Fantasy

The story behind Pathfinder is so convoluted and indeed silly that it's worth noting.

Once upon a time there was Dungeons & Dragons. It was a little game published in a small box in three booklets, and it was, actually, kind of a bad game -- very poorly written and rather clunky. But it was the first RPG, and at the time the idea of a roleplaying game was so novel and exciting that it became a huge best-seller.

Walker and Silhouette used to be antagonists. He's a police detective; she's a criminal of sorts, though it seems that most of her crimes were expressions of social subversiveness, rather than anything too hard-core. Now, of course, they solve crimes.

Walker & Silhouette is designed to be friendly to novice players, and in particular to get around some of the challenges of parser-based IF: instead of requiring the player to type full commands, it provides keywords that can be typed in or (on interpreters that support hyperlinks) just clicked on. Selecting a keyword means having the protagonist do whatever he (or she -- you play both characters during the game) thinks is the most reasonable action applying to that object at the moment.

Most objects don't get picked up, either, which means that the player has a fairly static inventory. And movement is limited to using the leave keyword when it becomes available -- which means that there's no map to keep track of and no compass directions to memorize. There are even some achievements to unlock, which is cute, a borrowing of game tropes decidedly alien to standard IF.

As one might expect, the keyword-dependency narrows the puzzle range of Walker & Silhouette: any given thing is only useful in one way at one time. It's not completely without challenge, though. It soon becomes evident that puzzle solutions are about interacting with objects in the right order, or timed to coincide right with external events.

I'm describing this keyword-based IF as though it were a novelty. It isn't: people have been playing with variations on this idea for a long time, because it offers obvious advantages to players who find the regular IF parser too frustrating or challenging to learn. Adventures of Helpfulman used clickable keyword-driven conversation back in 1999; in 2007, Ferrous Ring explored the possibility of giving the player multiple modes of play, ranging from the standard parser through keyword play to a system that would more or less play the game for you, so you could read it like a book. There are others. But unless you've followed the IF community and its competitions very closely, you probably haven't heard of those games, and that's largely because they didn't entirely work. Some of that has to do with writing (Ferrous Ring was deeply surreal, so it was hard to figure out what was going on), but some of it was because the authors hadn't given enough thought to how a keyword-based system might be fundamentally different to interact with from a parsed-command system.

More recently, Blue Lacuna offered a partially keyword-based system: it was possible to play quite a lot of the game typing only one-word commands to examine things or move from place to place, resorting to the fuller commands at the parser only for extraordinary actions. But it tended more or less to fall back on the parser when puzzle content was needed; whereas Walker & Silhouette really commits to the idea that the keywords are going to suffice for all gameplay. And they do.

In spite of that, W&S is not quite the same as a hypertext story, and not just because the world model has more state than the average hypertext story tracks. There is still a command prompt, and if you want to, you can type commands in classic IF style. It's not necessary to do that in order to win, and most of the time it won't be productive of anything important, but there are occasionally moments when I wanted to toy with the characters by suggesting actions that they aren't consciously considering. And this paid off: the game responded as though the protagonist was surprised by an unanticipated nudge from the id, often with rather entertaining text.

All this about interface and I haven't talked about the content. Walker & Silhouette is pleasing for some of the same reasons that Gun Mute is pleasing. Pacian likes to take a setting that you think you understand (the old west, early 20th-century England) and then add layers of worldbuilding that make that setting strange and new again. Each new scene brings twists not only for the mystery in the foreground, the one the protagonists are trying to solve, but for the mystery in the background about what kind of a world this is.

I am not describing the setting at all, because one of the constant pleasures of the game, for me, was in discovering that this world contained Surprising Element X... and that Walker and Silhouette considered Element X commonplace. The keyword system helps out with that effect, too, because it allows the protagonists to act on their world knowledge in situations where the player might not completely understand what's going on. If that sounds like a demerit, trust me: in this game it generally works.

Add to that a light romance and a theme about promoting gender equality, and you have a distinctively Pacian-esque piece. It's fun, adventurous, and not too hard; it feels like enjoyable fluff while you're playing, but after you're done you may find it leaves more of an impression than you expected.

Cute Knight Kingdom is an elaboration of Hanako's older game, Cute Knight, with more places to go, more quests, and vastly improved graphics. This being an indie game, "vastly improved graphics" does not, in this case, mean high-poly 3D virtual worlds, but actual full-color illustrations and 8-bit sprites, instead of the black-and-white line drawings of the original.

