Interactive Fiction

There's an ongoing discussion in the interactive fiction community about whether or not we're well-served by our traditional reliance on second person present-tense narration -- the kind of thing that works for

You are standing in a damp cave.

or

You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

...but not so much for

You feel overwhelmed by existential angst and break down weeping.

Make It Good is a dark detective mystery from Jon Ingold: there's been a murder, and everyone who was in the house at the time is a suspect. The protagonist is a cop whose drinking career has all but eclipsed his career on the force. His sidekick doesn't bother to conceal his contempt at having to serve such a useless master.

On this description, Make It Good looks like a classic style of interactive fiction, in the tradition of Infocom's Deadline and Witness. Those early commercial mysteries involved some of Infocom's most innovative character work: the non-player characters in Deadline give a strong impression of independent purpose as they move about on their own schedules.

Make It Good improves on this tradition.

Lots of IF lately is written for competition play and is therefore designed to be completed in two to five hours, and more deserves the name of interactive short story. Aaron Reed's Blue Lacuna triumphantly defies that tradition: Aaron calls it an interactive novel, and that seems entirely fair, because the game contains enough text for several full-length novels and is likely to play over 18-25 hours. The result is that it feels gratifyingly spacious, as less ambitious IF cannot, and there is room for emotional effects to build gradually.

Summer Session is from "Tycoon Games," but Hanako's logo is on it too, and it sure looks (and plays) like Georgina Okerson's work -- so, since there aren't any in-game credits, I'm going to assume it's hers. (Okerson also created Summer Schoolgirls, Cute Knight and Fatal Hearts.) In fact, Summer Session plays a lot like Summer Schoolgirls, redeveloped for boys. The objective here isn't to make friends, however, but to get a girl friend -- perhaps a minor difference, but one that adds a mild sexual frisson.

Shade is one of those classics that get recommended anytime anyone recommends any IF to newcomers: it's brief, disquieting, ambiguous, memorable without being especially difficult. It offers an interaction style too guided and fluid to be called "puzzly", and which probably belongs in some other category. It threatens one's ideas of the relationship between the player and the protagonist. It has entered the canon, as far as interactive fiction has one.

Common Ground is about perceptions and misunderstandings: the player experiences a set of events from the perspective of three protagonists. Their respective ideas of what is going on (and why) dovetail together in sometimes-surprising ways, and the result is a story about communication and expectation in an ordinary family.

Adventure games may struggle with many aspects of static fiction -- plot, characterization, pacing -- but they nail setting. The place is, after all, right there for the player to explore, with all its atmosphere and complexity, and a half-decent designer can set in layer on layer of subtle clues about how this strange world works. Not every player will be equally interested in all of it, but the mechanisms of exploration serve to dole out exposition in tolerably-sized pieces, and let players discover the aspects of the game world that they're most interested in.

Necrotic Drift is one of my favorite games to bring out whenever discussing the relationship between player and protagonist.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I've been flamed just for saying that before, because someone found the opening sequence so unpleasant as to be angry I had caused him to have any contact with the game at all.

So consider yourself warned: this game includes heaping helpings of profanity; copious references to drug use, sexuality, and violence; misogynistic and otherwise seriously unenlightened characters; and at least one grotesque misapplication of every secretion the human body can produce. There's an artistic purpose to it all, but I wouldn't want anyone thinking this was a good game to introduce to their Sunday school class.

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Slouching Towards Bedlam is a great game, without being a perfect one. It has some rough spots in the implementation; there are moments when key characters could be more fully developed. But polish isn't everything. The production values here are good enough to support the game's main concept, and that concept is enough to make it worth playing and replaying.

Slouching begins at a Victorian lunatic asylum. The setting is steampunk-Lovecraftian, and the first few puzzles are fairly research and discovery puzzles. Expect to spend some time manipulating the mechanical filing system at the asylum. At the beginning, things seem to be strange in a familiar way.

Aisle is a one-turn game. Play a turn, and the game ends.

Restart. Try something else. The game ends again.

This isn't a case where working out just the right single move will win, either. (For that, try Andrew Pontious' brilliant but difficult Rematch.) No, Aisle is partly about exploration -- an astonishing number of commands are implemented, ranging well outside the usual set of interactive fiction commands -- and partly about assembling the story that you're interested in.

Each ending tells another piece of story about an event in your past. Some of the fragments work together. Some conflict with one another.