Endless, Nameless is Adam Cadre’s latest game. The surrounding text claims that it’s the relic of the bulletin board age, but anyone familiar with Adam’s oeuvre won’t be surprised to know there’s a bit more to it than a retro remake. There’s no way to write a substantive review without addressing the ways in which it takes a twist, though; it’s worth playing enough to find out just exactly how it’s going to be not what you think. So please consider giving it a try before reading on.
Frankenstein, written by Dave Morris and implemented by inkle studios, is an iPad app retelling Mary Shelley’s original tale in a new interactive format.
Morris’ Frankenstein follows the essential plot of Shelley’s, with a couple of key deviations. Victor Frankenstein’s experiments take place in revolutionary Paris rather than at the university of Ingolstadt; the narrative frame of the original story is peeled off, so that it no longer begins with Frankenstein meeting a shipful of adventurers in the north Atlantic, and the meeting on the ice occurs only at the end.
Removing the frame gives the story a certain immediacy. Victor’s experiments are told in the present and the horror of them is more directly present than they would have been via flashback; and flashback is notoriously tricky in interactive narrative because it often makes the reader question how she can possibly be affecting events that are, from the point of view of the frame narrative, already in the past.
Continue reading “Frankenstein, by Dave Morris with inkle studios”
This year’s GDC brought me in contact with a wide range of really interesting games, demonstrating the incredible spectrum of what games are good at and for: not just frustration, fear, exploration, and adrenal rushes, but many stranger and more nuanced emotional reactions.
Here are some highlights of many different types, several from the IGF Expo floor and others from other encounters:
Storyteller by Dan Benmergui is an expansion of an earlier work of the same name (that I actually reviewed long ago). The winner of the 2012 IGF Nuovo award, Storyteller is a puzzle game whose mechanic is essentially about understanding the rules of comics, in good Scott McCloud style
The Colder Light (online play, IFDB page) is the latest game from Jon Ingold: in this case, a spare, melancholy tale about life on the ice. It also uses an interface evolved from some work by Erik Temple (see for example Erik’s alternate interface to Sand Dancer).
This interface attempts to address some of the community’s long-standing concerns about the parser by presenting affordances explicitly. The player can click on hyperlinked objects in room descriptions and inventory and receive a list of plausible ways to interact with these. The result is a play experience with the noun-and-verb variety of classic parsed IF, a more consistent world model than the average CYOA, and enough diversity to make for genuine puzzles; but without any guess-the-verb issues. It also, I imagine, eased the authoring burden that Jon didn’t have to write the vast range of error messages that typically come with parsed interactive fiction.
There are some other possible novice-friendly features it doesn’t have: HELP only produces credits information, there are no hints to speak of, and mapping is also up to the player. But it’s still pretty accessible and I would be interested to see what new-to-IF players might make of it.
So that’s worth noting, and has already received some discussion. There have been a lot of user interface experiments over the past year and a half or so, but to my mind A Colder Light is one of the most successful in capturing the sense of possibility and setting immediacy that I like from parsed IF, while offering a significantly more accessible experience to the user and avoiding unnecessary screen clutter.
But the work also bears analysis on a couple of other levels.
First of all, it centralizes all its puzzles around a consistent mechanic — achieving this is a bit of an obsession of mine, I admit. To discuss that, I’ll need to be slightly spoilery, though I’ll try to avoid giving away specific puzzles.
A Comedy of Error Messages is Wodehouse-style comedy — social comedy, romantic entanglements, plenty of misunderstandings — only reimagined for a world where Jeeves is a computer.
A Comedy of Error Messages is Wodehouse-style comedy — social comedy, romantic entanglements, plenty of misunderstandings — only reimagined for a world where Jeeves is a computer.
Continue reading “IF Comp 2011: The Elfen Maiden / A Comedy of Error Messages”
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 