Planet Interactive Fiction

(Previous posts here.)

I’ve finished the game, and I was fairly close to the end. The largest jump was simply understanding what the game was even trying to convey.

I had incidentally tried to run the car into the door (thinking this would be one method of “smashing” the door) and was simply told I couldn’t; I came close to the right idea, as you’re supposed to run the car into a regular wall, getting a good effect.

THE CAR MADE A STRANGE SOUND AND DIED.

You can hop out and turn the crank again to start it; what’s new is there’s now a hammer that fell out from somewhere.

With that hammer, SMASH DOOR now works, leading to a supply of boards.

Nice contrast with Mexican Adventure, where the wood being portable is part of what led me to not realize you could build a whole cart out of it.

I still had the nails from earlier and the hammer, and I also had the BUILD verb un-used off my original list. Given how this was clearly at the end of the game, I figured now was the time.

This is followed by one of the most unfortunate parser moments in the game. You can’t TAKE the ladder because it is too heavy, but you can’t LIFT if either. It is important to note that LIFT is considered a synonym to TAKE, while RAISE is its own verb.

I had already spent enough time puzzling over the verb list I figured out this issue quickly, but I could see someone getting stumped here at nearly the very end.

I decided, despite no ceiling exit in view, to follow with CLIMB LADDER.

This is on top of the maze. I originally didn’t think that because you can still walk around the maze and looks normal as before.

What kept me from wasting enormous time here was my constant attempts to experiment with ways to die. (Adventure game deaths can be funny, sometimes! Or they can give, as you’ll about to see, a hint.) While on top of the ladder where I had raised it I tried JUMP DOWN, not even realizing yet I had made it through the ceiling.

THAT WASN’T THE RIGHT PLACE!

This suggested there was a right place, and established for me, despite the odd way the graphics hadn’t changed, that I was in fact on the roof and just needed to find the right spot to apply JUMP DOWN.

Hence:

This is followed by a long and slow animation, and I have it here below at double speed.

Then text displays (again slowly, there’s a key to speed it up but I forgot what it was):

YOU STUMBLE OUT OF THE DIMLY LIT RECESSES OF THE MAZE, INTO THE STARTLINGLY BRIGHT FORMAL OINING ROOM OF PROFESSOR LA BRYNTHE. SEATED AROUND A LARGE TABLE ARE THE MEMBERS OF YOUR FACULTY COMMITTEE, HEADS BENT TO ONE ANOTHER IN WHISPERED DISCOURSE.

The professor then states that we have had our performance assessed through a real-life version of “the maze through which you have run so many of your experimental subjects” and they are now prepared to bestow a degree based on in-game performance.

TOTAL NUMBER OF MOVES -2145
NUMBER OF TIMES YOU ‘DIED’ -11
ATTEMPTS TO KILL SOMETHING -5
INVOCATIONS OF THE MAGIC WORD -16
NUMBER OF TIMES YOU QUIT -1
NUMBER OF HELPS YOU NEEDED -30
TIMES YOU TOOK INVENTORY -88
NUMBER OF PEEKS AT THE MAP -33

(This likely is inaccurate — it seems to be including things from the previous owner of the disk.) I find it interesting that it tried to account for so many things but aside from me finding move-optimization to be generally tedious without some extra gimmick, I take umbrage at having features like “taking inventory” and “looking at the map” somehow getting a negative tally. Yes, you could restart and avoid those (probably having to delete some sort of file on the disk) but it’s just uninteresting to do so, plus the whole ideal experience of an adventure game is to see the nooks and crannies and results of say, trying to wallop the wine snob.

This was shockingly polished (“polished” in a 1981 Apple II game sense) for a random unheard-of game that may or may not have been sold in a store. It did not make any magazines I could find, although that’s not equivalent to saying it wasn’t published; this was still an era where it was possible to just hang up a disk in a baggie somewhere. My current theory is that this was a college game (especially given the expensive model of Apple II needed for development on top of the collegiate references) and it could have landed in a computer store near a campus (maybe selling 30 copies). Even if this was just a disk swapped amongst students of the University of Rhode Island for fun, I hope one day we’ll get a better idea where this came from.

To bookend all this: the first-person adventures with views in multiple directions we’ve seen have had very different styles. Deathmaze 5000 and the other games from Med Systems (like Asylum) had sparse levels where just mapping them could be a challenge. The Haunted Palace was dense but eccentric and sometimes graphics at different angles didn’t match, but it otherwise went for a “narrow” view. The Japanese Mystery House had randomization and zoomed in views of objects. The Schrag games like Toxic Dumpsite kept the room count very low and didn’t feature any “hallway” sections, and come across the closest to the 90s games like Myst. While I still think it is possible the author(s) of The Maze saw Deathmaze 5000, it is also possible every single author mentioned above was coming up with the concept independently. Because none of them became a paradigm — even with Asylum getting respectable sales, and Mystery House being the first adventure in Japanese — there never was a “genre” established in the same manner as RPG “blobber” games.

