Issue 5
(July 2005)
CC oo nn tt ee nn tt ss
Welcome to Issue 5 of the Reviews Exchange!
Up until about a month ago, this was looking like a surprisingly slim issue comprising, as it did at the time, of just slightly less than one review. But then – lo and behold! – reviews started flooded in thick and fast, until there were no less than 31(!) in total. A big thank you to everyone who sent a review in, and also a thank you to Richard Otter for organising the ADRIFT Intro Comp whose entries accounted for 21 of the 31 reviews herein.
And without further ado…
PAGE
5 The Adventure Of Space Boy! by David Parish – review by David Whyld
8 Escape To Freedom by Richard Otter – review by David Whyld
12 The Final Question by David Whyld – review by C. Henshaw
16 The Final Question by David Whyld – review by Stefan Donati (Shuarian)
19 The Fire Tower by Jacqueline A. Lott – review by David Whyld
24 Future Boy by Kent Tessman – review by David Whyld
35 Halloween Hijinks by David Whyld – review by Robert Rafgon
38 In The Claws Of Clueless Bob by David Whyld – review by Robert Rafgon
40 In The Claws Of Clueless Bob by David Whyld – review by Stefan Donati (Shuarian)
43 Lauren’s Awakening by TotalDirt – review by David Whyld
47 Murder Mansion by Reelyor – review by C. Henshaw
50 Murder Mansion by Reelyor – review by David Whyld
52 Murder Mansion by Reelyor – review by Stefan Donati (Shuarian)
54 Must Escape! by Robert Rafgon – review by C. Henshaw
57 Must Escape! by Robert Rafgon – review by David Whyld
59 Must Escape! by Robert Rafgon – review by Stefan Donati (Shuarian)
61 Normville by BBBen – review by David Whyld
66 Outline by Robert Rafgon – review by C. Henshaw
69 Outline by Robert Rafgon – review by David Whyld
71 Outline by Robert Rafgon – review by Stefan Donati (Shuarian)
73 Point 2 Point by C. Henshaw – review by David Whyld
75 Point 2 Point by C. Henshaw – review by Stefan Donati (Shuarian)
76 Rift by Red-Sith – review by C. Henshaw
80 Rift by Red-Sith – review by David Whyld
82 Rift by Red-Sith – review by Stefan Donati (Shuarian)
84 Sex Artist by A. Ninny – review by David Whyld
88 Silk Road Secrets: Samarkand To Lop Nor by C. Henshaw – review by David Whyld
90 Silk Road Secrets: Samarkand To Lop Nor by C. Henshaw – review by Stefan Donati (Shuarian)
93 The Will by Ambrosine – review by Robert Rafgon
95 Zack Smackfoot: Escape The Jungle Terror by KFAdrift – review by C. Henshaw
98 Zack Smackfoot: Escape The Jungle Terror by KFAdrift – review by David Whyld
100 Zack Smackfoot: Escape The Jungle Terror by KFAdrift – review by Stefan Donati (Shuarian)
103 Credits
104 Reviews Index
TThhee AAddvveennttuurree OOff SSppaaccee BBooyy!!
by
David Parish
Review: David Whyld
Genre: Superhero
Platform: Adrift 4
Download: http://www.shadowvault.net/games/spaceboy.zip
I've always liked games about superheroes. In fact, I've even written one myself. So when I saw this announced on the ADRIFT forum, I quickly rushed over and downloaded it… and came away feeling very disappointed.
The Adventure Of Space Boy! follows is a game about a superhero whose cape has been stolen and his sidekick, Wonder Dog, is missing. You need to find four items that can mimic Space Boy’s powers and also discover what’s happened to his cape. Oh, and find Wonder Dog as well I guess although the game never actually says this.
It’s pretty obvious right from the start that this is a game by a newcomer and has undergone little or no testing at all. While we were all newcomers at one point, it’s still hard to overlook the sheer number of things missed out here that really should have been covered. Okay, asking for people to test your very first game when you don’t really know anyone to ask isn’t an easy thing, but even so…
You can get a good feel for the overall quality of the game right from the beginning. Very few of the items mentioned in the room descriptions can be examined, and the descriptions for the ones that are covered are minimal to say the least – most less than a line in length. Obvious commands are missing for a good number of the things I tried to do – I can’t use or turn on or turn off the computer. There's text displayed on the screen yet reading or examining the screen isn’t an option, nor is reading or examining the text itself. While this is a pain, it’s not impossible to figure out what needs to be done to read the text. However, when YOU SEE NO SUCH THING pops up almost every time I try and examine something, I'm left with the feeling that I'm probably not going to enjoy this game much.
Other locations contain other annoyances. The front yard lists a large platform to the east yet I never did figure out how to reach it as going east won’t work and GO PLATFORM hasn’t been covered. In fact, precious few commands are covered. And there are no hints. Never a good thing.
