I recently played the Tin Man Games conversion of Forest of Doom for computer.
The original Forest of Doom from 1983 was a gamebook in the standard style at the time, where a winning run takes many restarts. The first bit of the map has four choices:
If you choose wrong, you have lost, although you don’t find out until the very end of the book.
Maybe some emphasis would help: if you choose wrong on the first map choice, you lose at the very end of the book.
Sigh.
This got my thinking about restarts in general which are still a general style in both parser games (like Jon Ingold’s Make It Good) and modern gamebooks (like The Sinister Fairground from Cubus Games).
Acheton is a game that very much wants you to restart, on many levels:
* The near-comedic presence of death leads to short resets.
* The ningy, which I already wrote about, is nearly guaranteed to cause a total restart.
* Optimizing lamp life can require a restart deep in the game, 500 or so moves in, requiring the steps for finding treasures be carefully tracked.
* There’s occasionally a more moderate “explorer-restart”. A simple example would be when mapping a dungeon; it is understood that you map the dungeon thoroughly first, find a good route, and then restore to the point you started.
This is the sort of thing adventure gamers accept without thinking. Consider, though: it’s deeply weird. It’s almost like it is built in (to this and many other adventures) acceptance of the sort of time travel mechanic where a character makes a “fugue echo” of themselves to send out before resetting the timeline. This is true no matter what the genre.
In my most recent play session, I came across an ocean.
[Map by Marco Cavagna.]
Fortunately I remembered this section when I played through Acheton 5 years ago, so I knew that mapping the entirety of the sea is not exactly useful; the first time around, I inspected each and every square I could because this game was evil enough I knew it would have no shame about hiding a secret.
I have finished reviewing every game from IFComp 2014, so have collected links to every review as a page on this blog.
You can check that page for just the list, but I reproduce it here along with some general comments about the competition:
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> flash
The camera flash reveals, for an instant, a pale arm reaching out of the dirt.
Transparent by Hanon Ondricek is a parser game that involves exploring a manor while wielding a camera. There is supposed to be a second unit helping take photographs, but they seem to have gone missing.
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One morning, a messenger arrives from Götaland, bearing a letter from Siggeir.
The letter reads, “Dear Sigmund, Signý and I hope this letter finds you well. We would like to invite you and your family to the harvest festival, here in Götaland. We hope to see you and your marvelous sword there.”
Sigmund’s Quest by Gregor Holtz is perhaps the most graphical of the IFComp entries this year, having scenes in a pixellated style:
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Attempts to locate the party failed, primarily because of poor villagers being paid for their silence by Kas’s crew.
The few reports that did reach the King’s court consisted of rumors about a dwarf who split the mountain and built a palace filled with riches before the sunset on a single day.
A.E. Jackson’s The Secret Vaults of Kas the Betrayer goes for fantasy heft straightaway with its title. I kept a running “word map” of all the references, because in this sort of game I find it easy to get lost in a sea of names. (I did end up finding the fantasy backstory to have the right amount of thickness; not too dense, not too implausible.)
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“And now you presume to speak to one of the hrrugh without a proper introduction? Insolent blorg!” (Great. Apparently your translator module is faulty.) “I cannot hold a grrbog under such conditions. Produce your rrha or cease wasting my time.”
Naomi Hinchen’s Tea Ceremony involves some awkward and under-prepared diplomacy with an alien.
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Immanuel Kant taught us that it is important to obey authority, so that your actions will follow a consistent general rule. He even demonstrated that it would be wrong to lie to the police, if they want to know where your friend is hiding. Always keep that in mind, and you will have a great career at AlethiCorp :).
Simon Christiansen is the wag who last year entered a PDF gamebook into the competition, instructing judges to print it out. This year he asks us to apply for a job at Alethicorp.
TRIVIA: Did you know pictures of eyes can reduce cheating on tests, and make people contribute more to an honesty box?
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Tia Orisney’s Following Me is of a style I thought I might be seeing more of: the classic Choose Your Own Adventure book. (Caveat: As fas I know none of the originals involved fleeing from serial killers.)
I should probably explain: our mom took her intuition to a higher level by believing that a finding a black ribbon on the ground meant that someone was going to die. The “theory” behind that had something to do with how, when her father had died, she’d worn a black ribbon around her arm for a year. This was too far into the world of hoodoo nonsense for me, but for a moment when I’d seen that glove I’d been frozen by panic. Aria must have thought the same thing, she hadn’t wanted to go anywhere near it.
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Origins by Vincent Zeng and Chris Martens involves two characters — a courier and a runner — in a split-screen arrangement where you can choose “myopic” style so you only control one, or “omniscient” mode where you see choices for both. Each choice is between two options, for example:
Your breathing deepens as you start getting ready for the hill, and you let your stride open up a bit so you can hit the base of it and go.
The traffic light turns yellow.
You can make it.
You slow down.
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Two months later, all that was knocked out of you. Blanko. Fatigues. March, march march. Orders. Being bawled out by Sergeant Major Grant. Then at the new year, when you’d marched up and down half of France and having had been there for months on end, and stuck for all those dreadful weeks in First Eypre, or Wipers as you learned to call it, thrust into long and badly constructed trench lines, frozen nearly to death out there, you were ready to call it quits.
Hill 160 by Mike Gerwat is a parser game set in WWI.
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Renga in Blue 