It’s late 2019 and the awards for last year’s interactive fiction games have finally closed. So here are my thoughts on some of the nominations and winners.
As usual there are a bunch of browser-based games getting votes in competitions, but it’s beyond me why they get voted so highly in the best games awards. Let’s begin with some of the actual best – some of the games that have real playability.
I.A.G. Alpha
I.A.G. Alpha is well-presented, with actual photo-images, which is great to see. It’s just a natural progression to have interactive fiction with real images, something which was unachievable in the 1980s but which now rarely sees the light of day. I can only think of a couple of examples of the top of my head through the whole adventure spectrum, and those are Flash-based efforts.
The story itself is set in a post-Soviet research institute, which instantly brings to my mind one of my fave games of all time, KGB. The author Serhii Mozhaiskyi presents an elaborate conceit in which he oft reminds you that this is an unfinished game presented only so you can see what he managed to cobble together.
We are Anton, lowly employee at the Institute of Advanced Genomics, and we find our security has been revoked. While it has a choice-based ITCH interface, actually this is better than the standard html offering, as you have an inventory and the game chugs along with the standard fare of ID cards, drawers, metal rods and such like. Actually it’s very refreshing, and brings to mind early point-and-click games where you had to try everything in your inventory until you hit on the solution, though the puzzles at this point are quite simple. After negotiating the building’s security the game takes a serious twist where we can manipulate objects in a way untold of in adventure game history…
Another plus is it’s left for you to imagine locations, without ridiculous text dumps or the usual unnecessary blurb which does little for atmosphere. There is one exception though, and these are the abrupt interruptions with the author’s apologies about what he intended for the game, presenting a page of info about the background he intended to fill in. Yes, this is part of him leading you in the wrong direction, but it’s done a little bit clumsily for my liking. This could merely reflect the fact that the game was translated from its original Russian though. The other part of his grand conceit is the Debug feature selected from the top menu. The game code is then revealed to you – which also allows you to see the solution to the early problems.
This is a fantastic innovation, which I’ll try not to spoil, and one which gave it a nomination for Best Innovation in the XYZZY Awards, and for which it gets my vote, above even the excellent Cragne Manor. I think more could have been made of it, and in a full-blown commercial release it would undoubtedly expand into more and more devious puzzles. Nevertheless, it also got nominated for best puzzles, so there is something there. Even though I felt the whole subterfuge at the start could have been done in a more convincing way, without resorting to pretending the game was an amateurish castaway, I hope this guy gets into more and bigger adventure projects, as he definitely brings a spark of something new to the adventure world.
Junior Arithmancer
Mike Spivey’s effort might not be everybody’s cup of tea, but I found this game very addictive. You are a young examination candidate in the mathematical branch of wizardry – arithmancy. Your task is to cast a series of spells to try and uncover the numbers in several sequences which await on your examination paper.
Built with Inform, and playable on a Glulx interpreter, the screen is split into two halves, with the right side of the screen providing the number sequences and spell names. This is really tidy, and the way the ENTER key works is very user-friendly, functioning simultaneously on both screen sides. The difficulty level ramps up quite quickly, but I don’t know whether I would consider this a criticism, as it makes the game all the more compelling.
The game does leave you feeling a bit muddled at first, but you quickly grasp what’s going on, aided by examining wizards Morkan and Yottaboz, who don’t know that you can hear their acerbic comments about your lack of progress.
An adventure game with only mathematics puzzles might not suit everyone, but it was nominated for best puzzles, so I guess someone managed to get through the trickier beasts. The mind boggles at how Mike Spivey managed to ensure these complex number puzzles had such mind-bending (I believe, single) solutions. Very well implemented by a chap who also writes the best reviews nowadays on the Interactive Fiction Database.
Illuminismo Iniziato
Sometimes presentation is king, and Illuminismo has it in staves!
This game won Spring Thing 2018, and deservedly so. A sequel to the author’s previous Risorgimento Represso, made in the almost pre-electronic age of 2003, it’s a travesty that scrapings like Bogeyman are in the running for XYZZY Best Game, with this out in the cold. For some reason Paul O’Brian moronically gave the first game two stars even though it was a 9.5 game according to his reckoning, because it wasn’t “the right size for the comp”. Well, I can’t think of anything more inane given the overshort tripe that is so often on offer. BIGGER GAMES! We need bigger games! Rant over. O’Brian did make up for it a bit though with an interesting interview with author Michael J. Coyne in SPAG Magazine.