Inevitably, I got stuck and cheated by opening up the Generator (mercifully the game is unpassworded) and had a look there to see what I could find out. Not much unfortunately. Maybe I missed something but there seemed to be a serious amount of guess the verb involved with some of the required tasks (USE KEY ON DOOR is needed to open a door instead of OPEN DOOR or UNLOCK DOOR) and several items appear to be next to impossible to get hold of.
The writing is brief and to the point. It’s also very basic. Room descriptions tend to list what the player can see and nothing else. No effort is made to inject depth into the proceedings and it’s not long before I was getting tired of the game. At heart, this is meant to be a comical, light-hearted game about a superhero and his dog yet there's nothing very comical about it. More time needs to be spent on fleshing out the room descriptions, as well as the items in them, and some definite work needs to be done as far as the puzzles are concerned.
One of the game’s main problems is clearly down to the fact that it’s written by a newcomer who’s probably never written a game before and so has missed out on a good number of the things that are generally expected in a text adventure these days. Hopefully he can get these fixed in time for either his next game or a revised version of this one. He also needs to get someone to test his games beforehand, or at least do a more thorough job of testing them himself because there are some strange bugs in evidence that any half-decent betatester would have picked up on. The Parico Flight Boots start off closed (I'm not even sure how boots can ever be considered closed but anyway…) yet I'm still able to wear them. However, even whilst wearing them, with my feet actually in the boots, I'm able to close and then open them. Funnily enough, the game won’t let me fly if the boots are closed while I'm wearing them, yet will if they're open.
All in all, a game I couldn’t really recommend to anyone but here’s hoping the writer learns from his mistake and releases a better game next time round, and doesn’t just disappear like all the other newbies before him whose first game wasn’t very well received.
2 out of 10
EEssccaappee TToo FFrreeeeddoomm
by
Richard Otter
Review: David Whyld
Genre: War/Espionage
Platform: Adrift 4
Download: http://www.shadowvault.net/games/freedom.zip
In a retro mood? Suffering pangs of nostalgia for the more straightforward and simple type of text adventures of the 80’s that were more about the finding of treasure and less about exploring the vagaries of the human mind? Welcome to Escape To Freedom, a port of a game originally written in 1989 for the Commodore 64 by one Mario Moeller. No, I’d never heard of him either, and while I played a lot of text adventures back then, I’d never heard of Escape To Freedom either.
You play the part of a World War II bomber, shot down over enemy territory and forced to crash land. After that, it’s a case of trying to find your way back home before the enemy grab hold of you and subject you to whatever unpleasantness World War II bombers get subjected to when they fall into enemy hands. Nothing very nice I suspect.
Without having played the original – one of the many that passed me by in the Golden Age of Text Adventures – it’s difficult to say how accurate a port this game is. There are the obvious differences that hit you straight off – text adventures these days go for a miniscule font whereas ones back in the good ol’ days had a larger font. Why? Beats me. The game feels retro, though. Descriptions are brief without ever seeming rushed, telling you what you need to know without resorting to anything too flowery. Part of me likes this sort of thing – it brings back fond memories of text adventures as they used to be – whereas another part longs for more fleshed out descriptions. In the original game the descriptions had to be brief and to the point as the game was written with the Commodore 64, and 64KB of RAM just isn't a huge amount for a full size game to fit into. In the modern age, with memory restrictions so huge as to be virtually non-existent, the descriptions could certainly have been fleshed out.
Unfortunately, fond as I am of the retro period, there are things about it that bug me. Precise wording for certain puzzles is required and so though you might figure out what you need to do to solve a certain puzzle, hitting the correct phrasing is often harder than the puzzle itself. I found some floorboards which I was sure I needed to lift yet couldn’t work out how to go about it. After trying several different ways without success, I weakened and went to the walkthrough. Apparently GET FLOORBOARDS WITH KNIFE is needed, not just LIFT FLOORBOARDS or LIFT FLOORBOARDS WITH KNIFE or even GET FLOORBOARDS. Typical retro period guess the verb for you there. It’s kind of annoying that this wasn’t fixed in the port, although I think the writer (porter?) was going for a true retro feel so he probably felt that leaving in the hideous guess the verb problems was appropriate.
Some of the puzzles are quite good, but poorly clued. They're of the variety that you probably won’t get first time round but after you’ve messed them up, the solution is pretty much handed to you on a plate. Some you might even solve without realising you’ve done them. One involves creeping through a hole you’ve cut in a wire. Creep through at the wrong time of day (when it’s light) and you'll be caught. Creep through during darkness and you're fine. The only problem is, it’s often hard to know what time of day it is. The message telling you just flashes past on screen and probably won’t even be noticed at the time. Examining the sky or your surroundings don’t produce any clues so it’s probably down to timing more than anything else: if you happen to be at the hole in the wire during nightfall, you'll be fine. Otherwise, you're caught and thrown in the slammer with the game telling you that you should have tried when it was dark. Not a bad puzzle, but a difficult one to get first time round as you'll most likely not know what time of the day it is or that it matters.