UPDATE:

Not worth a new post, but–

I was asked by P-Tux7 in the comments, about the other possible titles. Here’s the relevant code:

9040 SC=NM+10DK+20KI-20MW+20QU+5HP+5IV+10*MP
9050 IF SC<2000 THEN 9060:P$=”THIRD GRADE FAILURE”: GOTO 9200
9060 IF SC<1500 THEN 9070:P$=”HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUT”: GOTO 9200
9070 IF SC<1000 THEN 9080:P$=”HIGH SCHOOL EQUIVALENCY”: GOTO 9200
9080 IF SC<600 THEN 9090:P$=”ASSOCIATE OF SCIENCE”: GOTO 9200
9090 IF SC<400 THEN 9100:P$=”BACHELOR OF SCIENCE”: GOTO 9200
9100 IF SC<300 THEN 9110:P$=”MASTER OF SCIENCE”: GOTO 9200
9110 IF SC<200 THEN 9120:P$=”DOCTOR OF MAZEOLOGY”: GOTO 9200
9120 IF SC<50 THEN 9130:P$=”FULL PROFESSOR OF MAZEOLOGY”: GOTO 9200
9130 P$=”CHARLATAN OR TOTAL FOOL”

The curious thing is that “MW” (number of magic words uses) counts to SUBTRACT from the total score. The higher the score, the worse the diploma. What this implies is that at the very end of the game, you can drop the welcome mat, SAY WELCOME over and over to be “polite”, and change your degree from utter failure to a doctorate.

If you use it too many times, the number wraps over past negative into the very high positive numbers.

This continues directly from my previous posts on this game.

Last time, I had a “wine snob” blocking the path, and I had just extracted cheese from a mousetrap (see below). To make further progress I had to overcome confusion about the game’s orientation of obstacles, in a big-picture-theory-of-games sense.

In many RPGs that use grid squares, obstacles are viewed from the squares immediately adjacent to them. If there’s a pit in Eye of the Beholder, and you approach the same square from a different angle, you’re viewing the “same pit” from an entirely new position.

I originally drew my map with this paradigm in mind; thinking of the mousetrap as a “pit”, I made my world-model such that the pit actually occupied the corner square, as the player faced that square.

However, it started to become clear farther in that obstacles only become “active” in the world-universe sense if the player is directly in the appropriate square. That is, if the player is one step away from a pit on the map, they can’t see or otherwise acknowledge the existence of a pit. This is a long-winded way of saying that the trap should have been placed one square up, and I had a blank on the map that I hadn’t reached yet.

I had understood this by the time I had reached the wine slob snob but the mousetrap was the very first thing I placed on my map, and since the puzzle stumped me for a while I hadn’t stopped to reconsider the placement. Going forward once leads to a wineglass on the ground.

This can be taken back to the snob, where you will need:

the uncorked wine bottle
the wineglass
the cheese
the crackers

and…. clean shoes.

To explain that last part, on walking back from stepping over the trap, there’s a strange “dotted” room which I assume represents dirt, or rat droppings, or something else messy.

I was never able to examine the dots. I just know that before there’s no special inventory object, and after there’s “something” on the player’s shoes.

Fortunately, CLEAN SHOES works back on the welcome mat (another use other than hiding a key and teleportation! I love how often what seems initially like scenery keeps showing up again).

With unclean shoes, the wine snob will not be able to smell the wine as you are pouring and you won’t make progress. Alternately, you can just teleport past the messy spot, but that requires using the welcome mat again since SAY WELCOME teleports you to wherever it happens to be.

With the wine poured, the wine snob now demands some cheese, followed by some crackers (here’s an alternate way to work out what that strange graphic is, but this moment would likely come long after finding the object).

And he’s still complaining! Given we’re in “adventure mode” the thing that seems most natural to do might not occur to a player. We can SAY NO.

The “metallic taste” is a hint. Fortunately (?) things are quite breakable in this game and just dropping the empty wine bottle anywhere will cause it to shatter, revealing a second key (the first got used for the violin case).

The map then turns north, leading by some nails…

…and then has two branches, one to the west and one to the east (and the NE corner).

The west branch leads to trouble quite quickly as there is a sign that warns about walking…

…and if you try to proceed on anyway the passage gets sealed off.

This feels like a moment from a CRPG. Now we just need some spinners and portions of the map with permanent darkness.

Fortunately, the remedy is down the other branch. First there’s what more or less look like a garage door…

…this is followed by a “bottle” (“CHATEAU PETROS 1929”) right next to a 1928 MODEL ‘A’ ROADSTER.

The car is empty of gas, but fortunately, the bottle is not the kind you want to drink.

Driving over to the northwest part of the map (you can GO CAR and any movement drives the car by default), the only thing there is a “wood shop”. The door is locked, although BREAK DOOR indicates “you can’t do that yet” indicating we might finally get to use the power of violence.

I’m stumped from here although I haven’t tried much. The only other thing I’ve found is a “bumper jack” left behind at the car’s start point.

I suspect I am quite close to the end; maybe get into the wood shop, and then something from that will help make it to the exit?

The Boston IF meetup for June will be Monday, June 2, 6:30 pm Eastern time.

We will be trying Google Meet instead of Zoom for this meeting! Mike Stage will make a post with the link info on the afternoon of the meeting day (June 2).

(Yes, we skipped May. That was a result of slipping from late-April to early-June.)

Topic preview: Matt Griffin and Mike Stage will talk a little about an IF meetup thing at NarraScope. (Coming up June 20-22!)