Anyway, like in the first in the series, we are a student of eccentric wizard Ninario. We begin the game to find ourselves turfed out into the street, and make our way into the nearby village to discover local events, aided by the daily rag, the ‘Town Tattler’, and the neat auto-mapping system.
Help on our travels comes from our diminutive friend Crystal, who swings from our neck in her snow globe and offers loquacious advice. Although Kenneth Pedersen managed to finish the game with only a single use of the in-game hints, this is a game which builds up professionally from puzzle to puzzle, not holding your hand too much, and giving you plenty of puzzle to ponder.
It’s made with Inform 6, but you will have to use Glulx-E or an equivalent to play it, it’s not a Z-code that would run on Frotz. You also need to play from the blorb wrapper if you want the automap feature and small graphics, which means if you’re playing it through a more limited system or legacy system like DOS, you’ll need an interpteter which can handle gblorb.
In town we discover an airship anchored into the pier, and a range of stores with unaffordable inventory wares, as at this moment we only have two ‘plotkins’ to our name, small thin coins minted in copper. The marriage of fantasy and modern which has been so neatly applied to parody fantasy text adventures since the mid to late 1980s is again used to great effect here. Our laundry has been nicked, we have to shimmy up drainpipes, pterosaurs flounder in the grass desperate for help, and our mentor is conspicuous by his absence, denying he has an apprentice, and when pressed by the Tattler, denies the apprenticeship programme, “denied that he was a wizard and informed the Town Tattler that he would be suing them for libel, if that paper existed, a fact that he also denied.”
John Wilson of Zenobi eat your heart out, it feels like a latter day Bulbo and the Lizard King, but with all the added trappings that can fit into 741K (or 6.9Mb for the standard blorbed version). Incidentally, the Rochdale Balrog has been busy and recently released a new sequel, Bulbo and the Blue Dragon, for everything from the ZX Spectrum and Amiga to the MSX. Illuminsimo Iniziato is not as funny maybe, but it has a better parser and oodles of atmosphere. In fact, the description is so vivid I can quite imagine a point-and-click AGS conversion in my mind’s eye. Coyne found inspiration for his last release in everything from Zork and Spellbreaker to Monkey Island, and the magic of those forebears is resurrected again here. Craig Shaw Gardener’s Ebenezum from the Ballad of Wuntvor series and Paul Dukas’s symphonic poem The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (turned on its head) are a big influence on Ninario, the inept magical master. Highly recommended, we can only hope it doesn’t take fifteen years for Michael J. Coyne’s next release.
Human Errors
Boy is this one dross. The premise is great: imagine Spielberg’s film A.I. (actually half-made by Stanley Kubrick and Sara Maitland but that’s another story), with fully functioning androids at every level of society. You are employed in the error-checking department, handling issues from your company’s implant upgrades.
You begin the game finding that the company already has 5,000 unresolved issues which they’re swept under the carpet to be dealt with by outsourced assistance. We also have a whiff of profanity here which is unwelcome at this entrance to the adventure. Ignoring the 5,000 previous mails, you begin to to trawl through your new messages, a mixture of distraught factory workers and suicidal machines.
The execution unfortunately is very poor. Nearly every mail seems to have the same voice of hyper-hysterical lunacy, and there is little to give the sense that this is an AI you are speaking to: even the humans have the same characterisation. The stakes are not built up progressively, with no sense of variety. The mails generally start ok in the first paragraph – if each was chopped to this then the mystique would be maintained, but Moryati always seems to have the urge to go too far, and I don’t find it remotely amusing since she presents it in a serious manner. This is nominated for best writing. Seriously, are you yanking my chain?!