Being a retro game, Escape To Freedom is very fond of putting the player in an impossible to win situation without giving him the slightest hint that this has happened. On my first play through, I found myself in the prison camp which comprises a good portion of the game. I wandered round, solved a few minor puzzles, tried to escape, got caught… and didn’t get anywhere fast. Later, I realised that an item found right at the very start of the game was one I’d missed out on and, as a result of this, the game was impossible to finish. It was annoying knowing that everything I’d done since then was now useless as that one thing had effectively ruined the game for me. This wasn’t a terrible thing in itself, as all it required me to do was restart the game and pick up the item then make my way through the game again to the point at which I had become stuck, but as it happens so rarely in modern games (thank heavens!), it bugged me no end. In a way it’s strange in that I used to play so many games that did such things to me back in the 80’s, and never found it much of an annoyance, yet faced with it today it makes me want to throttle the writer who decided to utilise it in his game. A warning would have been nice…
Bugs the game seems just about free of. I only ran into a small problem with a pistol although as this actually helped me out, I'm not going to complain about it at length. The pistol was empty when I picked it up, and yet later I was able to shoot someone with it. Then again, a bullet I had eaten and then vomited out (don’t ask) earlier on mysteriously disappeared from my inventory around this time so maybe that’s where it went. Although if so, the game certainly never told me this.
No retro game would be complete without a maze. Well, that’s not strictly speaking true as quite a few retro games lacked a maze. But Escape To Freedom has one. It’s a forest where all the locations are the same. Now while I have great fondness for retro games in general, mazes are the one thing about them (even more so than the guess the verb issues) that I'm quite happy to go without. So when faced with this one… I cheated. Yep, opened up the walkthrough and just typed in the commands as they appeared. I probably ought to feel bad about it, but whoever came up with the idea of including mazes in so many retro games needs shooting. Preferably with a gun with bullets in.
Overall, I liked Escape To Freedom. It evoked a nice retro feel in me that kind of compensated for its other shortcomings. It probably won’t appeal to many people who lack fondness for the retro era, but for those of us who have nice memories of the likes of The Hobbit and Colossal Cave, it should be worth playing. In a way, I'm kind of curious as to why this one got the retro treatment and not one of the better known classics.
Retro rating: 6 out of 10
Non-retro rating: 3 out of 10
TThhee FFiinnaall QQuueessttiioonn
by
David Whyld
Review: C. Henshaw
Genre:rror
HoPlatform: Adrift 4
Download: http://www.shadowvault.net/games/intro.zip
1. Does it set the scene?
The Final Question starts off with a dialogue between two conspirators, although you don’t know what they are conspiring about until the 3rd or 4th paragraph. The dialogue sets the scene well – two personalities are in league over something, but a certain friction is also present. There is a bit of a hiccough with the very first sentence though – Markham’s ‘The question… is whether or not you will really go through with it or not.’ This wording set me up to expect some comedy element, silly dialogue or something. But no – read further and the impression is that this story is actually quite serious. Luckily that first line is forgotten in the continuation of the dialogue.
The opening is all about mood – the character’s mood (a scientist about to self test a Machine of immortality) and the game’s mood (self-reflective, a bit macho, and with anyone else I’d say gearing for surreal, but having played a few other games by David, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some gritty realism).
I have to admit that by the beginning of game play I was having a strong sense of déjà vu – the premise so far was very similar to Unravelling God in which a driven professor of science chases immortality, and whose name is Markson. So this in itself gave me some preconceptions of what this game would entail. Sure enough – at a certain point there is a flashback to a scene of the PC, Anton, in a hospital bed. Then we move forward again to Anton’s study, where (unsurprisingly like Markson’s house) it is described as a reflection of Anton’s personality and lifestyle.
Despite strange feelings of having read this before, this intro does a pretty decent job of setting up the back-story, getting the player involved in the character, and arousing interest in the plot. Passages from books like The Theory of Immortality give further weight to the interests and aims of Anton’s experiment. The very ending, Anton’s dramatic plunge into… immortality? Something, anyway... rounds off the introduction and made me think – Ah, here’s where the game really starts.
2. Is it well implemented?
In general, this game is well put together, with lots of text broken up by waitkey commands, which are an excellent way to keep you reading – put in a pause at a particularly interesting junction in dialogue, or at a cliff-hanger, and you’ve got the player (or me at least) hooked.