Hanako is an American developer, but this is a dojin-style game, with anime-inspired art, mild interaction, and with story and romance at least as important as actual gameplay. As with the original, you are a girl of 18 who, in three years, must find her destiny and happiness -- but that can mean taking almost any path, from becoming a dressmaker to becoming a warrior. Yes, there's combat, of a sort, but you can avoid it entirely if you wish.

As I said reviewing the original game, "somehow you find yourself drawn into her story--and want to drive it to something like a happy ending. In other words, Cute Knight quickly creates a sense of emotional engagement that's lacking in far more expensively-developed and commercial titles."

And that is certainly true of this game as well.

Pizza Morgana is a humorous graphic adventure created by Israeli developer Corbomite games, with art from Uri Fink, creator of Israel's most popular comic, Zbang.

In this world of alienations, in this age of sorrow, we could call do worse than to call a Glumbuster. Lovingly crafted in Game Maker, this game is the apex of four years of work by an individual whose only goal is to reduce the amount of mental anguish in this world, primarily through the game, and then via donations to a children´s foundation that the game solicits.

We're seeing the birth of a new game genre, something that doesn't happen all that often; it's already acquired the monicker of "social game," which is a terrible name, in a way. "Social games" live on social networks, hence the name, but at least to date use the social connections those networks provide in very primitive ways. And after all, all multiplayer games are social, albeit some more so than others; a game like Elven Blood is actually far less social than, say, Spades or Diplomacy or Hundred Years War, since there are few ways for players to either help or hinder each other -- and no support for 'table talk.'

In Aching Dreams, you're a sword-and-sorcery hero type going off and fighting monsters and such -- but this is no RPG, and increasing your stats is only a tool to an end. The end is using your tool, as it were. It's a hentai-style "date sim," and "winning" means winning the heart (and, you know, body) of one of two girls.

Though there's a minor bit of resource management -- you have only 32 days, some of which you will need to spend working on skills and taking jobs to earn money for needed equipment -- much of the game involves clicking "Next" to read the next bit of text and see the next set of images. Occasionally you have a choice to make. Some of the images, if you're doing well, are explicit, that is, show you merrily rogering one of the game's female characters, in your choice of positions.

Hand-drawn manga-style pictures of naked chicks do not strike me as all that erotic, really, but there they are. The game draws you in, however, because there's a puzzle-solving aspect to achieving your ends, and because the text is well-written and moderately amusing. There are also several different endings and eight possible "achievements" -- some of which can only be accomplished on a second or subsequent playthrough -- and you may find yourself playing through several times to unlock them all.

This repeat playability is nice, but comes at a cost; since all the missions are invariant, you're not likely to want to read the associated text more than once, so on subsequent playthroughs you're basically hammering on the mouse to "next" through stuff you've seen before.

The game did suck me in (no pun intended). Most games that deal with sex are either incredibly dumb or repulsively exploitative; Aching Dreams is neither. Indeed, it's actually kind of fun.

Notes from the designer here.

Playing Eschalon is a bit like slipping into a warm bath, at least for those of us who played computer RPGs obsessively in the late 80s. It's a tile-map, sprite-based, single-character RPG with randomly-rolled characters, multiple character types, and a bit of a story. Movement and combat is turn-based but if you hold the mouse button down, you move continuously in the direction pointed, so you can produce a quasi-action game, if you like.

Burning Wheel is the game that story- or character-oriented gamers brought up on Dungeons and Dragons always wanted. Burning Wheel is a fantasy game with many of the typical tropes (humans with sorcery and faith, elves with spell-songs, greedy dwarves, hateful orcs), but with an underlying system as adept at handling arguing law before a lord as it as at managing battle with a marauding band of horse thieves.

The Shadow of Yesterday is an narrativist tabletop indie RPG set in a world reminiscent of Vance's Dying Earth or Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer. A hundred years ago, the world of Near had a terrible catastrophe, the "Sky Fire;" as a consequence, part of the planet became a moon, when there had never been one in the sky before, and the civilized world, once united in the Empire of Maldor, fell into a long dark age. You play characters as trade and civilization begins to renew -- a setting reminiscent also of Moorcock's Young Kingdoms.