Now, this is supposed to be INTERACTIVE fiction, and you are presented with the possibility of textually responding to emails, but you can leave your response blank and still meet the same email reply back. She is assuming that someone would bother to engage the game with a well-crafted reply, but if they do so they will find no benefit. This is PASSIVE fiction, there isn’t even the sense of interactivity that was built into the early artificial intelligence Eliza. In a game which is about A.I., this is a bit of a failure. Involve yourself emotionally in to many user issues, and your supervisor will promptly revoke your access and kick you off the system. Which is probably preferable to actually playing the game. Avoid.
Bogeyman
I can’t really call Bogeyman a game, and really it should have some sort of warning about it’s adult content. It’s really a story about child abuse, and what can you say, Elizabeth Smyth writes horrifically and you are left with distaste in your mouth.
Why do people write these things? I’m not sure it does much else than hammer into us that there are real horrors in the world. But perhaps I’m being harsh, for this was written very well. I’m not sure at what level Elizabeth Smyth was abused in her life, or whether she researches and empathises well, but the scenario of being kidnapped is credible and realistic.
It’s not something I personally want to play, and it is mostly a clickfest of click-on-the-next-link in the story. And this is a story, rather than a game. This does make the horror more inevitable, since you don’t have much agency, even if it gives you something of the illusion of choice, but I prefer interactivity, and something more fun. Nevertheless, I can concede that it was made effectively, which is why it won awards for writing and best NPC. The Bogeyman himself is both horrific and very real, and the fact that the usual game escapes are not going to work here, adds to the overall ominousness.
Elizabeth is a narrative designer for Fusebox Games, whose usual fare are phone games like Love Island – The Game and The X Factor Life, based on the TV shows of course, so actually one can see why she would go in quite a different direction than the feelgood factor. And the professional writing shows. Was it worth three awards? Give it a go and you decide. But don’t expect to win, and have a nice cup of tea or coffee afterwards to steady your nerves.
Re: Dragon
Boy, are we scraping the bottom of the barrel here. The best thing about this one is the cover image.
This begins badly enough by showing you what looks like the game’s ending screen, until you click in the junk folder. This game is up for ‘best innovation’ and I couldn’t think of a more unworthy nomination for that accolade. It’s not like email in a game is particularly novel, the lousy Human Errors, which is also up for an XYZZY award, does it better, though you find it done with nice puzzle integration in commercial point-and-clicks like Resonance and Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches.
You are George MacBraeburn, or at least his email box, tending to your ‘JMAIL’ account, and scrying on the events of an incompletable game entered into the IF Competition. The ironic thing is that the game, which actually placed in 65th place in 2017 and launches within game, is genuinely funny a couple of times, which this effort is not.
I sometimes think this chaff gets nominated because no-one has the patience to actually play a proper good old fashioned text adventure. Vorple and Inform-powered, the links also tend to be a bit buggy in activating. The only think I liked in-game about this one was the incoming mail icon.
Cragne Manor
With some of the tripe out the way, let’s have a look at the XYZZY competition gold dust, Cragne Manor.
Cragne Manor is a unique beast, in that it was created by 84 different authors. Ensuring that it all somehow gels together, is Ryan Veeder, no stranger to the IF-Comp himself, having won it back in 2011 with Taco Fiction.
We open at a railway station, where Naomi Hinchen does a sterling job of setting the scene, with an adjacent restroom penned by an unknown author to me, David Petrocco, who captures the filth to perfection.
Not content with irritating me by releasing a game that doesn’t even run on many new Windows machines, Emily Short managed to bug me again here with the location description, ‘Emily Short with additions by Graham Nelson’ which took me bang out the enjoyment, and was actually the first time I realised the authors were bracketed in the room description (which shows how much I was enjoying it).
Here an old woman guards the bridge, not allowing you access into the town, replete with fantastic lines like, “Keep your hideous hands away from me, unwise fool.”
Four locations in, and it’s remarkable that it all seems to knit together; mapping the area there’s surprisingly nothing much incongruent bar the gothic atmosphere itself. It was a little odd to me that I could bypass the woman perhaps, as it had seemed apparent to me that she was guarding the bridge, but that was about all. After getting a bit further, the only thing to reveal that this adventure was written by so many authors was Daniel Stelzer & Jemma Briggeman’s writing, which seemed a bit hyperbolic, and a bit out of sorts with what came before.