Game play isn’t an issue much in this game, most of the introduction is back-story and working up to the cliffhanger at the end of the prologue – when Anton enters the Machine. The countdown (a real countdown) to entering the machine gives the player time to study the surroundings, although the description of the room could have been a bit more coherent (you can only examine the Machine and the cables). I was happy to see that PC description was implemented, and you could look at Markham even though he wasn’t there (as a remembered description by the PC).
In the study, the descriptions fall a bit short – walls, floor and door are mentioned in the room description, but you can’t examine them (you can however examine the carpet). There’s not much to do in the study except read passages from the books mentioned above, which are interesting, but once you’ve read them, you sort of stand there, waiting for something to happen. There are a lot of things you can’t do – open the door, open the curtains (and thus look out the window), light the fireplace, drink anything in the drinks cabinet, and while you can open the drawer in the desk, there’s nothing in it (and you can’t remember if you ever put anything in it). Okay, so this room is for reading books only. ‘Take books’ or ‘take a book’ comes back with ‘Sorry. That is not a command used in this adventure. Try something else.’ But I’ve already tried everything else!
Aha! I’d missed that last book title at the end of the line. Story progresses to the end.
3. Do I want more?
Yes, as long as Anton doesn’t end up mimicking Markson too much. I’d like to see some really surreal situations, something unique and fascinating, after that great build up. Unravelling God is one of my favourite ADRIFT games, so it’s not a bad one to imitate. If the writing can hold up to its former example, then this is set to be one of the better games I’ve played in quite a while.
Score (each out of 10):
Scene setting: 8
Implementation: 7
Appetite whettage: 8
Bonus points: 2 for the best prologue in the comp
Total: 25 (should have a pretty long shelf-life)
TThhee FFiinnaall QQuueessttiioonn
by
David Whyld
Review: Stefan Donati (Shuarian)
Genre: Horror
Platform: Adrift 4
Download: http://www.shadowvault.net/games/intro.zip
This entry of the Adrift Intro Comp 2005 is written by David Whyld, the most prolific Adrift author. It finished second, equal with 'Murder Mansion' by Reelyor.
'The Final Question' is a game about Anton Ryder, the player's alter ego with a rather unusual passion: trying to find a way to live forever. And although we see an engaged discussion between the ambitious scientist and his partner, Markham, we soon find ourselves in a room with a machine, designed to bring eternal life to whomever enters through its gateway. After we examine the machine a little bit, Markham starts the countdown for what could be a historical landmark of humanity. Given this impact, I can understand why the author has chosen to let the countdown go down one by one. Nevertheless, typing 'wait' several times didn't really increase the tension for me. Maybe there's another way of doing this, like an automatic countdown or a soundfile? After the player has entered the machine, the game takes us on a flashback to a scene seven years earlier. It gives us more information on the lonely and unemotional life Anton has, and we witness how he even isn't able to show emotions in a moment of great grief, as he learns of his parents death in a car accident.
The scene changes again, and Anton, unenthusiastically as you'd expect him, describes his workplace. Except for the door and the ceiling, everything in the workplace can be examined. The most interesting objects by far are some books, which, upon reading, show some excerpts about death and life; they add a strong sense of suspense to the story. The books have to be read one after one, as 'read books' isn't a recognized command.
In the final stage of the intro, we're back in the present and Anton is experiencing strange feelings as his trip through the machine unfolds. The end cuts in at a tensing moment, when we only know that he is safe, but nothing more about the future fate of his journey. Apart from a few missing commands and objects, I enjoyed this intro. It established a good and enthralling storyline, and the pacing at which new information are given is very well arranged. The experience this author has with game writing clearly shows. I was a little bit disappointed about not being able to explore more on my own, but that's not that surprising for an intro.
So, will a game follow this intro? In a recent thread on the Adrift forums, David Whyld hasn't included it on a list of his working titles, but maybe it will reincarnate in another one of his games? I certainly hope so.
[NOTE from author: yes, I’ll be writing a full length version of this game. One day.]
TThhee FFiirree TToowweerr
by
Jacqueline A. Lott
Review: David Whyld
Genre: Real Life
Platform: Inform
Download: http://www.shadowvault.net/games/firetower.z8
Interactive fiction used to be about finding lost treasure or battling monsters in dark dungeons or saving the world from terrible evil. How times have changed. The Fire Tower is about a hiker.
I’d be lying if I said I don’t have fond nostalgia for the text adventures of old. The storylines might have been corny, they might not have made much sense, and the mazes which populated a lot of the games could make even a sane man tear his hair out in frustration, but I always felt like none of that really mattered and what was important was that the games themselves had interesting storylines. A game where you play a hiker just doesn’t really compare to a quest to save the world. Save the world and you feel like you’ve achieved something major. Finish your hike…? Well, it’s just not the same thing.
