Andromeda Awakening by Marco Innocenti

I quite enjoyed Andromeda Awakening though it definitely wasn't without its flaws. It's a game by an Italian author who clearly has a far better grasp of the English language than I do of Italian, but at times certain phrases just stopped me in my tracks and I had to read them again to make sure I'd read them right. 'Squatter around like mad rats' and 'a cold blade cuts your whole in half, at kidney's height'? I can figure out what the first one means but the second is kind of baffling.

Some aspects of the game I found frustrating. It seemed to be one that requires you to play it the exact way the author intended, with no leeway given for other things you might want to try. I met a man on the train and he was reading a newspaper. I decided to examine the newspaper and was given a message that made me believe the newspaper wasn't at all of interest to me. So I engaged the man in conversation and found myself asking him about the newspaper that I'd just been told was of no interest to me. Not long after this, the train crashed and the man was trapped under his seat. Attempts to free him or lift the seat off him failed (the game calmly informs me that I can't see any such thing when I try to examine or move the seat). The only option seems to be to abandon him (or if there's a way to save him, I never came across it and it's not included in the walkthrough).

At times I found the style of writing to be good, at others it seemed far too overblown for my liking. At its best, it was very good indeed.

Some puzzles seem to rely on repetition. Try an action once and you might get nowhere, try it again and you succeed. A few times I only figured this out by sheer chance - trying something I'd already tried not because it occurred to me to be a good idea but simply because I'd forgotten I'd already typed it. I suppose it's not unreasonable to expect people to try things multiple times but it might be a nice idea to clue them into the fact that another attempt is required.

The game's biggest flaw was its liking for mentioning a multitude of items in room descriptions that can't be examined or interacted with in any way. The 'inside of the hut' was especially bad:

"Inside the hut

Darkness gets thicker in here. Shelves line up along the interior, but they are all empty. An old wire dangles from the ceiling with no lamp on it. The only exit is south, to the warehouse.

A blade of light comes from the back of the hut, to the north, where it penetrates a cut in the plastic case.

>x case

You can't see any such thing.

>x hut

You can't see any such thing.

>x blade of light

You can't see any such thing.

>x back of the hut

You can't see any such thing.

>x back

You can't see any such thing."

Didn't any of the testers try to examine these items?

Not only that, but attempting to take the plastic mentioned in the room description allows me to take an item that I'm pretty sure I shouldn't be able to take. Being told I'm carrying 'a cut in the wall' was amusing. Though not half as amusing as, following the walkthrough because I was becoming increasingly stuck by this point, I was able to use the metal bar on the wall and open up a previously hidden exit from the hut... whilst in an entirely different location!

Negative points aside, I did enjoy Andromeda Awakening. It might have its problems, but it's certainly one of the better games I've played in this year's IFComp.

6 out of 10

How *not* to start your IF writing career

From a game called Missing Person recently added to the main ADRIFT site (http://www.adrift.org.uk/cgi/new/adrift.cgi):

“Missing Person
That was the autumn of 1940. I have been working in a private detective's office for eight years. My boss Jimmy was going to retire.
Eight years ago, there was one day, when Jimmy came to me and said:
You can work in my office although you have lost your memory.
Your name is Guy Roland from now on. ”

Bad, very bad. Speech without speech marks. Past and present tense mixed up. Punctuation in the wrong places. I've been playing the game for less than a minute and already I'm wanting to quit.

Yes, this was another ‘game’ (for want of a better word) that was recently uploaded to the main ADRIFT site. Under the ‘full games’ section as well. Some newbies make a genuine effort to impress people with their first games, realising, of course, that first impressions are all important and if you don’t succeed in hooking people right at the start you're never likely to hook them full stop. Others… well, others write games like this.

Let’s persevere, though, shall we? Let’s play this game a little further. Maybe it improves. Maybe it becomes a masterpiece. Maybe…

Maybe it continues to stink. One location is described as

“Old apartment
Marry is here.”