It turns out we are Mrs. Cragne; Peter has gone missing, and an unknown Edwin is waiting for us in the manor.
Without expending too much energy, I was already carrying: some flakes of plant matter, a fungal powder, a cast iron spire, a mouldy, waterlogged journal, a small, rectangular battery, the Dollmaker’s Journal, a faint chill (haunting you), a waterproof flashlight, a giant milkweed leaf, the Modern Girl’s Divination Handbook — Volume Three, a pull-string doll, a glass jar containing an insect, a half-full styrofoam coffee cup, a label and a familiar gold wristwatch (being worn).
The fact we have two dolls and two journals causes a bit of parser confusion, but it’s quickly overcome. The coffee cup in our inventory functions as a slight hint system, as we can divine in the cup whether we need to explore a bit more before we can successfully pillage the room we are in.
One minor criticism for me is I wish they hadn’t bother with the apology at the start that this is not like other games: you get prompted twice to affirm say that you really do want to play. Once you get going it is clear that they needn’t have bothered with this. What I would love though is for Ryan Veeder to alter those room title to remove references to the authors, and instead have the authors revealed in some subtle way within room text itself.
This game poses some challenge, and as a consequence of the plethora of authors, it’s not always apparent what the problem is that you have to overcome. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Way back when in the annals of text adventure history there were some games that achieved this admirably like Castle Blackstar, and unrestricted by the memory restrictions of the retro era, this plays a lot better.
Definitely my favourite of the competition.
Alias the ‘Magpie’
Alias the ‘Magpie’ was nominated for seven XYZZY awards this year. In the end it only won one – Best Player Character, though author J.J. Guest can breathe a sigh of relief that at least it beat Bogeyman to the top spot to win the 2018 Annual Interactive Fiction Competition last year, as well as the Miss Congeniality – the best game as voted by competition authors.
Lord Hamcester (pronounced ‘hamster’) has hired psychiatrist Doctor Drake to look over his barking brother-in-law, who believes he’s exploring the Congo. Arriving as ‘Doctor Drake’, you find you’re to go incognito, and pretend to his wife that you’re the famous Hermes Perroquet, on the trail of the notorious Magpie. What Hamcester doesn’t know is that Perroquet is your own arch-nemesis, and you are in fact Sir Rodney Playfair, alias ‘The Magpie’. After overhearing a phonecall in the Dionysus Club, you had rang up Drake, told him the appointment was off, and entered Hamcester’s estate posing as the noted psychiatrist (he of the ginger moustache).
The Earl ignores you to commence writing his St. Bartholomew-on-the-Bog village fete ‘best cucumber’ speech – he’s named this year’s cucumber ‘Shenandoah’: “No vegetable ever nurtured by the man has ever exceeded her length or girth, despite the best efforts of Sir Humphrey Leghorn.” This leaves you free to focus on what you are really after: Hamcester’s jewelled Egyptian scarab, which lies somewhere within his Bunkham Hall estate.
Good scenario, though the standard Inform text dump of the plotline is not the clearest, and takes some mental unravelling before you get going. Once you do, you find descriptions are tidy: “A Chesterfield back-buttoned wing chair upholstered in a quality chestnut brown leather, exquisitely soft.”
EXAMINE responses are informative and humorous. X CRUMBS reveals, “It looks as though someone has had their cake and trampled on it.” The DUTCH COW is “A fine example of Victorian tat, which, in spite of its size, manages to lower the tone of the room.” J.J. Guest gets richly creative with his descriptions. To EXAMINE TABLE, we get, “A George III mahogany inlaid double-pedestal extension table featuring a reeded top with rounded corners and matched-swirl mahogany veneers crossbanded with quartered pau ferro and satinwood stringing. Rather fine.” We also have probably the best response to EXAMINE WALL that I’ve ever seen. “Staring at the walls will send you wall-eyed, probably.”
Room descriptions have the same tone and level of detail: “The library at Bunkham Hall has a long and chequered history, and its chequered floor still bears the faint traces of numerous chalk outlines.” Slight omission that you can’t EXAMINE the MIRROR at the back of the curio cabinet, but I’ll forgive him that one, and I guess only I would attempt to ROLL the CARPET in front of Lady Hamcester.