But that aside, what’s The Fire Tower like as a game? Unfortunately, there's not much in the way of actual gameplay here. There are no puzzles to solve, no items that play a role (you start carrying several but they aren’t required for anything and seem to be there because it’s expected that the player is going to be carrying something), and precious little storyline. There are no ways to die or fail the game that I found, although I think I read in another review that you can die if you're especially unlucky. I guess this must have been my lucky day. Very little happens to enliven things.
Is it all bad then? No, far from it. It’s actually quite refreshing to just wander from location to location without anything to really do in them. The writing is way above average and while I've never been fond of hiking before today (too much like hard work for my liking), I might give it a try after this. Unfortunately where I live there tends to be a lack of beautiful scenery so maybe I'm better off reading about it on a computer screen as opposed to experiencing it first hand.
To say the game is called The Fire Tower, the fire tower itself doesn’t really play any major part in the proceedings. I expected some kind of revelation when I reached it, or for the game to take some abrupt turn and become a bit more interesting, or… something. Instead, I reached the fire tower, went inside, didn’t find a whole lot and left. Expecting something to happen if I tried moving away from the tower, I did that. Only to find that once I had left the vicinity of the tower, I wasn’t able to return. So my hike up to the fire tower seemed pretty anti-climactic. All that was left afterwards was for me to hike back down and the game ended.
I played the game through a few more times to see if I’d missed anything on my first play, but aside from wandering slightly off the beaten path at one point, I think I had seen pretty much all the game had to offer.
A bit disappointing then? In some ways: yes. In others: no. For the time I spent playing it – it didn’t take much more than fifteen minutes from start to finish – it was interesting enough to hold my attention, although that was partly because I kept thinking “there has to be more to it than simply wandering from place to place” and right up to the last bit, I was expecting some kind of puzzle to spring itself upon me. When it didn’t, and then the game ended, I was left with the feeling that while it had held my interest for fifteen minutes, it wouldn’t have kept me glued to the screen for much longer.
Puzzle filled games have never been my cup of tea. Mainly, I readily admit, because I'm terrible at puzzles and can’t figure them out half the time. Even the easy ones, I generally don’t have the patience for and when I faced with one puzzle after another, the urge to just quit and play something else becomes overwhelming. But then I've never been a fan of puzzle free games either. Just wandering around with precious little to do isn’t especially interesting and while the setting doesn’t really allow for the placement of oodles of puzzles, I'm sure a few could have been worked into the mix without too much effort. Maybe the fire tower could be locked and I need to find a way inside. Maybe a path is blocked and I have to find an alternative route, perhaps using a log to cross a river. Maybe when I meet the bear, I have to use my wits to get past it instead of the game just moving me past it without me being required to do anything.
But no puzzles. And a very short game. Subsequent plays didn’t reveal anything hidden that I hadn’t discovered on my first play and after reaching the ending for the third time, I decided that enough was enough. While okay in its own right, The Fire Tower just isn’t interesting enough to keep me coming back for further plays.
Bugs it’s pretty free of. I encountered a few annoyances but nothing that really put me off the game. In one location there's a woodpecker but you can’t listen to it by referring to it as “woodpecker” but instead “bird”. A few other times, I’d stop for a rest during my hike and trying to move in a direction afterwards would hit me with a message saying I couldn’t do that while I was on the ground. The first time I saw this it confused me a bit because I wasn’t really sure what it was telling me. Yes, I was on the ground. Why was moving in a direction a problem? It wasn’t till I realised that I was sitting down and needed to stand up first before I was able to actually go anywhere. Towards the end of the game, I game across a locked gate. Just as I was about to cry out “a puzzle at last!” I realised it wasn’t a puzzle at all as there's no way of opening it. Oh well. However, the text informs me that I don’t need to open it as I can walk around it to the northeast. Only I can’t. It’s northwest I need to go.
The major annoyance, as far as I was concerned anyway, was that once you go in one direction, you can’t go back. I guess this might be believable in the sense that the locations are often spaced far apart – you're hiking several miles after all – but it made me feel that I was missing out on significant portions of the game by going one way when I should have gone another and once I’d gone that way there was no backtracking. Aside from that, the game also has the tendency to prevent you going in directions you might want to go in and instead steers you along a very set path. So while you have the illusion of being able to wander pretty much wherever you want, the reality is that you're restricted in where you can go.
Conclusion
If you’ve half an hour to spare, give The Fire Tower a try. It doesn’t break new ground and the storyline isn’t anything special, but it’s nicely written and the scenery is stunning. Me, I think I’m off to stumble through a few tunnels in retro games and smite me a monster or three.