(Continued from my previous posts.)

Just to recap from last time, I had a WELCOME MAT, TUNING FORK, VIOLIN, CASE, CORKSCREW, and CRACKERS. There was a mousetrap with cheese that would snap upon taking the cheese (I’ll be solving that one, but I’ll save discussing it for later). The beast was where I first focused my efforts.

With the case/box thing resolved, after some testing I realized somehow my attempts at playing the violin were while the game assumed it was in the case (I think if you’re holding both of them at once?) When the violin is out you can successfully PLAY VIOLIN and it does a tune, albeit not necessarily a great one:

Whoops! Fortunately I had the TUNING FORK, and after some fiddling I found TUNE VIOLIN worked while holding the fork. Then playing the violin is more succesful.

You can now refer to the beast as a CAT.

Just past the cat are some eyeglasses. With the eyeglasses worn you don’t have the “dim light” message anymore when pulling up the map with the M key, although the exact system is still a little cryptic:

What appears to be the case is that there’s no real “automap” as far as keeping track of where you’ve been. Rather, the game automatically shows a region near where you are standing, plus some of the area south, with the result you might see a good chunk of map or very little.

This suggests a secret room — see the isolated 1 by 1 spot — but my attempts at HIT WALL and SMASH WALL were for naught. At least WALL is a recognized word. CLIMB WALL gets the response SO IT’S COME TO THAT, HAS IT?

The eyeglasses have an unfortunate side effect. Previously, if you run into a wall, the game just says “OUCH!” but no adverse effects happen. With the eyeglasses on, your eyes start to swim and go blind.

Moving on from there, the hall turns and briefly stops by a niche with a wine bottle…

‘STRAWTOWN CELLARS 1982’
‘WE SHALL SELL NO WINE BEFORE MONDAY’

…with the route eventually stopped by a “wine snob”.

Trying to kill the man is fatal.

You can UNCORK BOTTLE (with the corkscrew) and try to pour it but the result is wine on the floor.

Given the emphasis on politeness, I thought maybe I needed to open with some sort of conversational word via SAY before I could offer CRACKERS or CHEESE or WINE (I don’t have the cheese yet, but I will in a moment). No luck. I even tried YELLing the words given the mention of the man being somewhat deaf, but I got no helpful response there either.

WHAT SHALL I DO? YELL PLEASE

OK – PLEASE
THANK YOU

(That’s the parser responding, not the man, since this happens elsewhere too.)

I did find in the process of this that SAY WELCOME teleports you back to the location of the welcome mat. I don’t know if this is for a puzzle or just meant to be a way to make travel faster. The welcome mat can be moved so I’d expect somewhere you could toss the mat under a door to teleport in, but I haven’t seen any circumstance like that yet.

While being frustrated at the wine snob, I figured out the cheese in the trap, via the process of dropping every item in my inventory.

With this done I could get the cheese safely. After process of elimination I found that either the welcome mat alone or the violin case alone both work; the violin case seems the clear better choice given the teleportation property of the mat.

I will take any suggestions at all. I’m also happy to hear from people who have beaten or otherwise hacked the game (use ROT13 if this is the case, though).

Here's a bunch of reviews that have accumulated! Gotta push them out before the stack falls over.

There's no common theme here except I played them all since GDC.

• South of Midnight
• Old Skies
• The Horror at Highrook
• Lab Rat

South of Midnight

• by Compulsion Games -- game site

A girl heads across Louisiana flood country in search of her mother, and falls into the swamps of a Southern-Gothic fairy-tale.

This is action-adventure of a very old stripe. Think Darksiders or any of those early-2000s Price-of-Persia knockoffs. (Lithe wall-runners, not thumping Kratos types.) You run around a very pretty landscape. Sometimes you climb a (ruined) building. If the trail forks, or if you see a place to climb on the side, it will take you to a thoroughly-clued collectible before you rejoin the main track. And then you fight monsters in a bounded arena. All fights are exactly the same except for monster count. Repeat, with plot breaks and the occasional boss fight and runny-jumpy chase scene. Honestly it could be a PS3 game.

It's all well-done. I love me a building climb. There's nothing bad about this formula; it's just that it was already a formula when West Wing was cancelled.

The plot is decent. It oozes atmosphere -- mud and flood, homes and factories cluttered with people's lives. Eerie caverns. Steamships decaying in the swamp. These are the poorest parts of the South, which means the story is about white people doing terrible things to black people, and rich people doing terrible things to poor people, and for the most part I've repeated myself. The game leans into that, as it should.

But it doesn't have bite. Your job (Hazel's job) is supposed to be healing the wounds of people's souls, but the people barely figure into the plot. You meet them, you go find their stories... and you never go back to engage. You're just a witness. The story only comes alive for your immediate family: your mother, her ex-boyfriend. Your rich white grandmother, except there's not much to her either, in the end.

Compare NORCO, which throws you straight into the merciless poverty of Big Muddy corporate greed and never stops screaming. NORCO was personal. South of Midnight is tourism.

I am coming off harsher than I mean to. This was a delightful game to play through. Exploring was always fun. The environments are vivid, alternating fetid-rank and glimmering-lovely, often both. The voice characterizations are first-rate. I set the fights to easy mode so I can hardly complain that they were time-wasters. The bond between Hazel and her mother, off-stage as it mostly was, still caught me by the final scene.