That’s the entire description. Dear god.

I wandered around some more. I got hit with several error messages because the map was too complex and could not be drawn. Quality game testing here and no mistake.

The will to live is beginning to escape me. I check the Generator to see what the game is all about. The very first task I see is “order” which is used to order food. But “order food” doesn’t work, nor does “buy food” or anything similar. A little further down – task 3 to be precise – is “hand jimmy goodbye”. Er… what? I had to open up the task and see what that was. Turns out that “hand jimmy goodbye” is the broken English equivalent of “shake jimmy's hand”. Other amusing tasks I come across are “see * bedroom”, “leave old apartment” (a simple directional command not good enough for you?), “knock the door”. I quit right then.

The writer is listed as Yingying Wu who unfortunately seems to have as poor a grasp of the English language as he does of writing games in ADRIFT: a) he’s not a native English speaker, b) he hasn’t bothered getting a native English speaker to test his game (considering the sheer amount of language problems on show here) and c) this is a bad, bad game.

IFComp 2007 Musings

Total games in the IFComp this year: 29. Quite a downtown on last year’s total of 43, although from a quick glance (could well be wrong) there seem to be less obvious joke entries this time round. Across the various systems, the entries were broken down as follows:

Inform, 14 games
Windows, 5 games
ADRIFT, 3 games
Glulx, 3 games
TADS, 3 games
Quest, 1 game

So another good year for Inform which came very close to achieving half of the entire entries in the comp. ADRIFT came joint third with TADS and Glulx. Last year we had 5 ADRIFT entries so we’re definitely down there, but as one of them was a joke entry it’s true to say there were only 4 ‘proper’ ADRIFT entries last year, so we didn’t fare too badly this time around. The number of TADS entries was again low, perhaps indicating that the ease of use (at least initially) of Inform 7 is more desirable to potential IFComp authors than the complexity of TADS. Other than that, there was one Quest game and no ALAN games. What ALAN itself is like I couldn’t say (never tried to write a game in it myself and only played a handful of games written with it), but it certainly doesn’t seem to be a popular choice for the IFComp.

Five of the games were written without any of the standard interpreters and instead are just ‘Windows’ games written with custom systems. I always roll my eyes when I come across one of these. I mean, seriously, what's the point? If you don’t like coding, use ADRIFT or Quest; if you do, use TADS or Inform or HUGO. There's absolutely no point in writing your IFComp entry in a custom system that I can see because a) the ones that already exist are more than capable of handling anything you want to do, b) people are familiar with most of the existing systems and so don’t need to install any extra software or waste time configuring stuff and c) custom systems are generally crap. Sorry, but they are. Using one for the IFComp is akin to someone entering a short story contest and instead of submitting it on paper like everyone else, deciding he'd be different and inscribe it onto blocks of stone. Believe me, no one is impressed.

Funnily enough, one of the custom jobs wasn’t even a text adventure at all but instead a point ‘n’ click game with text elements. Does this even count as a text adventure? Could I repackage Morrowind and enter it in next year’s IFComp because it has text that you can click?

As it happened, I decided not to play any of these games for more than a few minutes. Three were by Paul Panks whose games I quit on a while ago, one was the point ‘n’ click game which isn't really a text adventure as far as I'm concerned and the other one required software I didn’t currently have installed on my computer so I didn’t bother with it.

This is the fourth year I've played the IFComp entries with the intention of reviewing them all afterwards. Each year, I've started the comp entries in a very positive frame of mind and fully intended to write lengthy and detailed reviews of them all… fully aware that I've yet to get through all the games in previous years but still determined that *this* year I’ll manage it. Ironically, each year I find myself becoming frustrated much more easily with games that seem buggy and haven't been tested properly. Whereas once I’d sit and doggedly play a game until either I’d finished it, got completely stuck and was unable to proceed any further, or was so utterly fed up with it that it was either quit or slash my wrists, I now find myself growing bored very soon into playing the game and looking for reasons to quit.

