We continue with the reviews of games from Spring Thing 2011. Today’s is The Lost Islands of Alabaz, by Michael Gentry.
Short summary: The setting is whimsical and has a certain charm (reminiscent of Augmented Fourth at times). A very aggressive tutorial mode, pitched-at-young-children writing, and a heavy moral may be a bit much for adults. With the tutorial turned off, reading all the text becomes a bit less laborious, but there’s still an awful lot of busywork in the minimal transcript. In the current state there are also some bugs that render the game unwinnable if you do things in the wrong order.
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I’ve found Gentry’s work for adults compellingly hard to put down. Both Anchorhead and Little Blue Men are driven by a sense of terrible foreboding. Jack Toresal and the Secret Letter, Gentry’s work for/with Textfyre, didn’t grab me enough to encourage me to finish, but that was a collaborative work and I wasn’t sure what might be the reason for that. But Alabaz has a little of the same trouble: though there is a hook, the need to save this kingdom under threat, I just don’t feel a very powerful sense of mystery and urgency here.
It doesn’t help that there’s a lot of friction on the system.
First: way too much to read per turn, especially at the beginning. Alabaz gives the player a perky sidekick named Trig who offers advice every move during the opening portion of the game. Often that advice is a lot more long-winded than the text of the game, and since it’s presented in the same window without even being set off typographically (italics, fading to dark grey, whatever), it’s distracting from the flow of the narrative. I’m all for teaching new players how to play, but I feel like this would be wall-of-text overwhelming for most of them. It’s possible to figure out how to turn all of this off, eventually, but it produces a heavy drag on the narrative at the point when we’re supposed to be gathering excitement. Streamlining this somehow would make the intro stronger.
Second: way too much navigation. The design is such that the player must travel between many of the islands over and over and over again — it’s just not possible to pick up everything you need in one location and move on to the next. On top of that, the process of moving from one island to the next is made many moves too long: board your ship, go aft to the poop deck, turn the wheel, weigh anchor, go fore, go port to get off the ship, and then traverse whichever island you’ve arrived at. (And that doesn’t even count in the business with the basket-elevators on a certain island you’re likely to visit several times.) One of the main reasons I dislike conventional mazes is that there is typically a long period of execution between the time you realize what the solution is and the point at which you’re actually finished applying that solution. Alabaz does this a lot: you realize more or less instantly what you need to do, but it’s a 20-turn task to carry it out. It would help a lot if there were some mechanism for returning automatically to locations that are visited.
Third: just needs more polish, which is an odd thing to say because most of the game really is quite smooth. But the remaining bugs are in really unfortunate places, and forced me to replay some or all of the game several times. A bug where I didn’t receive the icefruit early in the game caught me out and made it necessary to replay almost the whole thing from walkthrough. There were some smaller issues too, though: I accidentally closed the hatch to the lighthouse pump-room from the outside, whereupon I couldn’t open it again and had to restore from a save; when I didn’t have the icefruit seed but did have some other seeds from the greenhouse, I tried putting one of the seeds into the boulder crack and then found that I couldn’t manipulate any seed (the one in the crack or any other).
Then there’s the moral, and this is not a design issue:
Lucinda, you have taught my brother and I a valuable lesson. We were both stubborn and selfish, and the Kingdom suffered because of it. From now on, we will talk to each other and work together to solve our arguments, whatever they may be.
I wince, pedantically, at “my brother and I” not being “my brother and me.” Then I wince again because, gyah, this is the moment where I realize that I’ve accidentally listened in on a bedtime story that Gentry is telling his kids about how to share their toys.
Okay, so. That was all a lot of negative, and I feel a bit bad about this. I did see a fair amount to like here, from the lavish feelies to the entertaining squid behavior. The best moments here were the rich and tactile descriptions of places and things, and there’s some inventive work behind puzzles like the repeatable race, which is designed to feel a little different each time while still teaching the player some basic principles for winning. The solution to the spinebird nest was pleasing as well (though I felt a bit guilty about ripping off the poor animal).
I just wanted a bit more mood, a bit more depth and mystery — things that Gentry is unquestionably able to deliver — and less slog and explanation. Moderate revisions would make this a substantially better game, in my opinion, and let the game’s vivid imagery and clever solutions shine through more clearly.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
It would help a lot if there were some mechanism for returning automatically to locations that are visited.
There is a GO TO command, but it doesn’t work for precisely those bits of traversal that slow down navigation the most — the ones that require actions other than standard IF directions. And prerequisites like juggling the single fuse. Oh, lord, did I ever end up loathing that fuse. I don’t know what happened to Mysterious Energy Corporation Guys, but I’m sure they deserved worse.
Yeah, no kidding. I really expected they were going to turn out to be the villains of the piece.
I also kept forgetting exactly what junk the junk-robot had (or needing to look at it to determine whether it was likely to be useful), and it was a pain needing to travel back to the island of trash every time I thought I might need something that wasn’t in my present inventory. I had the notion that the rusty spring, being described as quite sizable and sturdy, might be able to bridge the gap between the cable and the upper basket, for instance. It couldn’t, but I sure wasted a while testing the hypothesis.
I had that theory about the spring as well, and also ran into both the icefruit bug and the seed/crack bug. After finally breaking down and consulting the walkthrough to get me around the icefruit bug (or at least, to verify that it was a bug and not me not being able to solve the puzzle), I found that whenever I had a theory about something, it was tedious enough to check it out that I’d just pop open the walkthrough and glance to see if I was correct. That was the point where I decided that all the travel was really a big design flaw in the game for me.
I have to admit that I really like this game, probably because of its simple narrative.
