IntroComp 2020 review: Foreign Soil by Olaf Nowacki

Foreign Soil, by Olaf Nowacki, is the beginning of a parser-driven sci-fi adventure, one whose demo duration leaves the potential scale of the whole open to speculation.

In the striking opening scene, the PC is born, messily and with plenty of fluid, of a sarcophagus on an alien planet. Her apparent task: to establish a colony from scratch. It seems a bit pessimistic on the part of her parent civilisation to have preserved its colonists in containers that are basically elaborate coffins, but sarcophagi are certainly cooler than glass tubes. Thus the game starts out well.

After solving a few uncomplicated waking-up-groggy puzzles, the player gets to have a look outside the ship. For me, donning a suit and going through an airlock always takes me back to Scott Adams's Strange Odyssey – you've probably got your own first airlock. The scale of the landing crater is conveyed by splitting it up into numerous empty locations, simply connected. And the bounds of the crater are really the bounds of this introduction, as far as I can tell. Someone else already reported not being able to progress beyond the pulling of a lever found on the outside of the spaceship, however we could all be wrong! If there is more to this demo, please let me know, anyone. This invitation is extended to the author as well, though obviously the author should contact me privately and make sure they avoid breaking any Introcomp rules.

In reviewing my transcript of the game, I realised that the strength of the birth scene is essentially the strength of the whole demo. Beyond that point, the descriptions, design and implementation quickly slide towards the minimal. In terms of my expectations for an extended version of this game, I'd be wanting everything to be as interesting as that first scene. In terms of imagery, the author has already shown that they've got that up their sleeve.

The trick would seem to be that the goal of establishing a colony is a pretty radical one with many dimensions. Would the player have to resurrect other colonists? Find and develop food and shelter? Change the atmosphere? Explore the planet? I can imagine an old school Scott Adams (again) implementation of these ideas that would barely convey them in satisfactory fashion to contemporary players, and the result would be a simple and non-modern game. That's definitely not where I would encourage the author to go. Yet the alternative is looking like a (scarily?) large and complex game to develop. One that might be too big to take on, considering some of the introductory level work that needs to be done on this demo. The main issues with what exists are a lack of support for obvious synonyms, and the game not catering to most common alternative methods of conveying similar ideas to what the game wants. The descriptions of locations quickly become bare, meaning there isn't much to interact with.

A rhetorical aside: How much stuff should we implement in a game? The general trend over time (like, decades) has been towards more. This is both a function of acquiring the technological ability to do it, and because implemented people and scenery and objects open up the interactivity of the parser game. But as parser games have gotten bigger, the work of implementing everything has increased exponentially, even though the games are still generally the work of one person. So we have seen creative offshoots which involve restricting the parser's vocabulary, or deliberately choosing not to implement as much in this traditional sense ("light implementation") and to focus on other aspects or mechanics of the game.

Returning to Foreign Soil, it's definitely in the sci-fi world genre of parser game that draws power from medium to heavy implementation. If it were to follow up on the quality of the first scene, I would like to see the rest of it, but I fear I might be waiting years for the result if the game continues on its current trajectory of asking the player to establish a colony. Of course there are a thousand excuses that could be made to turn the story in other directions that might be less difficult to implement and complete. Or even a strange version of the initial one. My advice to the author would probably be to not overreach with the scope of this project. That first scene can certainly be worked into something manageable.

IntroComp 2020 review: Pre-Marie by Dee Cooke

Something intriguing about IntroComp is that you have no idea what any particular entry will be about, or like, until you download and try it. There are no cover graphics or blurbs to lure you in, or to cue you, or to falsely cue you – just the titles of the entries.

These thoughts revisited me when I tried Pre-Marie, an entry from Dee Cooke. This is a parser-driven game made using the Adventuron system. While I feel I've encountered numerous blog posts about Adventuron development over time, I don't think I've ever played an Adventuron game before. The system's page on itch.io shows many games sporting a ZX Spectrum graphic aesthetic, surely indicating a UK-based heritage. In Australia where I am, we didn't have the Spectrum when I was growing up, but we did have the Commodore 64, so in buying UK-published gaming magazines for Commodore 64 reviews, I also read all the reviews for the Spectrum games and saw their screenshots.