The art style is an interesting take on stop-motion claymation, although the only actual stop-motion is the delightful opening cinematic. The rest of the game makes do with clay-ish surface shaders and hopping bunnies animated on twos. (Harold Halibut did it better on what must have been a twentieth of the budget.) As for the music... there were some good bits, but a lot of it felt like movie-soundtrack takes on Louisiana traditions, rather than the originals. Should have stuck to the pure-quill gospel and old-timey stuff.

But for the setting and visual style, I will forgive all that. I will never, ever get tired of New Orleans dreamscapes with hot jazz swirling over the vèvè of old Voodoo gods.

It was just... not an ambitious effort, in the end. Much ado about what you'd expect.

Old Skies

• by Wadjet Eye -- game site

You're a time cop! Ha ha, no, there are no time cops. You're a time tourist guide, working for the tacky-ass ChronoZen Corporation, leading rich assholes around history on a leash. For an extra fee they can change history -- minor details only, please.

What do you get out of this deal? No friends, no family, and no life. They count as "minor details" and are constantly being rewritten by time-jump ripples. (If anybody you cared about was a fixed point in time, you wouldn't have been hired in the first place.) The only people who remember the changes are other ChronoZen employees, so that's who you wind up spending all your time with. But hey, the pay's good. If you could spend it on anything that didn't ripple out overnight. Whoops.

Wadjet Eye's last point-and-click was Unavowed. I filed that one under "mixed feelings"; its story felt like it was there to justify the puzzle structure. I'm happy to say that Old Skies is a whole new ball game. It's a tight, vivid character story. Fia Quinn and her ChronoZen compatriots come to life as soon as they open their mouths. The supporting players are thinner, but even the rich assholes have depth and motivation. And some of the tourists will turn out to be more interesting than they look.

And let's not forget New York City, the character behind all the characters. This is New York across (real) history, rather than Unavowed's fantasy-in-the-shadows New York. History hits harder. Yes, 9/11 will happen. Yes, the game makes it work. You may also enjoy the wealth of in-jokes and sneaky references. (I know I missed a lot, but I'm always happy to run into my dude Ashbless.)

The puzzles still tend to the clunky side, but now I can say the puzzles are there to justify the story structure. Much the better way around. And your earbud-buddy Nozzo offers generous contextual hints.

As in Unavowed, each chapter is structured as a mini-mystery. Not a formal mystery (there are no time detectives either) but you generally have to figure out who did what, when and where, so that you can make the desired change to history. Or undo it, or prevent it. The clunky part is that the mystery structure is mostly running around asking every NPC every question you can think of, repeatedly, until the next plot bit unlocks. Then somebody shoots you. Death for a ChronoZen employee comes with infinite UNDO, so you get to try every possible action until one of them saves your ass.

I'm being a bit unfair. That's the basic structure, the tutorial. The flow of events (and history) gets knotty after the first chapter, and really starts to hit its stride around chapter four. And there's some old-fashioned adventure puzzles too. But you never quite get away from the "try try again" gameplay. You wind up clicking through a lot of dialogue, whether time-looping or just re-interrogating.

Recommended for the old-school adventure aficionado. If you're coming in from other parts of the narrative game world, you may feel some friction; but the writing and voice acting are worth the effort.

The Horror at Highrook

• by Nullpointer -- game site

Four explorers take on a haunted mansion. Gothic-ness will ensue.

This is interesting tack on the narrative RPG. It's closer to worker-placement board game mechanics than tabletop dice-rolling. Everything is a card: characters, obstacles, tasks, resources. You can perform a task or overcome an obstacle by plopping down a character with the appropriate skills and hitting the "go" button. The character crunches away until the task is complete. If your skills aren't high enough, add a resource with the right bonus.

Since you have four characters and lots of tasks, you can parallelize your work. And since you're always up against a rising tide of difficulties, you have to balance resource-mining with all the rest of your tasks. And of course you need to watch your hunger/madness/etc meters, and apply the appropriate palliatives when needed. Watch out for hauntings!

It adds up to a engaging mess of time-and-resource management. The kind of game where you have to stir five pots at the same time, and you can. The pause key helps a lot.

All this on top of a nice occult investigation storyline -- alt-Victorian Gothic with a dash of steampunk. Wandering spirits, creepy artifacts, occult rituals. Black cats and ravens and weird worms scooped from the well. The story leads with Poe and barrels towards Lovecraft. (The title is an unsubtle hint.)

I enjoyed this. But I felt the role-playing aspect didn't live up to the setting or the mechanics.

The mansion -- and the mechanics -- are initially a mystery; exploring them is prime fun. But once you've got a grasp on how everything works, you realize you're just in the business of stocking up on resources and applying them where needed. The tasks show up and you do them; there's no real decisions to be made. You're not solving puzzles. You're mostly not making character choices.

Critically, there are no tradeoffs. This is not the kind of game where the cure is worse than the disease. In a proper Gothic, every step forward costs you something you wish you hadn't lost. In Highrook, it just costs time. Or blood or sanity or what have you, but you can replace those with a bit of task crunching, good as new.