Pretty much any game that has an introduction riddled with spelling mistakes and/or grammatical errors will get a black mark against it. If I start playing and don’t have a clue what I'm supposed to be doing (unless this is intentional and the aim of the game is to figure out what’s going on), that’s another black mark. If I run into obvious errors (like a location where you can’t examine anything because the author hasn’t included descriptions for them, or I get stuck inside a door or I can carry around a tree), that’s a further black mark. Soon, the black marks start adding up and I'm quitting.

I'm aware how hard it is to get a game completely bug free and to cover all the possible responses people might think to try. No matter how carefully tested a game is, bugs still creep in and it’s impossible to cover everything (and I've found this out the hard way myself). Even so, it’s hard to summon up the enthusiasm to keep on playing a game that looks to have been written by someone who barely understands the English language or bothered testing his game prior to release.

As far as I was able, I played this year’s games with Gargoyle, an interpreter I'm growing more fond of now I've finally figured out how to customise the interface to look a little more pleasing to the ol’ eyeballs. While Gargoyle doesn’t play all of the games flawlessly – my own entry churns out a few weird messages on it – it does a decent job for most of them. The display is a little screwed up at times, but nothing that really spoils a game for me. The one Quest game didn’t work (is Quest not supported by Gargoyle?), so for that I used the standard Quest player. I also ran into problems with the Glulx games – constant crashes mainly – so I used the Glulx interpreter for these. I ran into similar problems with the winning entry from the IFComp 2007 (also a Glulx game). It seems Gargoyle and Glulx just don’t get on.

Some of the games here I played to completion. Others I didn’t. Generally speaking, if I finished the game it’s because I liked it; if I didn’t… well, I didn’t. The only games I finished that I didn’t like were those that, while they may have been bad games, were at least engaging enough to make me want to see what the ending was like, or those so short or easy that I’d finished them without really trying. The majority of the ones I didn’t finish (i.e. the ones I didn’t like), I didn’t play for the full two hours. If I've played a game for half an hour and decided it’s terrible, I don’t need to sit and grind my way through it for another hour and a half. Deadline Enchanter I only played for about five minutes but that was all I could stand.

Saying that, it’s altogether possible that some of the games I quit became better later on. I initially thought Lost Pig was a joke entry and The Chinese Room almost had me quitting to begin with due to the problems I had with getting out of the first location. Ironically, these two games ended up my favourite two in the comp so I’ll certainly be more careful in future not to outright dismiss a game just because the intro doesn’t blow me away.

With only 29 games this year, I started out intending to play and review them all. Last year I’d decided against playing them all on account of there being so many that I’d never get through them in the 6 week judging period (it worked out at roughly 1 game per day which is a lot for someone who generally plays 3-4 a month), but this year, with less games I decided I’d play and review each and every last one of them… but in the end I didn’t. The games I didn’t review for whatever reason are:

“Adventure XT”, “Ghost Of The Fireflies”, “Vampyre Cross” by Paul Panks
Yes, more games by the notorious Paul Panks. I'm sure he has his reasons for continually entering games in the IFComp that almost no one aside from himself seems to like but I don’t know what they are. Don’t really care either. I decided to give up playing his games a few years back and haven't regretted the decision once. However, I notice from reviews of his games that I've read during the IFComp judging period that all three seem to suffer from the usual problems that have plagued his works in the past so by missing out on them, I suspect I'm not really missing much.

As a side note, “Vampyre Cross” later got disqualified from the IFComp for having been previously released. That’s the second time Paul Panks has tried to pull off this little trick. Maybe a permanent ban from future comps is in order…? (No, just wishful thinking there.)

“Deadline Enchanter” by Anonymous
Ah, good old Anonymous, the world’s most prolific author. I often wonder if people are too embarrassed by their games to release them under their real name or if it’s simply a case of them wanting the game judged purely on its own merits and not on who’s written it. For this one I kind of suspect the former applies. The intro was weird and the game itself reads more like a one-sided dialogue than a proper game. I can’t say I cared for it much. Actually I couldn’t stand it. Five minutes of the game’s mocking and snide tones and I was only too ready to quit.

