Recently I tried Peter Nepstad’s new game, Journey of the King, which was nearly entered in the IF Competition. Like a couple of other games that did get finished in time for the competition, it’s an IF version of a short static story, in this case by Lord Dunsany.
In general, I haven’t been completely convinced that these translations of static fiction are successful: there are a lot of design challenges involved in transferring what was a straight story into something interactive, and I’m not satisfied than anyone has solved them yet. Journey of the King does not, I think, transcend this set of problems either. In fact, it starts out with a very uninteractive sequence of conversation in which the player has to question a series of visitors and read a great deal of straight text.
I gather that there are some puzzles that arise after this initial phase of the story, but I found the first conversation dumps a bit hard to get through, so quit. It doesn’t entirely help that the conversation here is very flowery and abstract.
I may come back to this piece later; we’ll see.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 