(The cure for lost sanity is booze, and it just works. Come on, folks. Oh, one character starts with an "alcoholism" trait, so I had to be careful about that, but it never became a problem in practice.)

Admittedly I was playing on easy mode. Negative traits piled up slowly and were easily fixed. Maybe the gameplay feels totally different in the higher settings? But I didn't see any sign of mechanics that would support that.

I think the underlying problem is that the game is balanced for a one-run-and-done experience. It's not a roguelite where you have to fail and fail to learn the system. And fair enough! This is a narrative game; the authors want to tell you the story. If you played the beginning ten times, all the wonderful bits of narrative description would be wasted. You'd stop reading them. That would be a different game entirely, and this is the game the authors wanted to make.

But I came away feeling like I'd had a quick snack in between Blue Prince runs.

Lab Rat

• by Chump Squad -- game site

Okay, this isn't primarily a narrative game. It's a block-pushing puzzle game with an original color-zapping mechanic -- a pretty simple rule which is extremely productive. The game pulls many chapters of puzzle ideas from its sleeve without ever feeling stale. Full marks for puzzle.

But it's also a narrative game, and the narrative is... a voiceless protagonist being run through through test chambers by a snarky, female-presenting AI who goes mad with power. You have to blow up her memory cores.

We will not stop you if you've heard that one before. You have; the game has; everybody gets to take that for granted. Lab Rat goes to the mattresses inventing variations and substitutions on the underlying Portal trope. It does fantasy, it does noir, it does silly riffs on a dozen game genres -- including doubling down on Portal, just to prove that it can.

It just never stops feeling like it's working for its food pellets.

Oh well. The puzzles are worth it.

(Continued from my previous post.)

I promised last time to create my verb list. Since it’s been a while since I’ve explained: over the years I have collected verbs that are quite common in adventure games in this era, all the way to verbs that are rare, and I made a list. I then go through each verb on the list testing to see if that verb is accepted or not.

Some games have parsers which give almost no feedback so this trick doesn’t work (like, for example, “HUH?” for anything that isn’t interpreted) but as long as you give a verb and a noun this game not only gives feedback if a verb is misunderstood it displays the word flashing.

Just like Sierra On-Line games and others at this time, hitting ENTER will turn off the graphics temporarily and just show text.

By doing this, I’m able to get an idea of what kind of commands I should be focused on. Understood words are in green:

Just to give the reference in text form:

DIG, CLIMB, READ, BREAK, OPEN, DRINK, EAT, KILL, THROW, HIT, UNLOCK, SHAKE, POUR, SMASH, JUMP, TURN, MOVE, YELL, MAKE, SAY, CLEAN, WEAR, GIVE, EXAMINE, KICK, SMELL, PLAY, DRAW, OFFER, LIFT, FIX, BUILD, LOWER, SNIFF, EMPTY, START, RAISE, ATTACH

DRAW incidentally goes with DRAW MAP but the game says you need to make your own (weirdly enough, this isn’t quite true — I’ll explain in a moment). YELL and SAY both have “open” nouns meaning you can yell or say any text and it will be repeated back, indicating some possible future code word puzzle. SMELL working is notable (and not the sort of thing I’d automatically check), BUILD and MAKE are in (meaning we likely have at least one instance of combining together things into a new thing where we have to guess the noun) and START is probably the rarest verb on there. It’s also been a while since I’ve seen CLEAN.

None of these really suggested to me what the strange item was last time, but I first need to clarify that I was confused, as CASE and BOX are treated in the game as synonyms.

So when I did OPEN BOX, the game actually dropped the violin, and that picture to the left is a smashed violin. You can pick the violin up and see it described in textual form. That means that the real mystery is the “box object” which isn’t a box.

The game does not have GET ALL or LOOK FLOOR or any of the other types of commands you might think would reveal nearby objects. I did go ahead and test all the other one-letter possibilities past L (turn left), R (turn right), F (move forward), and A (turn around) and on top of the usual I (inventory) I came across two more. Z full on quits the game, which at the very least allows LISTing the BASIC code if I ever need to go there.

M shows the map as visited so far with a message about how “the dim light really hurts my eyes”. The map only shows temporarily before disappearing, although you can see what is most likely the exit in the process:

If the same object density keeps up, filling this in could represent the entire territory of the game. Or maybe there’s a second level and this game’s going to stick around a while.

Bizarrely, using the feature again repeats drawing a map but makes it smaller.

The map keeps getting tinier and tinier, down to just being a squiggle in the corner. I guess this is meant to simulate the dim light, but also in a game sense, discourage too much use of the automap. I’m needing to make a map in order to keep a track of objects anyway, but still, it’s wildly unusual to put the effort into making a feature but also yank it away. Just as a reminder:

With that sideline done, and no helpful commands found, it was time to crack on getting that word figured out. I wanted to try some more generalized crowdsourcing, so I made posts on both Mastodon and Bluesky.

Other tries were JOURNAL, PARCEL, BRICK, SUITCASE, and INTERNET (??). One of the guessers (@ericgerhardt.com) took it upon themselves to find and download the game to try things out themselves, and they discovered that HELP is contextual.