“In The Mind Of The Master” by David Whyld
Yes, my game. I suspect any review I wrote of it would be a tad biased, though I dare venture it’s the best game I entered in the IFComp this year… :)

“Jealousy Duel X” by Alex Camelio
The aforementioned point ‘n’ click game that isn't really a text adventure. As this is a competition for text adventures, I decided to skip it.

“The Lost Dimension” by C. Yong
For some reason, this required the NET Framework version 2.0.50727 to be installed. I didn’t have it and didn’t feel like installing it. I'm always wary of installing extra software in order to play a simple text adventure, particularly when I have all the standard interpreters, as well as Gargoyle, installed anyway, and my past experience has tended to indicate that games written in custom systems are never much good anyway. Maybe this one bucks the trend and is a masterpiece waiting to happen, but if so it’s a masterpiece I’ll be missing out on.


The “Why Oh Why” Awards section…

“Why oh why do you keep entering games you know people don’t want to play?”
For Paul Panks. I can’t decide if he does it because a) he genuinely thinks his games are what people *do* want to play (which would be kind of scary considering how often he’s been told otherwise), b) he’s doing it for a laugh to see how many people he can sucker into playing and reviewing them even when they know the games are going to be bad (likely), c) he sincerely just doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing (also likely) or d) he secretly knows his games suck but figures that if he keeps writing them in a system everyone hates, he can convince himself that they're getting bad reviews because of the system and not because he doesn’t know how to write (we’ll call this theory number one). One day I’d actually like to see him write a game in TADS or Inform.

“Why oh why did you write a game with a custom system?”
For everyone who persists in writing a game in a custom system and then entering it in the IFComp, often without the slightest instructions on getting the game to run. (One of Paul Panks’ games was actually written for the Commodore 64 and so won’t run on any of the standard interpreters. If you're not familiar with the retro text adventure scene and know about emulators, you'd never be able to play it.) Wise up: you're not going to win the IFComp this way, you're not going to impress people that you put together a system on your own that’s almost 1/15th as good as any of the established systems and anyone who plays your game is just going to end up wishing you'd written it with a proper system. On top of that, your game will only do a fraction as well as if you'd written it with an existing system.

“Why oh why do you assume the player is a mind reader?”
For quite a few games, but A Matter Of Importance takes special honours this year. Crossing a road isn't simply a case of directional commands or even CROSS ROAD but instead you need to AVOID TRAFFIC. Beating a kid in a game of football requires you to UNDO LACES before kicking the ball. Solving any of the puzzles in this game requires either a) the player to be psychic or b) the player to continually type HINTS as there's no way of making progress otherwise. As I'm not psychic, that leaves the hints. As I don’t like cheating my entire way through a game, this one was never going to go down well with me.

“Why oh why didn’t you think it was a good idea to tell me what the game was about?”
Several different games vie for honours here but I think I’ll award it jointly to Eduard the Seminarist and Reconciling Mother, two games that alternatively made me want to slash my wrists and/or the author’s wrists. In particular for Eduard the Seminarist, don’t hide key items detailing the aim of the game under items that aren't event mentioned in the room description.

“Why of why didn’t you proofread your game better?”
For In The Mind Of The Master by… um… some chap who probably should have proofread a certain key part in his game a little better. Some people commented on this and were almost driven to the brink of suicide, others reflected on the sheer horrors it brought to them. In my defence, it was one word in a game of many thousands. But, yeah, I still should have proofread it more carefully.

IFComp Review 3: Press [Escape] To Save

Press [Escape] To Save by Mark Jones; Inform

Order played: 3 out of 22

There are some IF games I play that I’ll be 10 – 15 minutes into and find I have absolutely no desire to play any further. The lack of desire to continue could simply be due to bugs, a poor standard of writing, overly difficult puzzles, an awful storyline, or a hundred and one other things. This was one such game.