We soon discover that the scarab has been half-inched. Not only that, but your trusted lockpicks have disappeared from your secret pocket. “That snot-nosed kid who walked right into you on the platform at Paddington – the perisher must have snaffled it!” He’s also concerned about the Major decimating hollyhocks with machete, and the brother-in-law is indeed out and about, causing havoc. Though you also manage to create some for yourself: “Well, toodle-oo, old bean” you say, and gesturing towards the balding box hedge, add “keep up the good work.” You then tumble into the ha-ha, a trench preventing cattle from running amuck, whereupon you discover a banana.
There is an occasional lack of synonyms: MADAM and MADAME for LADY HAMCESTER would have been nice, and you can’t ASK her ABOUT HERSELF, PRAY or RIDE the BULL, but the game is generally well implemented.
How do we get past the gardener, guarding entrance to the Earl’s cucumber patch? Where is the key to the cabinet, how do we get past the Earl’s bull, which billows steam from its nostrils when you attempt entry to the orchard, and who is dropping all the bananas?
Puzzles a’plenty, and plenty to like about this game, for me it had a better claim to Best Writing and Best Game than Bogeyman.
Ozmoo
The Best Technological Development XYZZY award category this year highlights more strongly than ever the insular nature of the IF “Community” and the text adventure afficionados who exist outside of it.
Hopefully, though this development will change the tide a little. Ozmoo, which was nominated, but didn’t win, allows modern IF games to be played on the old 8-bit machine, the Commodore 64. Inform games up to about 210 KB should be playable. “If they have a large amount of dynamic memory, they can be bigger, but games with larger dynamic memory will be prone to constant disk access which will probably make them horribly slow.”
170K games are stored on the single side of a disk, 190K on a double-sided disk, and via the use of ‘extended tracks’, up to 210K, though not all emulators support extended tracks.
However, on speed issues, it is possible to increase emulation speed of the emulator VICE to 200%, which should increase playability no end.
On top of this, larger games of up to 350K can be built and stored on two or three disk sides. They require a system with dual 1541 drives, but of course, this is no issue whatsoever for an emulator. Any sized game can also be stored on a 1581 disk image (.d81) and played using an SD2IEC or an actual 1581 drive. The big emulator VICE (Versatile Commodore Emulator) supports these.
This means (which I’m often fond of moaning about) unblorbing .blorb files to get the Z-code beneath the bloaty wrapper.
This is not the first project of this nature. John Elliott’s ZXZVM allows Infocom games to be played on the humble Spectrum +3 and Amstrad PCW. Like ZXZVM, Ozmoo works on the real original hardware, not just emulation.
Release 2 was out in June 2019, though it was up for the XYZZY award for last year’s efforts. Ozmoo‘s creators, Johan Berntsson and Fredrik Ramsberg, wrote it in assembly and it is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
Custom fonts are embeddable, and it uses none of the Infocom-owned code, though graphics and sound are not currently supported.
It’s a GitHub project which might make it less accessible to the non-technically minded, but once the .D64 games start floating around, the true value of the project will be seen. C64 owners might spit out their cornflakes though when they learn the ZX Spectrum and its Z80 processot got their first.
Dialog
Terrible name for what the software does, but Dialog is probably quite different to what you might imagine. Nothing to do with dialogue trees, Dialog converts high-level rule definitions into compact, efficient Z-code, which means resource-constrained platforms – vintage systems – could potentially run Z-code games.
Linus Åkesson is responsible, all the more coincidental with the release of Ozmoo, since Linus created Zeugma for the BBC Micro, a modern Z-machine interpreter for the 6502 processor family, the processor which, of course, the Commodore 64 also runs on.
Linus (who also goes by the pseudonym Lft) was also nominated for an XYZZY for the game Tethered. The award might have went to Bogeyman, but I did enjoy the way Tethered was written, not holding your hand but forcing you to make difficult decisions.
Dialog is welcome, don’t get me wrong, but it shouldn’t win the XYZZY 2018 award. Until David Welbourn’s poking around, there were major problems in the libraries in November 2018, and it didn’t have an upgrade for outputting .z5 games till Jan 2019.