A METALLIC VOICE ECHOES DOWN THE HALL: IT SAYS ‘REG. PENNA. DEPT. AGR.’ THINK IT THROUGH

I admit I had found HELP was acknowledged, but I wasn’t thinking of using it here as I wasn’t considering this to be a puzzle but rather a user-interface frustration. However, based on the fact that even HELP is cryptic here, the author was clearly thinking “figure out what the object is so you can pick it up” was a genuine puzzle!

The Department of Agriculture reference means this is a food. These are CRACKERS.

Via eBay. The diagonal marking is the logo.

As Eric points out there’s cheese (from the trap) and apparently there’s wine later, but still–

As Carl Muckenhoupt pointed out in discussion later:

It’s a good example of how (as I’ve put it before) early adventure game authors didn’t fully distinguish between difficult to solve and difficult to play

That is, while realizing what you’re looking at in order to pick it up would be considered by most modern standards a bug — but what logical reason would you not be able to grab the thing otherwise — with this game the author genuinely blithely ignores the meta-narrative confusion of the whole thing and makes it a puzzle. The most comparable puzzle I can think of is The Sands of Egypt which made guess-the-verb into a puzzle and also gave a hint whilst trying to get off a camel that was slightly indirect.

The hint was “The opposite of mount is?” You’re supposed to type DISMOUNT.

More actual progress next time! I hope! The Beast doesn’t like crackers, though:

I’d guess it’s really a “giant rat” given the context and I need the cheese, but I haven’t figured out the trap yet, and none of the verbs — and I tried all of them — were helpful.

IT IS SATURDAY MIDNIGHT, AND A LATE SUMMER STORM IS BREWING OUTSIDE.

YOU HAVE BEEN STUDYING LATE, TRYING IN VAIN TO AVERT A THESIS CRISIS — IN LAST MONTH’S ISSUE OF THE RAT RUNNER’S JOURNAL (A PUBLICATION DEVOTED TO YOUR FELLOW INVESTIGATORS OF LEARNING PROCESSES), AN ACADEMIC RIVAL OF YOURS HAS JUST PUBLISHED THE RESULTS YOU’VE SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF GRADUATE STUDY STRIVING TO COMPLETE.

I’m not sure why this game slipped by me before in my 1981 sequence. It is possible I saw the title screen and skipped on by immediately.

From this screen and the generic titling I might have discarded it as one of the many “generate a maze, now get out in first person” games that’s popped up since the 1970s, like Escape, which inspired Richard Garriot to make his first-person dungeon view in Akalabeth leading to the Ultima games.

1982’s Wayout (by Sirius, of Kabul Spy, etc.) has similar map generation but allows full 360 degree movement.

From Mobygames. I think you’re supposed to be the clown.

However, The Maze is another game along the lines of Deathmaze 5000 or Asylum, with objects and puzzles scattered throughout and plot designed in a way that places it firmly in the rare “adventure blobber” camp.

YOU BEGIN TO DRIFT OFF INTO A FITFUL DOZE, DREAMING OF RATS CAUGHT IN MAZES, WHEN SUDDENLY THE TELEPHONE STARTLES YOU FULLY AWAKE.

I know nothing about Fermented Software, the only credits given on the title screen. This particular disk landed on the Internet in 2006 when someone on Usenet named “Astrp3” listed The Maze amongst disks that were being uploaded to the Asimov (a still-extant Apple II archive). There’s otherwise no information, and “Fermented Software” doesn’t ring up any hits in the usual places.

The game requires 64K (not the default) so the author(s) were using a relatively beefy computer, and Deathmaze 5000 did have an Apple II version so it is possible it was an influence. The reference to a thesis crisis suggests an academic (it’d be an odd plot for someone outside of that particular “rat race” to make up). Perhaps more will be revealed as we get in deeper.

WITH YOUR HEART POUNDING, YOU PICK UP THE RECEIVER ANO HEAR THE VOICE OF DR. LA BRYNTHE, THE NOTED PSYCHOLOGIST AND YOUR THESIS ADVISOR, ON THE OTHER END: ‘JASON, I’M AT MY LABORATORY, AND I THINK I’VE FOUND A WAY YOU CAN USE THE RESULTS FROM YOUR MAZE STUDIES TO COMPLETE YOUR THESIS AND RECEIVE YOUR DEGREE. NOW LISTEN CAREFULLY AND I’LL GIVE YOU THE…
WHO’S THERE??…
   WHAT’S GOING ON… HELP! HELP!

SUDDENLY, THE LINE GOES DEAD…

You grab a raincoat and head to the laboratory, musing about the Professor’s “classified experiments” and also “experiments on animals” that were rumored to be done on humans. Ominous!

The opening mat seen above can be taken; this reveals a key, which can also be taken, giving the first two items of the game.

Movement is not by arrow keys; you can type “R” and “L” to turn right and left respectively, or “F” to go forward. Just “A” flips 180 degrees but I don’t think there’s any way to walk backwards.

Only any “close” walls are shaded, any farther away get the outlined black and white treatment.

It is much more dense than Asylum, at least so far, and I suspect the map is smaller overall. Here’s what I have so far.

Starting with the “trap” in the lower left corner, that’s a giant mousetrap with some cheese. Any attempt to take the cheese are step forward kills you, although you restart at the beginning with the feeling like you’ve been “drugged”.