By sheer bad luck, I ended up playing two of the worst (in my opinion anyway) games in this year’s IFComp back to back. As with the previous one (Eduard the Seminarist), this is another game by a newcomer and has the same kind of problems that I generally associate with first timers. There were so many things wrong with it that it’s difficult to know where to begin.

The writing. Let’s start with the writing…

Boy, it was awful. I won’t go as far as to say it was the worst writing I've ever come across in an IF game but it’s certainly the worst in this year’s IFComp. Weird phrases litter the text, some of them making me wonder if English isn't the writer’s first language, or if he’s just very young. But it’s not just the writing that brings this game down, it’s the bugs as well. A description of one NPC read: JUST A HARDCORE JAILRAT. A BURLY MUSCULAR MAN WITH TATTOOS ALL OVER HIS ARM, HE'S A MAN IN HIS MIDDLE FORTIES YOU'RE GUESSING. HE SEEMS LIKE THE EASILY OFFENDED TYPE. (Amazing that you can tell so much about a man who’s currently asleep from a simple glance!) Trying to talk to him hits me with THE CREATURE IS ASLEEP which is kind of unusual in that a) he’s a man and not a creature (did the writer mistakenly flag the NPC as some kind of animal?) and b) trying to examine the creature tells me that I see no such thing. Later on I was told THE FIGURE THEN CLEARS HIS TALL THROAT and wondered to myself just what a ‘tall’ throat is.

The text is littered with numerous typos (one location is referred to as STATE OF UNCOSCIOUSNESS {sic}), grammar errors and more than a few bugs. The conversation system I didn’t care for due to it being one of these whereby you talk to an NPC, get presented with a list of options, select one, then have to go and talk to him again to reach the next set of options. Why not just follow one set of options with the next set? Why require the player to keep typing TALK TO [NAME] over and over again? Oh, and ensure you put in something for if the player doesn’t type in one of the options because [** PROGRAMMING ERROR: TRIED TO PRINT (CHAR) 130, WHICH IS NOT A VALID ASCII CHARACTER CODE FOR OUTPUT **] is a bit jarring. Also, it’s a good idea if there are no further conversation options available to tell people this instead of having

SELECT AN OPTION BELOW.

SORRY, NO TOPICS AVAILABLE.

At other places, typing in commands sometimes produced no response at all aside from a blank line. I'm not sure if this was where an error message was supposed to go, some text was intended, or if the game is just horribly broken. Probably all three.

If the storyline had been interesting, I might have persevered with the game a bit longer. But it was a generic “thrown in prison for a crime you didn’t commit” type of thing. Once there, you meet a psycho called Jimmy who has all the depth and personality of a cardboard cut out (definitely one of the worst NPCs in a game I've played for a long time) and later on you're visited by a ghostly presence which pulls you into another dimension. This was where my willpower to keep on playing it just died. Up to this point, the game had been terrible in a kind of must-see way. Like you know you're going to be disappointed if you keep playing it, but you just have to keep playing all the same just to see if it really *is* that bad. Unfortunately, it really *is* that bad. I’d like to say this was a decent but flawed effort by a first timer, but it just isn't. There are so many problems with the game that even a first time writer should have caught if he was paying attention that I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

Last place in the IFComp 2007? Well, it’s got some serious competition this year but I’d wager it finishes in the last five.

1 out of 10

IFComp Review 2: Eduard the Seminarist

Eduard the Seminarist by Heiko Theiben; Inform

Order played: 2 out of 22

It kind of tells you what I thought about Eduard the Seminarist when I say that, being perfectly serious here, I couldn’t tell at first whether or not it was a joke game. Usually it’s easy enough to spot these a mile off because they’ve got so many things wrong with them right from the word go that they might as well be called Generic Joke Game. This one was different. It had many, many things wrong with it (more of this below) but at the same time, it seemed a strange subject for a joke game and it didn’t *seem* like a joke game. Just a very, very bad one.

