Posted 17 November 2005 to rec.games.int-fiction

Scores

An explanation of the scores is in order; this explanation is a posteriori, as the scores merely reflect my overall impression and enjoyment of the game. A 1 means an utterly horrible game, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I probably quit such a game in 10 minutes. In order to earn a 4, a game must be at least playable without any severe problems, such as major bugs, hard-to-read prose, a seriously incomplete implentation and so on, Thus a 4 simply represents the minimum acceptable technical achievement. A 5 can be scored if the game can maintain my interest sufficiently for me to play for two hours.

Games can score extra points by being interesting, with good pacing, excellent writing, puzzles and plot. A 10 would place a game among my all-time favourites.

• Phantom: 1
• Neon Nirvana: 2
• Sabotage: 2
• Off the Trolley: 3
• Gilded: 3
• Beyond: 4
• The Colour Pink: 5
• Chancellor: 5
• Tough Beans: 6
• A New Life: 7
• Distress: 9
• vespers: 10

Phantom

The opening made me cringe. Punctuation, style, logic are absent. Then I enter a forest. It's a maze, so I go back to the village.

OK. Enough.

Apparently the game's idea of a puzzle is to enter the shack to get a lantern, which you will need later. Why wouldn't you have a lantern in your inventory, I wonder? But these finer points are wasted on this game.

Rating: 1.

Distress

This game opens with somewhat convoluted phrasing and inconsistent grammar - but give it a chance. Later on the writing is largely free of such things and in fact some of the descriptions of the action manage to be pretty exciting. There is a lovely set of puzzles in the game, which tie in very well with the story and are all solveable in the 2-hour time-limit. (I was stumped by one of them, but that had only because I misunderstood what was going on).

Very elegant piece of work, with an interesting story, grippingly told.

Rating: 9

Neon Nirvana

Just another amateurish attempt at a police story. To begin with, I notice that the author made no effort to provide descriptions for you or your companions, an indication of which directions you can move in and finally neglected to include potentially important words in the dictionary.

Throughout the game, many holes in the implementation are evident:

Similarly, the descriptions leave a lot to be desired, with multiple errors and frequent repetitions. But it comes up with some great quotes

• You can almost feel evil lurking in the dark cracks of the pavement.
• This is a high-crime area, and you're cold and lonely.
• The sidewalk stands behind you.

Not only the implementation is half-hearted, but the author thought it a good idea to insert useless and unfunny descriptions such as:

Rating: 2—Not absolutely dreadful, there seems to be a game hidden somewhere in there, but nothing good about it at all.

Tough Beans

A convincing, concise opening. Later on, much backstory. And an unruly dog.

A couple of things about the game are irksome, such as obvious items that should be mentioned in the description and minor bugs related to object implementations.

The puzzles in the first part of the game are a bit of the 'search everywhere to find required object' variety, but not too irritating.

Later on you arrive at the office. Once more, you have to search for an object. It seems that the author is desperately looking for ways to ingeniously hide objects so that then he can say 'Hey, isn't it awesome to hide useful objects in obvious hiding place?'

The amount of actual work you do is minimal, however, as copious amounts of explanatory text follows all minor achievements in the game. The writing is competent, but did not make me very enthusiastic. Although the character is quite clearly defined, it is perhaps chiseled a bit too enthusiastically—too sharply—to the point of being almost a caricature, with altogether far too many flashbacks.

Overall not bad, but not amazing either—But yay, points for 'strawberry-mango explosion'.

Rating: 6

Gilded

Gilded? Fey? Shadows? This seems like an interesting game, indeed... with a CREATE verb. This is MADNESS, I tell you! But an ambitious kind of madness nevertheless—the kind of madness that heroically and tragically comes to its long-foreseen DOOM. An example:

Everyone seems to ignore your supernatural powers. Oh well.

The whole thing felt quite linear, and the conversations were annoying. I am not sure what the '...' option meant—Magically Exit The Conversation? Say Nothing? The hint

Overall, this game looks like something that is promising, but which needs needs a lot more work before it is actually playable. The number of bugs is simply too large for the game to offer any kind of enjoyment. Almost every action I took produced some kind of bug. Even looking at the hints produces a bug. Not only that, but the overly long introduction makes no sense in terms of the sequence of actions made by your character—and how the other characters relate to him. After getting out of the tavern and wasting 10 minutes trying to figure out what to do and without any reason why I couldn't just get the hell out of there, I quit.

The score which I give is an optimistic estimate of the expected quality of the game.