I tried throwing the mat to trigger the trap but no luck; picking up the mat afterwards causes the same effect.

Rotating around the spaces on the map, there’s a violin case that’s locked. The key fortunately works (although it gets stuck), and inside there is a violin. The game says you can’t play it yet if you try (I suspect you need a bow).

Further along the same path you can scoop up a TUNING FORK…

…a CORKSCREW…

…and a ????.

The question marks are here because while OPEN BOX works to get a thing out of it…

…I have no idea what the thing is or how to pick it up. I have tried various permutations of LOOK and have no textual description of what’s nearby. Any guesses?

It may help to know whatever it is will possibly resolve the one other obstacle (other than the trap) I need to deal with, a “BEAST”.

I haven’t made a verb list yet, but the cryptic object flummoxed me enough — and since it is the sort of thing I can crowdsource to you, my dear readers, I decided it was time to stop for a post. I will do verb testing next time (and knowing the verbs might help figure out what some of the pictures are, if there really is no “describe all the stuff near you in text” command).

It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to do one of these; my 1981 in review was posted December 20, 2021.

The chart with plot types like Rescue, Escape, etc. just isn’t that helpful up to 1982 — too many arbitrary assignments — but I did do a chart just of Treasure Hunts, that is, games modeled essentially off the original Crowther/Woods paradigm of gathering X things together.

There’s still some fuzzy aspects — like lost games, or games that have been discovered since I passed a particular year that I haven’t returned to yet — so assume a margin of error. (On top of that, some games are hard to categorize — is Dateline Titanic, where you are rescuing passengers by bodily tossing them in boats, a “treasure hunt”?) In general, you can say while the percentage dropped dramatically at first it went flat starting in 1980 hovering around 40%.

Regarding why, some of this may be the creative version of the Eternal September effect. It used to be, when a new school year started and there was a large influx of people on the Internet, it took a while for standards to take hold so there was chaos in September. Then, with the rise of AOL and other services in the early 90s, anyone could go on the Internet at any time, hence Eternal September. The creative version of the effect is that there are still people in 1982 whose only exposure to an adventure was Crowther/Woods so they do the natural thing and copy it (like Sphinx Adventure); also note that this chart is mixing all countries together, so while US authors like Adams and Kirsch were cranking out enough games to shake off the Treasure Hunt bug, plenty of others were getting started for the first time.

Furthermore, the Treasure Hunt structure is a convenient way to branch the gameplay in a way that requires less work on the part of the author. When there’s an “escape” game, it’s possible to go super-linear, but if the same author wants the kind of branching they’d get from a Treasure Hunt they need to carefully mete out when items and locations are available. It’s easier to simply require 9 things than it is to create interdependencies that form a satisfying structure.

Before getting into 1982, here’s my “curious firsts” list from 1981:

– First use of relative direction: Mystery Mansion
– First use of landmark navigation with no compass: Empire of the Over-Mind
– First defined player character: Aldebaran III
– First use of choice-based interaction in a parser game: Stuga
– First dynamic compass interface: Spelunker
– First dynamic puzzle generation: Mines
– First free-text conversation in an adventure context: Local Call for Death
– First adventure game comedy: Mystery Fun House
– First adventure to use graphics in every room: Atlantean Odyssey by Teri Li
– First Tolkien adventure conversion: Ringen by Hansen, Pål-Kristian Engstad, and Per Arne Engstad
– First Lovecraft game of any type: Kadath by Gary Musgrave
– First graphic adventure with some action solely in the graphics: Mystery House by Roberta Williams
– First adventure written specifically for children: Nellan is Thirsty by Furman H. Smith
– First “stateless” CYOA game written for computer: Mount St. Helens by Victor Albino
– First 3D graphic adventure: Deathmaze 5000 by Frank Corr, Jr.
– First adventure game that involves traveling back through time:
Odyssey #3, Journey Through Time by Joel Mick and James Taranto OR Galactic Hitchhiker by A. Knight
– First adventure game with outside third-person character movement: Castles of Darkness by Michael Cashen
– First adventure game with conversation menus and an action mini-game: Cyborg by Michael Berlyn

Since I last made this list, I looped back to a 1980 game which is worthy of inclusion:

– First adventure game on a console: Bally’s Alley by John Collins

I’ve got deeper into non-English games since last I made the list, so here’s the first occurrence I have so far of languages other than English, not counting translations from English games:

– Stuga (Swedish, 1978)
– Ringen (Norwegian, 1979)
– Dracula Avontuur (Dutch, 1980)
– Mission secrète à Colditz (French, 1980)
– Das Geheimnisvolle Haus (German, 1981)
– Mystery House (Japanese, 1982)
– Avventura nel Castello (Italian, 1982)

I’m otherwise not adding games from 1982; we start to get into territory with many caveats. Certainly people were producing original ideas, but they’re hard to encapsulate in “first” bullet points; things like the bizarre combination shmup / adventure game Probe One: The Transmitter or the French pocket calculator game Des Cavernes dans le poquette.