I unwittingly committed suicide on my second move by attempting to go south. The game, unhelpful in the extreme, decided that typing S meant I wanted to throw myself out of the window (which I hadn’t even realised was to the south) and promptly killed me. Yes, we’re definitely off to a good start here. Shouldn’t the game at least warn me that going south will kill me? (Joke game or just very, very bad one? I still can’t decide.)

For the most part, room descriptions are brief and devoid of any attempt at depth. You often get nothing more than a single line detailing where you are followed by a list of directions, except for the location of the gym where the author finally seems to have cottoned on to the fact that the people playing his games might like them more if he made a bit of effort. Unfortunately, this is a one off burst of enthusiasm and everywhere else shows a distinct lack of effort.

What the game is supposed to be about I don’t know. There's no introduction, no background, no goal stated. Finding your way about is confusing as a few exits aren't listed so it’s generally a case of trying every direction in every location to find your way around (and if you happen to throw yourself out of a window in the process, too bad). Add to this an annoying darkness puzzle* and you’ve got a game that doesn’t try very hard to make you like it.

Re the darkness puzzle: there's a candle you can take with you to light up dark areas. But there's a rope that needs to be climbed. Only, of course, you can’t climb the rope while carrying the candle. So you drop the candle which promptly goes out (thus proving that people who throw themselves out of windows when attempting to move south are equally as unskilled at laying down their only light source and not preventing it going out) and climb the rope. Ah, but then the candle has gone out and so any location you enter which is dark you're unable to leave because it’s too dark to see. So… you enter a normal sized room, find it’s too dark, and then discover you're unable to navigate your way to the exit, which can’t be more than a few feet away from you, due to the lack of light? Blind people are able to move about in perfect darkness, but it seems seminarists can’t manoeuvre their way out of a simple room without running into problems. Added to this, even when I knew there was a front door before me in a dark location, I still couldn’t open it on account of it being dark.

From the time I started playing this to the time I quit was about 25-30 minutes. That was pretty much all I could take of it. I've played worse games in the past than Eduard the Seminarist but it’s hard to remember them right now. It fails on just about every front and really should have been kept on the author’s hard drive as a failed first effort instead of being released to the assembled wolves (i.e. the IFComp judges and reviewers). I think I may have spent longer writing this review of the game than I did playing the game itself, which probably tells you all you need to know about it.

Addendum: After quitting the game, I went and read a few other reviews of it to see if there was something that I had missed. It seems there was. Someone mentions another bed in the first location, missed completely out of the room description, that you need to look under in order to find a key item which reveals a lot of the game’s storyline, not the least of which being the actual aim of the game. As this isn't mentioned in the room description, they either managed to get the walkthrough to work where I failed (kudos to them) or somehow managed to discern the location of an item which isn't referred to anywhere* (double kudos to them). With this in mind, I thought about going back to the game and having another go at it, but the same reviews also mention problems like literally getting stuck inside a door, picking up a tree as if it were a carry-able item and various other errors. Considering all that, I think my decision to quit when I did was the best one.

* I remember having a couple of discussions with people in the past about this kind of thing. Someone put a doormat before a front door but failed to mention it in the room description; someone else put a key under the carpet in a room but didn’t mention the carpet anywhere. Both people reckoned these puzzles were completely fair as you'd expect to see a doormat before a front door and a carpet in a room. I disagree. In IF games, you tend to work with what is displayed to you in the text on screen and shouldn’t be expected to interact with items not mentioned anywhere.

2 out of 10

IFComp Review 1: Wish

Wish by Edward Floren; Inform

Order played: 1 out of 22

This was the first game I played in the IFComp of 2007. Why was this one first? Beats me. I think it was just totally random. In previous years, I've used the IFComp’s handy randomiser to select the games for me, but after it giving me a truly awful game for my first one several years ago, I decided to swear off it in future. So from now on, whatever game I happen to play next is entirely random. Anyway, it was a decent enough game to start with.

