GAME: Authority
AUTHOR: Eva Vikstrom
PLATFORM: Inform http://www.inform-fiction.org/
SOUND: no
GRAPHICS: no
REVIEWED: 2nd May 2005
WALKTHROUGH: n/a
DOWNLOAD: http://www.shadowvault.net/games/authority.z5


Authority was entered in the Spring Thing 2005, a competition whose main requirement is an entry fee. Now an entry fee is the sort of thing likely to discourage anyone not really dedicated to writing a game because, at the end of the day, it's money. It's not a lot of money and hardly the sort of thing that even the most destitute of people are going to struggle to scrape together, but it's still money you have to spend for perhaps no comeback of any kind. It's also the sort of thing likely to discourage anyone from releasing a game which isn't anywhere near ready.

In theory anyway…

Authority got off to a bad start. The first version I downloaded displayed the room description at the top of the screen and then a yawning emptiness. No prompt to type commands, no response to anything I typed and not a thing displayed beyond that room description. The second version, thankfully, had this annoying little bug fixed. On the downside, it just introduced a whole new assortment of them, some minor, some not so. All infuriating. In hindsight, I think I might have been better off sticking with the original version.

The introduction was dull and lifeless and left me thinking that if I wasn't playing this game as part of a comp and intending to review all the entries, I'd have probably taken one look at it, shot it off to the recycle bin without pause for thought and gone hunting for something a bit more exhilarating. An introduction should grip the player, make them feel like they're about to embark on a game which is going to really blow them away, not make them wish they'd tried something else instead. Aside from being dull and lifeless, it wasn't even very well written, leading me to suspect that the writer's first language is a long way removed from English. Didn't she get an English speaker to at least test it for her? The evidence would indicate not.

Does it get better? Well…

Annoyances arise all over the place. There are several items in the first location which can't be taken and instead display a truly annoying message: "Don't try to take the [object]". Why can't I take the object? At least give me a reason, don't just hit me with a default response and leave it at that. There also seem to be a large number of ashtrays scattered around the premises which either serve no real purpose (I've nothing to smoke so the obvious purpose is gone) or one that I didn't stumble upon. I'm also kind of doubtful that many outdoor locations even have ashtrays. I certainly can't remember seeing any in the real world myself. Is the writer confusing them with something else?

From bad to worse…

Yes, it gets worse. Some of the location descriptions are just so woeful, you wonder why they're even there. This is Home:

"You live in a simple one-room flat in Suburbia."


Wondering where the rest of the description is? Me too. I saw that and suspected that I was somehow playing in some super terse mode of the game where all the depth and emotion has been stripped from the location and you're just left with the bare minimum. But nope. That's the description in its entirety, all ten words of it.

Other locations just read like a shopping list of what they contain. Little attempt has been made to inject any life into them and reading them is often no more interesting than reading a shopping list.

Conversation

Authority uses a set of dialogue options for conversation which is a conversation system I'm usually quite fond of. It beats the "ask [npc] about [subject]" method hands down which generally devolves into desperately trying to figure out what obscure subjects you need to question the NPCs about. So when a game has the dialogue options conversation system, I breathe a sigh of relief. Usually anyway. But not this time. Here you get a panel opening along the top of the screen with the dialogue options in. And the replies? Well, they show up where the rest of the text shows up so a typical conversation has your poor eyes darting from the top to the bottom of the screen and then back again just to follow what's going on. How this sort of thing was ever considered to be a good idea I can't imagine. Then again, as the rest of the game is remarkably sub-standard, at least the conversation system is in good company.

The more I played Authority, the more I was convinced it had been written very quickly and then sent off to the comp without more than the most basic testing. As well as being a very tedious playing experience, the game doesn't really seem to go anywhere. The locations are lifeless and lack any kind of depth and the NPCs could have been replaced with cardboard cut outs and it's doubtful anyone would have been able to tell the difference.

Conclusion

It wasn't long before Authority just lost any kind of appeal for me and I simply quit. Funnily enough, the game file included a walkthrough yet such were my feelings for the overall quality (or lack of), that I didn't even bother looking at it. A walkthrough is something I resort to when I'm struggling with a game I either enjoy playing or at least like enough so that I'm curious enough to see what the ending is like. Authority is neither.

Maybe I'm being unfair but I expected a lot better from a game entered in a competition like the Spring Thing. I expect a few classics and a lot of drivel from the IFComp because that's a free comp and has a tendency to attract entries from people who haven't even learnt the English language let alone know how to write a game in it, but something made me think that the Spring Thing entries would be different. Not so with Authority alas, a game that would have given the lowest placed entries in the IFComp 2004 a serious run for their money.

1.5 out of 10