone else.
(The good news here is people get better; I'm sure Kahlan's next game
will tone it down and liven it up and be a much better play all
around. There is some potential here, even if the execution was pretty
much a wash.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Last Hour (Roberto Grassi) ADRIFT:
The Last Hour has some similarities with the last thing I reviewed,
Solitary, in that they're both one-room games with a potentially-
interesting idea poorly executed. Unfortunately, The Last Hour's flaws
are so severe that the game is almost unplayable. To start off with,
Grassi should have had a native English speaker help him edit the text
of the game. It's not impossible to understand, but it seriously
distracts attention from the story when I'm having to puzzle out the
phrasing. The Last Hour also has issues both in terms of not
implementing enough objects and not supporting enough actions (I never
worked out the right syntax to catch the mouse, for instance, and
though it's supposedly possible to talk to the guy in the next cell I
never found the command). This problem is worse in this case because
it's a one-room game, so the implementation needs to be deeper than
usual to make up for the lack of scope.
But these are just side-notes to the most fundamental problem, which
is this: The Last Hour is a game about being confined. You're in a
cell and never get out. There's nothing really to explore in the
cell. You can't change the plot or affect it in any way. You can do a
game on this premise (cf Rameses), but there has to be motion in the
character arena, then, and this game doesn't even have that. There's
one twist, it's telegraphed early on, and the player character is so
unsympathetic we don't care. The twist itself is so black-and-white
and the revelation is given so melodramatically that I found it
impossible to be moved or even really startled by it*. I'm not going
to say it's impossible to do a good game on this premise but The Last
Hour isn't close to being it. I think Grassi's style would work much
better on something larger scale and less Serious; I'd suggest he aim
that way for his next game.
* Emily Short had a bit about this in her review of Natalie that
suggested that Italian IF may just have different genre conventions
with respect to presenting emotional content -- if you find those
conventions less weird than I do you may appreciate this game more.
--
Dan Shiovitz :: dbs@cs.wisc.edu :: http://www.drizzle.com/~dans
"He settled down to dictate a letter to the Consolidated Nailfile and
Eyebrow Tweezer Corporation of Scranton, Pa., which would make them
realize that life is stern and earnest and Nailfile and Eyebrow Tweezer
Corporations are not put in this world for pleasure alone." -PGW
As part of an attempt to post more reviews, I am posting more
reviews. Like all my reviews these are archived on my website at
http://www.drizzle.com/~dans/if/reviews.html -- if you're reading this
post after a few days there may be a more updated version there.
First up, two one-room games:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Solitary (Kahlan) Z-Machine:
Enh, I dunno. Solitary is about an 18-year-old college student who
writes about being sad, and I suspect this is also a fairly accurate
description of the game's author. I'm not really in a great position
to poke fun at this, since I too was 18 lo these many years ago, and I
too sinned and wrote poetry. But, right, the thing that was true then
and is still true now is this: you can have feelings that are real and
true and right, but that doesn't mean that you've necessarily done a
good job putting them into a piece of art for other people to look
at. And when they look at the art, they don't see your original
feelings, only what you put down, so if that's not great, the art
won't be great. And Solitary isn't great.
Kahlan's goal was explicitly to create a puzzleless story-biased
one-room game. Which is fine. The trick, then, is how to set the
atmosphere and cue the reminiscences in a natural way. Unfortunately
Solitary punts on both these points: the latter is handled by having
the hint system tell you to do "THINK ABOUT X" (this command doesn't
appear anywhere else in the game as far as I know), and the former is
handled, well, like in the description of the vase of flowers:
It's a glass vase of flowers, artfully decorated, but the flowers are
wilted and tired, perhaps a week old. They were roses, when you could
recognize them, but now, they are just red spheres, soon to become
just dust, like your true love. Your heart shudders again as you read
the tag attached. Something inside you just wants to cry out, and
never live again.
(Ow, my heartstrings.)
I've skimmed over the grammatical issues, the weird gameplay
decisions, and the bugs (most glaringly, "QUIT" is remapped to "JUMP",
and then a few places are missing rtrues and so on), but probably you
can get the idea just from the quoted passage above. Overall, Solitary
is like the poetry I wrote when I was 18 -- deeply meaningful to the
author, a necessary step in learning to write, and shouldn't really
have been shown to anyone else.
(The good news here is people get better; I'm sure Kahlan's next game
will tone it down and liven it up and be a much better play all
around. There is some potential here, even if the execution was pretty
much a wash.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Last Hour (Roberto Grassi) ADRIFT:
The Last Hour has some similarities with the last thing I reviewed,
Solitary, in that they're both one-room games with a potentially-
interesting idea poorly executed. Unfortunately, The Last Hour's flaws
are so severe that the game is almost unplayable. To start off with,
Grassi should have had a native English speaker help him edit the text
of the game. It's not impossible to understand, but it seriously
distracts attention from the story when I'm having to puzzle out the
phrasing. The Last Hour also has issues both in terms of not
implementing enough objects and not supporting enough actions (I never
worked out the right syntax to catch the mouse, for instance, and
though it's supposedly possible to talk to the guy in the next cell I
never found the command). This problem is worse in this case because
it's a one-room game, so the implementation needs to be deeper than
usual to make up for the lack of scope.
But these are just side-notes to the most fundamental problem, which
is this: The Last Hour is a game about being confined. You're in a
cell and never get out. There's nothing really to explore in the
cell. You can't change the plot or affect it in any way. You can do a
game on this premise (cf Rameses), but there has to be motion in the
character arena, then, and this game doesn't even have that. There's
one twist, it's telegraphed early on, and the player character is so
unsympathetic we don't care. The twist itself is so black-and-white
and the revelation is given so melodramatically that I found it
impossible to be moved or even really startled by it*. I'm not going
to say it's impossible to do a good game on this premise but The Last
Hour isn't close to being it. I think Grassi's style would work much
better on something larger scale and less Serious; I'd suggest he aim
that way for his next game.
* Emily Short had a bit about this in her review of Natalie that
suggested that Italian IF may just have different genre conventions
with respect to presenting emotional content -- if you find those
conventions less weird than I do you may appreciate this game more.
--
Dan Shiovitz :: dbs@cs.wisc.edu :: http://www.drizzle.com/~dans
"He settled down to dictate a letter to the Consolidated Nailfile and
Eyebrow Tweezer Corporation of Scranton, Pa., which would make them
realize that life is stern and earnest and Nailfile and Eyebrow Tweezer
Corporations are not put in this world for pleasure alone." -PGW
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