Where the big potential is, though, is that this can be a programming system in its own right, once improved. Unlike Inform you can see and modify library code under the hood. Once its played around with & tested maybe it would deserve an award. Maybe the IF Community could make up for it and give Ozmoo the award this year?
Animalia
Animalia is another Browser-game. I usually turn my nose up at these things, but this one is renowned for actually having some size about it.
The Taigalands are in trouble, and the animals gather together to propose a plan. Their tabled scheme is to produce a human replica, puppeteered by four animals, to protect their lands from the unenvironmental actions of the humans.
The game is hampered or helped, depending on your opinion, by your having to select four animalia from the circus of animals. These four animals impersonate Charlie, and proceed to Dundee Road to convince Charlie’s parents that Charlie is Charlie. Then it’s off to school, possibly via the ‘dandelion whale’ (school bus) where the team receive a relentless salvo from Charlie’s malevolent classmates on his personal hygiene. We proceed to some light swearing (at least in this playthrough) alongisde attempts at humour that seem a bit far off from the real experiences of schoolchildren. But for the most part, the game’s zaniness is well-done. It has a simple, childish style, but at the same time it has genuine life-awareness and humour.
It’s in the area of the animals failed attempts to act normal that the game scores. Alongside their more slapstick moments, the animals persistently use outdated terminology like leeward, windward and trepidation, feeding the suspicion of humans. And it’s occasionally hilarious, which is not so easy in a text game. During their operation to extract Benji the mouse from being the luncheon of the ravenous Frumpy the python, the animals ask to go to the bathroom. “Excuse me, Teacher?” Charlie says. “I must excrete urine in the child washroom .”
On the other hand, at times the text feels a bit forced, trying too hard for laughs. The occasional spelling mistake skips past playtesting as well, like “perceptable” for “perceptible” and “contigent” for “contingent”. And having the option to view all story endings from the title screen is definitely a no-no in these days of Internet walkthroughs.
As we get into the game the text improves, with old-fashioned room description:
“Charlie sits in a canary-yellow classroom, decorated on all sides with banners and posters espousing positivity, enthusiasm, and respect. The desks in classroom have been organised into rows, and Charlie’s desk sits in the middle row about halfway back from the board — almost the exact centre of the class.” This is also the point where we can sink our teeth into puzzles, and though it’s based on multiple choice it’s still pretty tangled.
Game screen is generally made up of a few choice options, but at times on the left hand of the screen you get the option to SAVE, LOAD and see your STATUS, which involves seeing how believable your story and actions are to the humans. You can only save your game once into memory, so this is the equivalent of the old text adventure command RAMSAVE. Other options appear according to the episode. RESTART is hidden within the STATUS option, but you can just refresh your browser to achieve the same effect.
You’re going to need that SAVE option. It’s a nice time-saver on going through all the choice options, and it also worked for me after restarting my computer. Some of the decisions though are a bit arbitrary. You can easily make it impossible to save Benji through little fault of your own or finish the game early through an oversight. This makes it inferior to adventure s in general, but the satisfaction of completing the puzzle turns out to be well worth it.
Manage it through your first day and you make it to Earth Week 2018. Here the game is authentically educational, and here we learn the Taiga is the largest biome on Earth and are introduced to Wladimir Köppen and his climate classification system. It’s all done in an unaffected way, in keeping with the storyline (I’m going to let Susan & Horseradish’s vomit-inducing mutual atonement speech, which occurs slightly afterwards, slide).
It has been touted as a longer browser game, but in the end it felt like the game was just beginning when it finished. There are a large amount of alternate scenarios, but you’re only going to see them if you’re the type who likes endlessly trawling through the options. It won an XYZZY for best NPCs, which seems very apt, but did it deserve Best Writing? It shared the accolade with Bogeyman, and I suppose if you put the writing of both games together you would have the quality needed for the award. But for me it lacks the polish of Illuminismo Iniziato or Alias the ‘Magpie’.
