Sunday, 3 July 2011

IntroComp2011: Bender

This is a review for an entry in the Interactive Fiction IntroComp 2011.

After an awkwardly written description of the protagonist being shot and the perpetrator running away, you are presented with a Magic Device (some kind of wall-bending green bullet), and explicitly presented with Your First Puzzle: use your magic device to move walls around to block your assailant from reaching the escape jeep before you do.

The major problem here is that too many elements are presented at once. The author wants to do an in medias res action-packed opening, but at the same time wants to introduce a Magic Device with a function and operation unknown to the player, while simultaneously setting up the first puzzle. This is overkill: players really need some hand-holding to get to grips with all this. Throwing them into an uber-complex time-limited puzzle involving shifting geographies and path-finding, before they have even had a chance to examine themselves, check their inventories, experiment with the Magic Device, or get any kind of clue about who the PC or NPC is, is asking too much.

The minor problem is that the map doesn't seem to display correctly in Gargoyle: all the important locations are marked with multi-coloured question marks. Presumably non-ASCII characters are being mangled on this interpreter?


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