The rain beats down on Janette's Crossley flat in Pre-Marie

Marie (the 'pre' referring to the fact this is a taster offered for IntroComp) is set in contemporary London. The PC is a woman about to sneak out to investigate some unspecified mystery that she doesn't want her currently sleeping husband to know she's going to investigate. It's a compelling set-up delivered in a generally old school manner. This means: the parser is simple and doesn't understand a lot or too well. The graphics are pixellated pastels that vaguely remind me of some of the first graphic adventure games from the 1980s, and especially the propensity of those games to present different streets in a town in ways that made them seem disorientingly samey. The font is channelling both ZX Spectrum adventuring and Sierra's various 'quest' games. Finally, the game has a mildly punitive design outlook. I think this last effect is just down to some of its oversights reproducing what we now perceive in older games to have been an absence of helpfulness, and not to any intent.

For instance, reaching for a wet newspaper spied on the ground prompts a 'Leave it alone, it's wet'-type rejection message. But really, the game wants you to READ the newspaper. So there's a kind of needless misdirection there. The prose is also a little misjudged in giving overall direction. Early on it presents the heroine's internal dithering as to whether she should hasten to get on a train or keep exploring her neighbourhood, but the game is really about doing the latter. Her dithering is too dithery re: what's important to the game. New location descriptions sometimes scroll partly out of view, meaning you have to mouse back up the first time you enter a new area.

It took several plays for me to apprehend all of this, and the first play felt especially open ("What's going on? How does this game work? What does it want? What can it do? What should I do?"). I certainly enjoyed the intrigue of trying to make out the game's aesthetic over those plays, its suburban London setting and the mystery of its plot. I barely dented that plot. I do ultimately find the game curious. There's something non-transparent to me about how this particular story's being delivered – with this old font, with these graphics, with its mystery plot versus its simple parser. It may be transparent to the author or Adventuron folk; it might have become clearer to me were the game to have continued. I also confess I don't especially like the graphics overall, though they have their moments. The pastel colour scheme leads to a kind of non-differentiation that I find hard to interpret at times. I also find the PC's notebook contents, presented via the graphics, pretty illegible.

On the excerpt of Marie given, I don't quite get it, but my curiosity does prompt me to give the IntroCompish verdict of, yes, I would like to see more of this game. And I like that IntroComp allows me to have this kind of totally unheralded game experience.

IntroComp 2020 review: Navigatio (The Confession of the Second Man) by P. James Garrett

IntroComp 2020 is now on. You can read about it, find the games and see the author/judging rules for it by clicking this sentence.

I don't think I've reviewed any IntroComp entries in my blog before this year (2020). IntroComp is feedback-focused. If I play an IntroComp 2020 game, have enough to say about it and feel that what I have to say is appropriate to share in public, I will review it here in my blog. Otherwise I'll share my feedback by the mandatory private mechanism that's invoked when you vote on an entry, and/or in notes in the Some Introcomp 2020 Reviews thread started over on intfiction.org. And I won't say anything about A Fool's Rescue because I helped test it. 

Navigatio (The Confession of the Second Man) is a parser-driven IntroComp 2020 entry from P. James Garrett. It's the first chapter of the prospective longer adventure and took me about twenty minutes to complete. I'm definitely keen to play more. Coincidentally, the game has some structural and content similarities to the last game I reviewed on IFDB, Napier's Cache.

The PC in Navigatio is a monk's assistant at a monastery in the middle ages. The prologue about his rough upbringing and how he got to where he is is catchy and confidently delivered, even if there was one element of it I didn't quite understand. Then comes the first prose of the game proper –

Frozen Northern Bank

It is the third of a series of strange mornings. Lauds was late, but time has been misbehaving. So have the monks of this community.

– which I really like. It conveys a lot, moving through levels of awareness and connecting ideas quickly.

In the vein of 'assistant' games, the PC is tasked with fetching news and objects, communicating between different NPCs and solving environmental puzzles that get in the way of his goals. The monastery environment is compelling, and apparently the product of some research, sporting religious and manuscript-making details that evoke time and place. The implementation of the physical details is light, and probably the area of the game I'd most like to see beefed up in a later release.

The puzzles in this intro are simple and well-cued. I also nabbed some items that I expect will be of use in a subsequent chapter. The transition to chapter two has several elements that are hooky, including the continuation of a mystery thread set up in the first chapter and a suggestion that the metaphysical nature of the world might change as the game continues. I'm keen to see more either way. Some typos aside, Navigatio is well-written and well-directed, with a strong sense of place (including a few random environmental elements for flavour) and effective characterisation between the PC and his mentor. I would like to see stronger implementation of the environment in an expanded version, mostly so that the game would have a means of elaborating on its world's interesting details.