At all times I either had a new island to explore, or a mystery to solve. Whenever I couldn’t figure out the solutions on my own, I found Trig’s advice to be helpful, without ruining to fun. There were only two times when I did have to consult the walkthrough. First was to find the pipe-cleaner underneath the basket. (I still don’t know how I could have figured that out alone) Second was when I planted the icefruit seed in the forest instead of the rock, and couldn’t seem to get another seed. (Had to revert to a save to fix that one)
Whenever I figured out the solution to a problem, I didn’t mind the couple of turns it took to get where I had to be. I was just happy I figured out the solution.
If I had to give criticism I would say that I found it odd in a children’s story that you have to attack the artcovex, drawing blood, or that you had to steal a bird’s egg from its mother.
I for one can’t wait for the sequel to find out what happened to the islanders who escaped the mist!
I know what you mean about the animals. I felt a bit mean about stealing from the squid, too.
If I had to give criticism I would say that I found it odd in a children’s story that you have to attack the artcovex, drawing blood, or that you had to steal a bird’s egg from its mother.
See, I found things to be completely the reverse — that it was too soft and harmless. Classic children’s lit does not generally shy away from blood, death and violence: the founding works are Alice in Wonderland — wherein decapitation features strongly — and The Water Babies, in which (for example) the villainous Grimes is beaten up and drowned. Modern stuff generally follows Rowling and Pullman in dealing with dark themes and serious nastiness. And there’s basically all of Roald Dahl, or the Grimms, or Narnia… One of my very favourite books as a child was Marguerite Poland’s Mantis and the Moon: Stories for the Children of Africa , which features many creative uses for entrails. Even Beatrix Potter, who these days is basically a synonym for saccharine cutesiness, always has the threat of being killed and baked into a pie hanging in the background. The idea that blood and violence are somehow inappropriate for children’s works is a modern idea and mostly confined to new media (which is easier to censor) and commercially-produced works (which can’t afford to offend anyone); it’s not a natural fit for IF.
Obviously, Gentry wrote this particular piece for his own children first and foremost, and what he’s comfortable with them reading is totally his call. And I’m very much in favour of IF works for children. But I think the genre will be a lot poorer if Saturday-morning-cartoon cleanliness predominates.
It’s not the presence of these events per se that struck an odd note with me. I would’ve been fine with more threat and violence than this. What felt odd was that I as the protagonist was being required to do things that felt gratuitously mean, to animals who obviously could feel it and did mind.
Oh, totally — and sorry for leaping from specific point to very general rant.
I think the framing for the bird was meant to function as mythological-monster; this worked for the artcovex, mostly, although it could have been more successfully dragonish. But the safety of the world makes it harder for heroic acts to work properly; if there aren’t any real monsters, then the monster-slayer role feels suspect. A big part of the bird is that getting the egg doesn’t really serve any good purpose — you’re just fulfilling the whim of some capricious noble git.
Any kid would be furious, having been instructed that sie is a KNIGHT with a SWORD, to learn that it was for display purposes only. The protagonist has moral depth, evidently.
I agree on Trig. He’s a tiresome nuisance for the introduction. I didn’t manage to switch him off, but he eventually settled down to little “Gee whiz!” comments that I found mildly endearing, a credulous foil to my obvious genious and heroism.
As for the cuteseyness of the story, I don’t mind it so much. This game is clearly pitched as pedagogical (welcome to IF, here’s how to play… not a bad thing to have) so it is an assurance that the player is going to be alright (as you comment elsewhere on Treasures of a Slaver’s Kingdom). The pearls seem to be the clunkiest element, and the ritualistic process you describe for employing them. Here the didactic purpose is a bit heavey. They’re a metaphor for the player’s progress, and even though you learn to expect a headache each time you visit a new island you’re still quite pleased with yourself as you visualise your collection of magic oyster leavings. What they draw attention to is the structure of the narrative: that the story is something that is unlocked in regulated segments, and that its unfolding is something intentional on the part of the author (including the moral ambiguity of the protagonist; perhaps that’s pedagogical too, and I’ve met ten-year-olds who could phrase objections to it). This is actually a pretty good training for IF, since every narrative in some way needs to limit the player’s choices in stages. It’s like getting out of the Chinese Room!
i got all the way to the end, but then i couldn’t use the blue pearl because there wasn’t any slots left in the wheel. i tried taking the pearls out of the wheel, but it said they were attached. i guess i shouldn’t have used the black one, (looking back, that’s the only place i didnt get something new), but it giving the pipes back to the ghost felt like the right thing to do and it is in the walkthrough.
That sounds like a bug to me too. You definitely need to use the black pearl: you do get the bottle there, which is useful later.
oh, right, i forgot about the bottle. well, then i can’t think of any island i went to that i didn’t get something i needed later. i just quit without saving when i figured out i couldn’t use the blue pearl, but maybe i could try to retrace my steps for a bug report. i remember that when i put the red pearl in the wheel, it told me i was putting it in the last slot — oh, i remember what happened and how i got there. I got two golden pearls. I hadn’t fully explored the ship when I first ran into the robot, so I didn’t know who Javier was and how to find him to make a cupcake. I thought maybe Javier was someone I’d meet later (which I did, once I explored the ship more thoroughly). Trig told me that i could take the golden pearl out of the tin can, so i did, and the robot didn’t object. Later on, when I figured out how to get a cupcake I went back and tried to trade the cupcake for the brass gear and it gave me another golden pearl instead, which i must’ve put in the wheel again.
Ah, tricky. I did accidentally get the golden pearl before I was supposed to — I also got the advice about picking it up out of the tin, and did so — but fortunately that didn’t lead me into a buggy state. But it sounds like you weren’t as lucky.