Self as Fractal

Spring Thing 2009 reviews: Realm of Obsidian - Amy Kerns

This is a review of a game in the 2009 Spring Thing Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want to read spoilers. You have been warned.

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(Sorry about the repost; something odd was going on with the timestamps.)

Next up is "Realm of Obsidian" by Amy Kerns, of Amethyst Games.

Remember how I said A Flustered Duck was old-school? I lied. This is old school. It's a separate executable file. It has a nonstandard parser - the game's built with TAB (ThinBASIC Adventure Builder) by Philip Richmond. The text is in Fixedsys. All of these things are red flags, traditionally, in the comp (well, maybe not the Fixedsys.)

The setting's old-school too: a lot of underground corridors, sparsely-described, and various objects to find. There's a spellbook with ingredients to gather. It's a horror game, so there are various monsters - locked doors, in essence - blocking paths until you find the right object/key with which to dispatch them.

Yet once again, I kind of liked this. It's surprisingly well-implemented - not just for a nonstandard parser, but for a comp entry in general. I only found one major bug, and it's for something you really shouldn't be doing. Just to illustrate, one of the classic implementation tests is whether >FLUSH TOILET works. Not only does it work, but it comes complete with sound effect! Which reminds me...

The game does some cool things with multimedia - not graphics so much, but definitely color and sound. Recently, Kerns posted about the use of sound effects and music in IF, so it isn't all that surprising in retrospect.

I hadn't played the game when I commented, but for the most part I stand by my post. The sound effects are hit-and-miss; some are effective (the death noises in particular) but others less so (the chomping noise when Troy eats the Spam is way too cartoony, and the various dialogue noises lose their luster when you hear the exact same thing with the exact same inflection for the tenth time.) But the background music's pretty damn good. It sets the scene perfectly and what's more, I'd listen to it outside of the game.

Although the parser's surprisingly robust, a lot of synonyms are missing. The tape player got me, as did the colored tokens that you can't refer to by color. There's an inventory limit. Between this and Flustered Duck, it's a trend I'm not all that enthused to see return. And then there's the slight matter that the game isn't finished, and from the amount of loose threads left hanging at the end, there's going to be quite a bit of game to go. (I never even used the spellbook, except for evidence.)

There were a few interface choices I wasn't thrilled by, though. The hint system too - most of the time when I resorted to hints it was less "How do I deal with this thing that's about to kill me?" (and in most cases, you're pretty much dead anyway if you have to do that) than "What do I do now?" With location-specific hints, there's not much you can do about that except wander about until you run across an unsolved puzzle.

But honestly, more than anything, I wanted those loose threads to be resolved, which has to be a good thing. I'll be interested to see the final release.

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On a side note, the game implements a command called "redescribe" (or "redesc" or "r".) I've grumbled a few times before about how nobody uses "look" in its literal sense (looking around the room) and how it really should just be made a meta-command. Here is that it isn't technically a meta-command - if something's trying to kill you, they'll take another turn just as if you typed in >L - but the idea is fantastic and I wouldn't mind seeing it become an IF convention.

On another side note, there's a changelog bundled with the game, which is pretty interesting in itself if you like poking around people's changelogs.

Posted by Sarah at 5:31 PM

Labels: interactive fiction, spring thing