GAME: Bolivia By Night
AUTHOR: Aidan Doyle
PLATFORM: Tads 2 http://www.tads.org/
SOUND: no
GRAPHICS: yes
REVIEWED: 15th May 2005
WALKTHROUGH: n/a
DOWNLOAD: http://www.shadowvault.net/games/bbn.gam

This was the third Spring Thing comp game that I played and it was a far more solid effort than the previous two - Authority and Whom The Telling Changed.

Once past the less-than-thrilling introduction - the author apparently thinks Bolivia is a riveting place to be but the description of it doesn't exactly make me scream with excitement - the game starts properly. A bit of confusion initially arose.

A Man Called David

At the start, the game asked me for my name so, not wishing to play anonymously or be called by a name that wasn't my own, I promptly inputted "David". Big mistake. One of the NPCs in Bolivia By Night is called David. So am I. This led to quite a bit of confusion as I arrived at a meeting only to be told that it couldn't start as David wasn't here. But I was there. I know I was there because the text on the screen told me so. It was even more confusing when other NPCs kept referring to this chap called David and implying he wasn't even there at all.

Hmmm… pity my parents didn't think to call me Ezekiel. It would certainly have avoided problems like this.

After that bit of confusion was out of the way, things progressed somewhat more smoothly aside for a few annoying little niggles along the way (more about them later).

What's It About?

Not, as I'd first thought, a guidebook about Bolivia thankfully. It seems you're a journalist who happens to live and work in Bolivia and it's your job to be sent all over town to cover stories. These tend to be fairly simply and straightforward stories and involve nothing more complicated than turning up at the relevant location, asking a few easy questions and sometimes taking a photograph.

Taking a photograph… ah, if only it was that easy. Bolivia By Night is one of those games which seems to delight concerning itself with the pointless minutiae of interactive fiction. Taking a photograph of someone isn't a simple case of typing "take photo". Nope. That returns an error message along the lines of there not being a photo here you can take. Surely the writer should have expected someone to type "take photo" and put a response in to cover this most obvious of actions? Unfortunately that's not the end of the problems involving the camera. When you've figured out the guess the verb concerned with taking a photo, you're next told that it might be a good idea to turn the camera on. Groan. Turn the camera on and take the photo? Nope. Now you need to put the camera in action mode. Double groan. Is putting the camera in action mode a simple case of typing "put camera in action mode"? Hell no. The game doesn't even understand the word "action"! Turns out there's a button on the camera that you need to press and that puts the camera in action mode. Can I finally take the frigging photo? Thank heavens I can.

(In fact I was a bit disappointed that the attention to pointless details broke down here because I was quite looking forward to spending another half hour typing out meaningful commands along the lines of "raise arm holding camera", "point camera at target", "check target's head hasn't been chopped off", "check lighting", "check film is in camera"… and so on.)

Murder Most Foul

The game becomes quite a bit more interesting when (spoiler alert!) David gets murdered. No, not me. The other David.

Up to this point, Bolivia By Night had seemed to be a fairly run of the mill game about a journalist but the murder of the other David gave it a darker twist. You, being the only journalist seeming to do any work, are assigned to the case to try and uncover what happened to him. A lot of this involved much wandering around town and generally hoping you hit upon the right thing to do. I was at a loss several times but, aided by the hints (which are very good), I was able to make progress.

And Then It All Got Rather Strange…

I'd been playing for about an hour to an hour and a half and thought I had the game pretty much sussed out: colleague murdered, find out who did it. Only there's quite a bit more to it than that. The real strangeness started when I met some chap who claimed to be a Guardian of the land and went on at length about dark powers and saving the world and evil forces. This sort of thing seemed quite out of place in the context of the game that had passed before, kind of like watching your favourite cop show and seeing aliens wander into the local pub for a round of drinks. While it's all fine and dandy in a generic fantasy game (and what generic fantasy game would be complete without evil forces and a quest to save the world?), it just doesn't fit into a game which had been, up to this point, quite normal.

And then my Che Guevara t-shirt started speaking to me and my earlier enthusiasm for the game began to wane somewhat. It got, y'know, kinda silly. It wasn't helped much by the fact that no one else seemed to hear the t-shirt speak or, if they did, they didn't seem to think it was anything unusual. I've never been to Bolivia before so maybe talking Che Guevara t-shirts aren't anything to get excited over but I sort of doubt it.

Other Annoyances

Thankfully there's nothing else quite as bad as the camera but a few other things about the game ticked me off. Some are just simply bad game design, others are very minor things but annoying all the same.

Several locations in the game aren't accessible in the normal sense of the word. A couple of locations in your apartment can't be reached and trying just hits you with vaguely unsatisfying responses. Enter the bathroom and you're told "You feel better after using the facilities" while the kitchen just has "Try as might, you can't find anything edible in the kitchen". Surely it wouldn't have hurt to have properly included these locations in the game instead of a few lines of text instead?

There's also a door in your apartment that at first looked like a genuine error arose when trying to open it but instead it just turned out to be a bit of poor programming on the writer's part. Try to go west and you get a message saying "You'll have to open the door to Richard's room first". Type "open door" and you're told it's opened. Try going west and you get the same message again. As it happens, this isn't the bug it first appeared to be as the game is mistakenly interpreting "open door" as referring to another door. "open richard's door" is the correct command. (It doesn't work, incidentally, as the door's locked.)

Overall, I quite liked the game and thought it was the second best in the comp, annoyances and guess the verb issues notwithstanding. I'd have rated it quite a bit higher if not for the weirdness that came about partway through which put me off playing the rest of it.

6 out of 10