5 out of 10
FFuuttuurree BBooyy
by
Kent Tessman
Review: David Whyld
Genre: Superhero
Platform: Hugo
Download: http://www.generalcoffee.com/futureboy/about.html (demo)
And after many years of commercial interactive fiction being just a pipe dream or a fondly remembered memory, along comes a new one. Okay, I'm aware of the Malinche games but given their less than flattering reputation in the IF community and the general ‘Malinche as black sheep’ feeling that hangs over them, I'm happy I've decided to avoid buying them thus far. But Future Boy tempted me. Maybe it’s because I'm a sucker for superhero games or maybe because I’d played a previous game by the same author (Guilty Bastards) and liked it a lot. Or maybe it was just sheer curiosity that got the better of me.
I approached Future Boy wanting to like it. Really wanting to like it. As someone obsessed with the idea of writing his own commercial interactive fiction one day, the coming of Future Boy was like a gift from the gods themselves. Could this, I wondered, finally be the rebirth of commercial IF once more?
I eagerly popped in the CD, installed the programme, tapping my fingers impatiently on the edge of the desk whilst doing so… and then, once I got to the game itself and started playing it, I found myself a little disappointed. Which isn't to say that Future Boy is a terrible game. It isn't. It’s good, very good in parts. It’s just that, for a commercial product, it’s a lot less polished than I expected it to be. I've played free IF that has been far smoother than this, so if the free stuff can hit such high standards, why can’t the commercial stuff? After all, we’re paying for something that is bug free and better than anything else, right? Wrong.
As the name implies, Future Boy is a superhero game, a genre I've always been particularly fond of, despite (or perhaps because of) its overly cheesy idea of people in silly costumes fighting other people in silly costumes. On the downside, you don’t actually get to play the superhero in question which struck me as a strange direction for the game to take, akin to playing a Superman game and getting to control Lois Lane instead of the Man of Steel himself. Or the recent Matrix game in which you don’t play Neo but some of the minor characters from the film that you probably blinked and missed. So Future Boy is basically a superhero game in which you don’t get to play a superhero. Hmmm…
There's a playable demo available, which was what I came to first. Was I overwhelmed with the attention to detail and impressed with the depth of story and interaction? Yes and no. Future Boy certainly starts off strangely – you're falling through the air and about to hit the ground – and I'm not sure this was the best way for the game to start. Why not Future Boy putting the smack down on some vicious supervillain? Future Boy saving the world from darkest evil? Future Boy stopping a derailed train about to plunge into a deep precipice? Etc etc. Instead we have Future Boy falling? Not quite the same thing. As it happens, the falling part is actually a dream (hope I didn’t give away too much there) and the game moves to the introduction properly once you awaken.
I wasn’t too keen on the introduction, either. Two strikes against the game. After the falling sequence, I was expecting something a bit more interesting than simply ambling around my apartment. I wasn’t able to leave which clued me to the fact that there was still something that needed doing beforehand. What needed doing? Simple: I've got to wake up my lazy flatmate. Once that’s out of the way – and the realisation that you're sharing a flat with a genuine card-carrying superhero (unfortunately this realisation is handled pretty poorly) – you're on with the game properly. Does it get any more interesting then? Well… The next part begins with you delivering some laundry bags to the prison. Wow.
Around this time (I was still playing the demo), I began to wonder if the writer of Future Boy had made something of an error in judgement in the way the game begins. The falling sequence isn't very interesting, the events of the introduction aren't either, and delivering laundry bags to a prison? Well… let’s just say that I was in two minds over whether to purchase the full product when I reached the end of the demo. In the end, I went ahead and bought it anyway. While the demo is certainly flawed, and considerably less polished than I might have expected, it was nevertheless very well written and I've always been a sucker for superhero games. And then there's the fact that I really, really, really want the commercial aspect of IF to emerge again. And then there was the fact that, on the whole, what I’d heard about the full game from various internet message boards and newsgroups was on the whole positive.
There were a few strange annoyances about Future Boy which I was surprised about. This is, after all, a commercial product and that generally means a higher level of testing than something given away for free*. One of the first things I typed was X YOU but was told THAT DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE! However X ME works fine. As the game constantly refers to the player as “you”, I found this unusual to say the least.
* In theory anyway. I've played enough commercial games over the years, both IF and otherwise, to know that just because the companies making them are charging money, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve bothered testing them. Hopefully we’ll soon see a ‘patch’ available for Future Boy which takes care of these annoyances. If, indeed, it’s even possible to apply patches to IF games in this way.
One thing Future Boy has, and has in abundance, is a large number of puzzles. And some are hard. Unfairly so. And, worse, they're not even very interesting puzzles. Take the prison cell you find yourself locked in during the early part of the game. While I suppose it’s possible to figure out on your own what you need to do to get out of it, it’s such a longwinded and, overall, boring series of events that I just didn’t have the willpower to even try. Added to that was the truly frustrating way I kept passing out every few moves and then having to wait several more moves before I was able to do something – was the writer actively trying to make me type QUIT?* Thank god for the hints, which told me exactly what I needed to do. And thank god the demo version of the game ended before dumping the player in the prison cell because I doubt I’d have bought the full version if faced with that sort of thing.
