The Stack

A anonymous entry in the surreal mode. Spoilers follow the break.

Read more »

Beneath: a Transformation by Graham Lowther is apparently based on Worms of the Earth and other Bran Mak Morn stories by Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan. Spoilers follow the break.

Read more »

Bill Powell gives us a twist on Sleeping Beauty, sending a more typical adventure game hero to lift the curse after Prince Charming fails. Spoilers follow the break.

Read more »

Lost Pig concerns an orc named Grunk, familiar to some parts of the IF community for his Livejournal. Spoilers follow the break.

Read more »

A game written in Adrift by someone using the pseudonym “revgiblet”. (The game data contains what might be revgiblet’s real name, but I won’t state it here.) The premise: you’re Death. Spoilers follow the break.

Read more »

Still trying to get caught up in these posts. Next up is a piece by newcomer Nestor I. McNaugh, concerning an arrogant gentleman thief in a modern setting. (It actually took me a while to realize that it wasn’t a fantasy setting, as the first element of the setting you hear about is a Thieves’ Guild.) Spoilers follow the break.

Read more »

So, now that the rules of the Interactive Fiction Competition allow blogging about comp games during the judging period, let’s get started. Choosing my first game at random, I got Ghost of the Fireflies by Paul Allen Panks. This did not bode well. Spoilers follow the break.
Read more »

I think most of the people who read this blog are already aware of this, but: the judging period of the 13th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is now open, and lasts until November 15. You can be a judge, and if you’ve never judged the comp before, I encourage you to give it a whirl. There are 29 entries this year, expected to vary from brilliant to abysmal. This is the smallest batch since 1998, so if you’ve found previous comps daunting, here’s your chance. 29 may still sound like a lot of games to play, but they tend to be short — judges are asked to judge each game after no more than two hours of play, finished or not, and the competitors know this.

Me, I’ll be devoting a large portion of my gaming hours to this for a while, and not blogging about it until the judging period is over, as that would be against the rules. So I don’t know how much I’ll be posting during that time. Maybe I’ll make another go at Pokémon between comp games or something.

[UPDATE 3 October 2007] Correction to the above: the rule against discussing games in a public forum before the judging period is over has been relaxed somewhat this year. Judges are now allowed to publish discussion of the entries as long as they “[m]ake appropriate allowances to hide spoilers, and don’t put spoilers in titles of posts or blog entries.” Now that I know this, I shall do so.

My word it’s been a while since my last real post. But never mind: after another of those all-day sessions that seems to always mark the ending of any substantial adventure game, I have completed 1893. I actually reached the endgame before finding all of the diamonds, but delayed completing it until I had them all. When the last of them was safely stored away, I was pleased to see the player character echo my own earlier thoughts:

And yet, the mystery of the elaborate scavenger hunt remains. Why steal precious diamonds only to hide them around the Exposition? Was it just a ruse, designed to keep the detectives busy while the real criminal work could continue without interruption?

Having already seen the final confrontation, I knew the real explanation: the mastermind behind the robbery was completely insane. More specifically, he had peculiar notions about art. As both an artist and the architect of the mystery, including its solution, he’s a pretty good symbol for the Game Designer in his antagonistic aspect, although I can’t say for sure on the basis of the game’s content alone that the author intended this. If he did, I’m not sure what to make of his death.

Come to that, given that this is a mystery, it’s notable that you never get the chance to arrest anyone. There are three confrontations with criminals, but in all cases, if you don’t let them escape, they wind up dead. (In one case the body isn’t found, but I’ll count him as dead-until-sequel.)

At any rate, it’s been a hoot playing in this environment, 19th century civilization in full flower. The glorious spectacle! The sense of pride, of progress, of purpose! The condescending attitude toward non-European races! Seriously, there are exhibits of “Dahomeyans” and “Esquimaux” set up so people can gawk at them like animals in a zoo. Here’s where the research behind the game really helps: if anything seems too outré or outlandish, it’s a safe bet that it was real. The endnotes reveal that even more of the content is based on fact than I expected, although of course some liberties were taken.

Another thing the game does well is encourage routine. There are a few things you want to do every morning: eat breakfast, take a bill of draft to the bank to receive your daily stipend, read the newspaper. There’s also a routine you get into whenever you find a diamond: take it to Mr. Wentworth at the Mining building to see if it’s authentic, then take it back to the Administration building and lock it in the safe. Routines like this in an adventure game can be a good thing. They give a comforting sense of familiarity in a genre that’s mainly based on throwing you into situations where you don’t know what to do, and also provide a framework for variation. When you take that hard-won diamond to Mr. Wentworth and he says it’s a fake, what do you do then? A break from routine is impossible without a routine to break from. I don’t see a lot of modern IF using this technique, but that’s probably because most modern IF consists of short works, and you really need a larger work to take advantage of this effectively.

I was less enamored of the time system. There’s a day/night cycle and a host of scheduled events that occur hourly, daily, or irregularly, all of which is fine, and helps to give a sense of a living world. But there’s also a deadline. The player character has less than a week to solve everything. So I spent much of the game trying to do things as efficiently as possible, and that combines badly with that time cycle. Sometimes the only way to make progress towards a goal was to wait for a daily event, but in the interests of efficiency I’d spend the time working on other puzzles rather than waiting, which meant that I’d be in the peculiar and slightly uncomfortable situation of knowing what I had to do but not doing it.

I’ve recovered three of the eight stolen diamonds and made significant progress on most of the rest. This was no simple theft: the thieves went to the length of building elaborate mechanical devices into the very architecture of the fairgrounds, a process that must have started when the fair was still in its planning stages, in order to provide hiding places that a sufficiently clever investigator could penetrate. And there’s no doubt at all that they want me to find the gems. Some of those elaborate devices are not hiding places but rather clue dispensers. Then there’s the riddle in verse that they left at the scene of the crime. And one of the thieves even talks to me through one of those new-fangled “telephone” devices on display in the Electricity building, giving measured hints on a daily basis.

All of which leads to one question: Why? Why go to all this trouble to indirectly give back everything they stole? The game has been mostly treasure-hunt so far, and the devices holding the treasures are basically a lot like the things you’d expect in a game about an Egyptian tomb. (Come to think of it, there seems to be one in a replica Egyptian tomb exhibit.) But this is a mystery — it says so on the packaging, plus I’ve found a corpse by now, and felt sundry other background rumblings of a story beyond the battle of wits with Edward Nygma’s grandfather. So what are the thieves trying to accomplish?

As I see it, the only real effect of the crime is the investigation it’s produced. It’s drawn the attention of the player character, one of the foremost detectives of his era. So that means that they either want me to pay attention to something — something that would escape the casual fairgoer, but which I’ll inevitably discover in the course of my investigations — or the whole thing is a distraction — they want my attention on the gems so it won’t be elsewhere. Or maybe it’s all some kind of weird Masonic initiation ritual. Who knows.