Rating: 3

Beyond

This game opens promisingly. The atmosphere is good and commands work as expected. It is terse and surreal, though using the extremely cliché theme of the immortal soul. The extreme naivitée of this piece made me cringe at places—the writing is alright but needs a bit of polishing. (Also, I didn't know that the italian police let priests walk around in crime scenes like that).

A nice feature of the game is that you can ask people to repeat evidence they have given. This is very useful but the choice of phrasing is a bit unforunate:

This somehow gave me the impression of a forgetful detective.

The biggest problem with the game is that it just doesn't feel realistic. Everything seems to be arranged unnaturally, everyone behaves dumbly, passively, automatically. Also, it is extremely boring. And this is too bad because it is obvious that a lot of effort went into this. Ultimately, however, it fails as a game.

Rating: 4

Sabotage on the Century Cauldron

The first sentence made me think office game... in space. This is not the case, but it seems as though the game is simply full of wanton wackiness at every level, including the main plot. Still, that doesn't necessarily mean the game would be bad.

Anyway, the game is a bit bizarre:

I guess this means it's a bar or bench

I found the NPCs to only provide minimal responses—the recognition of relevant words was minimal. I just didn't feel like playing through it - Unfocused, unimpressive, uninteresting, unfinished.

Rating: 2

A new life

This inexplicably has the filename Goblin.

The opening is intriguing. Movement commands elicit wonderful responses and the initial location seems to have a very real existence.

I particularly enjoyed the sense of backstory both through the use of the REMEMBER verb and the examination of objects. All scenery objects seem to be described—and the descriptions are concise and elegant.

The game feels slightly too puzzle-free for my tastes—it appears to be more of an exploration affair that reveals a story, which in itself is not particularly interesting, even though the world itself is intriguing.

Overall, a more than competent entry.

Rating: 7

Chancellor

The opening is encumbered with exceedingly weighty epithets, which I must say fail to have the expected impact—there is a ponderous exaggeration in such amounts as to make reading the text unbearable. Even though all sentences are laden with solemn importance, the following paragraph probably wins the prize for sheer over-dramatisation:

But on with the game. I have little in way of motivation at the moment - father says nothing, but evidently I must go out. Then I wander around... and end up in the second part of the game. Which is completely pointless. While the game does not seem to suffer from technical problems and the prose is adequate, but the game is unexciting.

Rating: 5

The Colour Pink

You are some sort of Extreme Investigator, out on a Dangerous Interplanetary Mission. This is not so Interesting as one might imagine. Although apparently a Brave and Resourceful Spaceman that has survived through many Dangerous Interplanetary Missions, you exhibit a fair amount of Naiveness. Certainly the descriptions are interspersed with Simple Thoughts of our Plain-Minded Investigator, who does keep his eyes Open in order to take everything in. Overall, the prose seems quite unfortunate, but I will give this game half an hour or so just in case there is something Interesting to do. However, when I actually try and play I discover some Unfortunate Bugs.

The hints do mention that there is something in the nest, so this is quite misleading. And it's the very first puzzle. But what happens next forces me to continue. I have to know how Mankind, or maybe just I, will be Saved.

The prose does not seem to be getting any better now, but it is quite amusing, perhaps because rather than in spite of this fact. However, I must say that putting all your descriptions of the room together with its contents and what they look like and what you are thinking about and what you remember and what was there before and the list of exists is not a good idea at all. Example:

My question here is: Firstly, why not simply say that there is an empty bookcase in front of which lies a pile of books? Secondly, why add all these inferences about the owner or what might have happened or that there might be something hidden underneath? Perhaps the hint should be given when you X BOOKS. And lastly, why have the chest be hidden at all? Finding it is not really part of the puzzle.

I thought the game was somewhat interesting, at least story-wise, and the premise was wacky enough for some amusement. Otherwise it was a mediocrity.

Rating: 5

Off the Trolley

OK, perhaps it is not entirely obvious that you have to push buttons to control the trolley. The main puzzle seems interesting, but the implementation of the whole thing is irritating. A proper walk-through would have been nice.

Rating: 3

Vespers

The opening is engaging both due to the interesting subject and to the well-crafted prose, which is composed of short, crisp sentences laden with meaning and decorated with the occasional metaphor. Some of the word and phrase choices are... I would say quaint, but that does not do them justice. Still, such peculiar uses of the English language are quite infrequent and not at all offputting though they reduce the otherwise excellent impact of the prose at times.

The game's implementation seems impeccable—all reasonable actions seem to work, and when they don't a valid reason is given. Furthermore, a couple of new very useful commands have been added, making the game interface very user-friendly.

This game is awesome.

Rating: 10