* Actually, the passing out bug is one that, according to the hints, can be avoided. However, I never figured out how so escaping my prison cell took about ten times as long as it should have done. I'm pretty sure that if I hadn’t paid for Future Boy I’d have thrown the game in the recycle bin at this stage.
Future Boy takes places in various parts of the city where you work as a laundry bag delivery man. Access to the different parts of the city is via the subway system, which does an effective job of moving the player from one part of the city to another without the necessity of introducing large numbers of filler locations. I wasn’t overly fond of the subway system, though. Maybe it was the hassle I had over finding my subway ticket (I'm apparently the sort of really poor chap who never carries around enough loose cash to buy a subway ticket) or maybe the annoying graphic that runs every time you board a train. Or maybe it was that the subway can only take you to four different places in the city and three of them are pretty empty. I like to explore in games, wander around and see what there is to see. Personally I think I’d have preferred a city filled with several dozen more locations for me to explore, even if they weren’t directly relevant to the game.
In many ways, Future Boy strikes me as a strange game to make a stab at the commercial side of things. It’s not an especially user-friendly game for a start. People familiar with IF games will obviously have an easier time with it than complete newcomers to the scene (although as I've been playing IF for over twenty years and I struggled greatly with it, that might not be the case). While no one really wants a game to be too easy – where’s the challenge in solving easy puzzles? – no one really wants a game to be as frustrating as this one often is. A fine balance needs to be made between what is easy and what is hard, and Future Boy seems to step over the line into too hard frequently.
Some of the problems might well be with the system used to write the game, Hugo. I haven't played enough Hugo games to tell for certain but with over half the screen taken up with the graphics, the text tends to get bunched up in a very small, non-resizable window at the bottom. And as Future Boy is quite a wordy game, this meant that most of my commands ran off the screen and I seemed to be forever seeing the
Another thing that bugged me, minor though it was, was the way when moving from one location to another I would often find myself sitting down and have to STAND. It might seem a really small thing to do to just type STAND but it’s a pain all the same. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to just have the player standing by default? Particularly as little can be achieved with you seated?
In other places, the dreaded guess the verb rears its ugly head. Yes indeed. I’d hoped that with this being a commercial game, it would have been tested through the roof to eliminate any kind of guess the verb struggling that might otherwise have resulted, but sadly a few little swines were overlooked. I had great difficulty getting into the police impound to recover my van due to the game not understanding most of what I was trying to do and being very particular about exactly what it would accept. Especially annoying was THROW BLANKET OVER FENCE which got me WHAT EXACTLY ARE YOU HOPING FOR? I thought it was pretty obvious what I was hoping for – to throw the blanket over the fence. COVER FENCE WITH BLANKET and COVER BARBED WIRE WITH BLANKET (there being barbed wire over the top of the fence) resulted in BETTER START WITH A VERB. Funny. I – and the dictionary – think that ‘cover’ is a verb but apparently Hugo knows better. By the time I hit upon DRAPE BLANKET OVER FENCE I was beginning to wonder if some hideous bug had crept into the game. Why the needing for the word ‘drape’ when ‘cover’ or ‘throw’ would have worked just as well? Beats me.
One thing I disliked about the game, and which got increasingly more annoying the longer I played, was how the solution to some of the puzzles seemed unnecessarily longwinded. Often I would uncover some vital clue and yet the process of actually doing anything with it was never as straightforward as it seemed. At one point, I found the hideout of the evil supervillain, yet no one seemed to care and my attempts to tell Frank (the civilian version of Future Boy himself) about it just elicited an unhelpful response. More and more often I seemed to be resorting to the hints just to make any kind of progress and whenever I tried to reason something out for myself, the game just refused to play ball. While I can appreciate that if Future Boy was an easy game, people would probably feel they hadn’t got their money worth because it would only take them a matter of hours to complete it, at the same time I'm not convinced that throwing hard puzzles at the player is going to make him like it any better. While some of the puzzles are reasonably easy, others aren't. And some are downright nightmarish. At least a few require you to revisit locations you have been to before and not found anything worthwhile in, and then to wait around for something to happen. While I guess it’s possible you could hit on the solution to these puzzles by sheer dogged persistence, or pure luck, it seems likely that a good number will baffle most people. I'm not even sure why some of them were included at all. Yes, they make you really think about things but after battering my head against certain puzzles for a while, only to realise that the solution was in a completely different location that I had already visited, just at the wrong time, I would have been happier with a more puzzle-free game.