The Origin of Madame Time
This one sort of got lost amidst all the other games. A sequel to The Owl Consults, a game which I thought undeservedly had sixth place in the IF Comp 2017 due to lack of testing (despite it being reviewed as well playtested), this new game is a lot more polished. That game was by Thomas Mack, Nick Matthewson and Cidney Hamilton, though, while this one is by Brian Rushton aka Mathbrush. Not content with being a mathematics teacher (hence the moniker), and writer for Choice of Games, Rushton has managed to be placed in the IF Comp top 10 three years in a row. Madame Time is described as a 12K game, but I don’t see how that’s possible as unblorbed into its .ulx file, it’s still 643K. So maybe this won’t be getting exported to Ozmoo.
It was nominated for best puzzle at the XYZZY awards, and it got my vote. Like its predecessor, you are a superhero, but this time there are a whole host of heroes and villains, all of which are clearly demarcated in their EXAMINE descriptions, and within your annotated notebook on superheroes, where you can LOOK them UP. Squid Kid, The Alchemist, Rusty Red Dashing, Golden Girl, Mister Winter, and so on, it’s like a line-up of B-movie villains. I really quite appreciated the descriptions, as my memory was not so good on who was who.
Billed as an authorised sequel, Brian Rushton, who for me writes the best IFDB reviews after Mike Spivey (also one of the playtesters), has written a nice tidy game. You are Justin Thyme, a superhero with the neat Charmed-like ability to stop time in its tracks. A nuclear airship is about to detonate, and whilst everybody else is frozen in space, your job is to manipulate everything so that no harm is caused by the explosion and the superhero team is able to overcome the villains.
Two hint systems are on display – FORESIGHT and OVERSIGHT – but the problems are still pretty taxing. Once you realise you have the means to transport the villains about the place it gives the brain a workout to consider where to put them – if indeed, that is even part of the solution. If you like comicbooks you’ll like it, but it’s not even necessary; as J.J. Guest commented, it’s also a series of ‘static vignettes’, so it’ll warm the cockles of anyone who likes puzzle-based adventures.
Cannery Vale
Just got a little space for another XYZZY nomination that deserves a mention. Cannery Vale won the award for Best Setting, and Hanon Ondricek (originally writing under the pseudonym Keanhid Connor) does something special with it.
It reminds me of a film I saw years ago where the protagonist goes to a psychiatrist about his nightmares. Gradually more and more weird things happen in his waking life, until he eventually realises at the conclusion of the film that his nightmares are real (someone please tell me the name of the TV-Movie if you know it).
Anywho, here you begin as a drowning man, and then we switch in typical Inform fashion to the game beginning, where we are an author in Room 408 of the Lovecraft Inn. Except this isn’t Inform, this is a Browser game, created with AXMA Story Maker. The .html file is also playable offline. There is a small graphical window to the right of the main screen, and some sound effects and music by Kevin MacLeod too.
As our author-character writes, we increase the scope of the game for the drowning man, whom we switch into when we get drowsy and fall asleep. And vice-versa, our drowning man’s adventures affect the author. Genius. It’s also an adult game, but we get warned about the explicitness. This was Brian Rushton’s favourite game of the XYZZY competition, and he’s played a few, calling it an ‘amazing Stephen King-like twisted, self-referential tale’, but I think Mike Spivey hits the nail on the head best, when he describes playing Cannery Vale as like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without the box top, where each new piece makes you realise that the picture in your head is wrong’. It’s rough around the edges in places, but very innovative.
The XYZZY Winners
Best Game: Bogeyman (Elizabeth Smyth)
Best Implementation: Cragne Manor (Ryan Veeder et al)
Best Writing: Animalia (Ian Michael Waddell) / Bogeyman (Elizabeth Smyth)
Best Puzzles: Junior Arithmancer (Mike Spivey)
Best Innovation: I.A.G. Alpha (Serhii Mozhaiskyi)
Best Setting: Cannery Vale (Hanon Ondricek)
Best Puzzle: Solving murder in Erstwhile (Maddie Fialla & Marijke Perry)
Best PC: Magpie in Alias the ‘Magpie’ (J.J. Guest)
Best NPC: Bogeyman, Bogeyman (Elizabeth Smyth)
Best NPCs: Animalia (Ian Michael Waddell)
Best Multimedia: Bandersnatch (Charlie Brooker & David Slade)
Best Technological Development: Dialog (Linus Akesson)
