IFComp 2015 review: 5 Minutes to Burn Something! by Alex Butterfield

5 Minutes to Burn Something! is an incarnation of the most staple of staples of the IF Competition: A parser game in which you have to solve an impractical physical problem in a closed environment using a disparate bunch of props before a time limit runs out. Other staple factors include the environment being the player's apartment, a wack approach to humour and the prose's fixation on the PC's crummy ex.



In 5 Minutes you've got to start a fire in your apartment to cover the false alarm raised by your toaster before the firemen arrive, thus avoiding a false alarm fine. Sure, this is a damagingly uncivilised course of action, but later behaviour by the PC is sufficiently extreme that I'd categorise her as sociopathic anyway, at least if the whole game wasn't so obviously silly-leaning.

5 Minutes does all its basic stuff right and exhibits some touches of advanced mindfulness (certain commands don't waste your precious turns, there's a complete and context-sensitive hint system, some text is formatted in colour, etc.) for what looks to be the author's first Inform game, or at least his first that I've seen. It's an old school-leaning adventure in the sense that the relationships between the puzzles and the solution objects can be pretty abstruse; it certainly requires a try everything on everything mindset embracing kitchenware, bathroomware and miscellaneous apartment crap. The implementation is a little too fuzzy for the fiddliness of the puzzles, leading to some guess the verb problems and uneasiness about whether you've really investigated each prop thoroughly. For instance, SEARCH is sometimes the jackpot command, sometimes not, and sometimes gives a misleading response. Also, I immediately knew that I wanted to snag that tree branch with my stockings, but after trying a bunch of commands for this and getting nowhere, I didn't feel like continuing to guess at them until after I'd hit the hints to verify I was at least on the right track.

The game lists one tester who knew nothing of IF and one scientific advisor (!) What's missing is a tester who did know IF and could have pointed out some typical weaknesses.

I did come to feel that I knew my apartment very well during play, but the PC's constant harping on her ex-boyfriend through the lens of most object descriptions tired me. This was the primary means of giving the PC some character. The danger with this game's kind of wack tone is that it can easily blanket all of the content. If I found the conjured boyfriend to be a caricature of a jerk, I found the PC to be a caricature of someone who dated a jerk and then could never shut up about it. So I didn't find the game to be as funny as it probably hopes it is, but it's complete, clear of major bugs, has well-programmed hints and sports multiple endings. It's an iteration of something that's been done a lot, but the author is now on the board.