As far as the storyline behind the game is concerned, it’s hard to say too much about it without giving away the twist at the end. But in brief, you're a little girl called Sarah who is desperately looking forward to her beloved grandfather coming to stay. This is mentioned often. Heavily mentioned. In fact, the game goes to such lengths to tell me what a Wonderful Super Ace Fab Guy Sarah’s grandfather is that halfway through playing it, I could quite happily have strangled him.

It’s easily possible to render the game unfinishable. Neglect to pick up a certain item earlier in the game and you'll find yourself unable to go back for it later on. The item in question wasn’t exactly hidden or anything like that, but I don’t recall any indication being given as to *why* I should take it when I first came across it so I simply wrote it off as a piece of scenery and didn’t give it a second thought. This forced a restart a few times as I had neglected to save my game up to that point. Fortunately it doesn’t take long to get back to where you were before. Even allowing for several restarts, I easily finished the game well within the two hour comp deadline.

There's a supplied walkthrough for if you happen to get stuck, though this only happened to me when I’d missed an item and put the game into an unfinishable position. The walkthrough at least indicated to me that I’d missed the item so it was certainly helpful in that respect*. But for the most part, this is a very, very easy game. Just as well really as at one point the walkthrough advised me to TALK to someone, even though the TALK command isn't recognised. Fortunately I was able to solve that little puzzle on my own.

* I wasted some time before consulting the walkthrough by assuming that I could either go back for the item I needed or that it wasn’t necessary and there were alternate solutions to the puzzle that didn’t require the item. Unfortunately neither of these was the case. You *do* need the item and if you didn’t pick it up, then the game *can’t* be finished.

Most of the puzzles are nice and straightforward. There are a few of the ‘find an item, give it to someone else’ variety and others that are solved merely by having the correct item in your inventory at the time. At other times, it only seems possible to ‘solve’ puzzles by waiting several moves for them to solve themselves. Whether this actually counts as solving a puzzle, I'm not sure. It’s kind of annoying, though. If I'm trying to figure out how to solve a puzzle and the game goes ahead and does it for me, it makes me question what the point of the puzzle was in the first place. Or is the point that I’m supposed to figure out the solution *before* the game tells me?

The only part that gave me any problems was making a kite. This was the game’s buggiest moment. When TIE CROSS TO FABRIC won’t work but TIE FABRIC TO CROSS will, it’s a problem. It also isn't helped by the fact that to make the cross, you need to use two other items but once the cross is made, you can’t refer to either of the items again which caused me further problems because I was trying to refer to them and the game kept hitting me with error messages about it.

Still, it wasn’t a bad little game, even if I didn’t really understand most of what was going on. My guess while playing was that it was some kind of dream or even a coma (there was a game in the IFComp last year which featured a player who was in a coma) but there was no indication of this when the game had finished. Was there some connection between the events in the game and what the game itself was about that I missed? Or did the author simply string together a number of ideas at random and just assume people wouldn’t think about them too deeply? The expected explanation at the end of the game never materialised, so I guess I’ll just have to settle for not knowing.

5 out of 10

Reviews on their way...

...and other stuff besides. The IFComp 2007 is now coming to a close and officially finishes this Thursday (15th November) with the results to be announced a few days afterwards. So by this time on Friday, I ought to know whether I've won (fat chance, but I'm an eternal optimist) or lost (not a chance, says the eternal optimist in me).

Overall, I think the comp this year has been a stronger one than in previous years. Sure, we've had the usual drivel from Paul Panks and a few games that were so bad it's like the authors just simply Didn't Have A Clue what they were doing, but all that aside there have been some pretty damn good entries this year. I haven't a clue where I'll end up but I suspect A Fine Day For Reaping will secure itself a place in the top 10. So good for the Adrift world then.