Aside from problems with the difficulty of some of the puzzles (the computer in particular), a good number of them are just downright tedious. Even when armed with the hints, I found myself struggling with the computer puzzle. Not so much to figure out what I needed to do, but to keep my enthusiasm for the game long enough to actually keep playing it. Now maybe it’s just me – I'm not a fan of overly complicated puzzle games at the best of times – but I'm sure that most people don’t find that kind of puzzle interesting.
Then again, some of the puzzles are pretty inspired. I particularly enjoyed the time travel puzzles associated with the large and small orbs (once I’d found them that was, which I doubt I’d have done without the hints telling me where they were; and once I’d figured out how I was supposed to use them (again, the hints came to the rescue)), even though I'd have definitely preferred if using them was made somewhat easier. The first time I managed to successfully activate the small orb and travel through time, I wasn’t even sure what had gone on and it wasn’t until I’d done it a few times that I realised the truth of the situation. A smile lit up my face then at a genuinely decent twist in the game. If only all the puzzles were this good.
Fortunately, there's an excellent hints system in place for the many times when the puzzles might get the better of you. Did I say excellent? Well, it’s certainly excellent in the sense that it helps you steer past the hardest of the game’s puzzles, and without it I’d probably still be stuck in that cell right at the start of the game with 95% of it still to go. But the way the information is presented is a downright pain. Type HINT and the screen clears and you're faced with miniscule text in the middle of the screen which you have to navigate through to the relevant hint. This is cumbersome to use and having to bang the ESC key to move back out each time you’ve finished, and H to reveal another hint doesn’t help matters either. Worse still, a good number of the hints are red herrings. I spent a while trying to figure out how to get inside the supervillain’s hideout with a hot air balloon only to find, when I resorted to the hints again, that there wasn’t a hot air balloon in the game. Ho ho. How I laughed then. In fact, I laughed so hard that I almost deleted the frustrating game and tried something else.
Yes, it’s ultimately a frustrating game. Genuine brilliance shines through in a few instances – the time travel aspects in particular – but all too often the game annoyed me so much I regretted ever buying it in the first place. I didn’t want to be annoyed. I wanted to be entertained. I didn’t buy the game to see how much it could annoy me. Which is a shame, because if that was the reason I’d bought it, I’d have certainly got my money’s worth.
Another point against the game is the multi-coloured text used for various dialogue options with the NPCs. Multiple colours looks gaudy and, worse, some of it isn't especially easy to read. Text all of the same colour would have been my preference.
The conversation system is another point against the game (yes, another). Usually I'm a fan of conversation systems that use the dialogue options way of doing things because selecting what you want to say from a list of displayed options is a lot easier than trying to figure out what you need to ask people about. Here, alas, it’s handled poorly. The conversation system is awkward to use and moving between the dialogue options slow and fiddly. A few times I selected the wrong option by mistake because the cursor had moved on to the next option without me realising it.
No superhero game would be complete without a supervillain. Here we have Clayton Eno. Clayton Eno? Hmmm… the supervillains in the comics I read as a kid always had cool names like Dr Doom, Ultron, Magneto, Dr Octopus and so on and so forth. Clayton Eno just doesn’t seem to have the same ring to it. Nor does he really get up to the kind of villainous deeds that supervillains are famed for: no world domination for Clayton Eno. Nope. He’s planning to get himself elected mayor and does this by blocking off a bridge. If Future Boy was meant wholly as a parody of the superhero genre (and maybe it was and I just missed the signs), it would probably get away with this sort of thing, but as it seems intended more as a straight superhero game, it suffers badly from a poor supervillain and his poor schemes. Getting yourself elected mayor just isn't the same as a diabolical plan to blow the world up. And he doesn’t even cackle insanely.
So... worth playing? Yes. Worth buying? Perhaps not. Future Boy is certainly one of the better IF games I've played over the past year or so, but it’s got so many rough edges that I’d be hard pressed to recommend buying it to anyone. A couple of free games I've played recently – City Of Secrets and Varicella – were considerably smoother and a lot less buggy. A lot more user friendly as well (Future Boy has a sarcastic parser that often makes fun of the player for trying out perfectly normal actions). If this was a free game, I’d definitely recommend people try it out as there's a lot to like about it. As a commercial release, you're probably better off playing one of the others I've just mentioned and hoping Future Boy one day becomes freeware.
In some ways, I feel bad about giving Future Boy such a harsh review because it’s not a terrible game and it’s obviously had a considerable amount of time and effort expended on it. Maybe it’s a sign of the times. If this had come out in the 80’s when interactive fiction (or text adventures as they were known back then) was 100% commercial, it would certainly have held its ground against the majority of the other games around at the time. Heck, it might even be remembered these days with the same kind of fondness as The Hobbit and Zork. But IF has moved on in the intervening years and with 99% of it being free these days, for a commercial product to succeed it has to be the best of the lot. And, sorry to say, Future Boy isn't anywhere close. It’s good, just not that good.
6 out of 10