Updating my recommendations, a new item proudly enters the first list:

1. Games everyone should play

Crowther and Woods Adventure, 350 points (1977)
Zork I by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Dave Lebling and Bruce Daniels (1980)
Deadline by Marc Blank

With the above list I truly am referring to everyone, but if you’re reading this blog you’re more likely to be interested in list 2:

2. For adventure enthusiasts

Crowther and Woods Adventure, 350 points (1977)
Voodoo Castle by Alexis Adams (1979)
Local Call For Death by Robert Lafore (1979)
Kadath by Gary Musgrave (1979)
Empire of the Over-Mind by Gary Bedrosian (1979)
Zork I by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Dave Lebling and Bruce Daniels (1980)
Wizard and the Princess by Ken and Roberta Williams (1980)
Gargoyle Castle by Kit Domenico (1980)
Will ‘O the Wisp by Mark Capella (1980)
Zork II by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling
Cyborg by Michael Berlyn
Palace in Thunderland by Dale Johnson and Ken Rose
Frankenstein Adventure by John R. Olsen Jr.
The Black Sanctum by Ron Krebs, Stephen O’Dea, and Bob Withers

I’m going to do one swap, taking out Deathmaze 5000 (fun for what it is, but deeply flawed) and fit in

Asylum II by William Denman

which has the cleanest design of the series while still being absolute suffering in a few places. The plastic surgeon alone makes it worth a play.

El Diablero by Ken Kalish

An absolute surprise to me, with some extremely clever magic using the narratives of Carlos Castenada as a mythical universe and having not just one but two puzzles where solving a puzzle also means “solving” the plot.

Murdac by Jonathan R. Partington

You have to expect the norms of Cambridge games (expect some of your lives to be spent just gathering information) and there’s also one old-school maze, but this otherwise is one of the most solid games I’ve played of the old school.

Starcross by Dave Lebling

The hardest of sci-fi; a game that rewards experimentation in ways that very few games from this era do.

Temple of Bast by Malcolm McMahon

(Make sure your TRS-80 is in Model 1 mode for this one!) Includes one of the most clever puzzles of 1982.

Adventure 200 by C.J. Coombs

I’d normally hesitate to recommend a game with as many mazes as this one does, but the payoff is incredible. What would happen if you had a game framed like a regular treasure hunt, but was actually a heist movie?

Zork III by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling

Might as well finish the trilogy! This isn’t quite as strong as the other two Infocom games from the year — it’s clear it is built from scattered parts — but it’s still a worthy ending.

The Queen of Phobos by William R. Crawford and Paul Berker

A group of four thieves trying to steal a mask, and you need to get to it first. Includes some Apple II vector graphics that actually make the style work.

3. Things I personally enjoyed quite a bit that didn’t make the above list

Also known as my “subjective fun” list, as I know I sometimes enjoy an experience but would have reservations recommending it generally. Previously I had

Trek Adventure by Bob Retelle (1980)
Crystal Cave by Anonymous and Kevin O’Gorman (1980)
Dracula Avontuur by Ronald van Woensel (1980)
House of Thirty Gables by Bill Miller (1980)
Odyssey #3, Journey Through Time by Joel Mick and James Taranto (1980)
Hezarin by Steve Tinney, Alex Shipp and Jon Thackray (1981)
Madness and the Minotaur by Tom Rosenbaum (1981)

To which I add

Ferret by the Ferret Authors

40 years to write, and 6 months to beat. I don’t regret my time spent at all.

Time Zone by Roberta Williams

Another monster, and this one I solved without hints. Despite the flaws I point out during my many posts, I enjoyed myself unironically and this was my favorite of the early Sierra games.

Mystery House by Tsukasa Moritani and Naoto Oyachi

The first adventure game in Japanese. I recommend specifically the FM-7 version which uses a traditional parser (rather than splitting verb and noun into separate lines). As of this writing the FM-7 version has not been translated.

Cornucopia by Brian Cotton

The idea this game could have been lost forever horrifies me. The framing world is genuinely clever and despite some issues with bugs this game had enough underlying systems going on for me to enjoy myself.

The Troll Hole Adventure by Long Playing Software (1980)

I do not know why I found this game for the rare Interact computer so compelling. Sometimes there’s just a wild card for no reason.

4. Some bonus games for historians

Also known as games I had trouble fully enjoying, but I recognize still did fascinating things.

The Count by Scott Adams (1979)
The Prisoner by David Mullich (1980)
Galactic Hitchhiker by A. Knight (1980)
The Institute by Jyym Pearson, Robyn Pearson, Norm Sailer, and Rick Incrocci (1981)

To which I am obliged to add

The Hobbit by Philip Mitchell, Veronika Megler, Alfred Milgrom and Stuart Ritchie

which influenced an entire generation of gamers, some who didn’t bother to try for the ending but just wanted to experiment. It has so many design flaws I can’t recommend the game on its face but anyone who cares about text adventure history should try this.

The Mask of the Sun by Alan Clark, Larry Franks, Christopher Anson, and Margaret Anson

The graphical quality and technology here seem from another universe than my other 1982 games. It has lots of design jank, but it also clearly signaled what the Apple II was really capable of.

My usual disclaimer: I always feel horrible about making these sort of lists because of all the games left out. There are so many clever and worthy moments but out. I can pick a game at literal random and it has something interesting going on (The Breckenridge Caper of 1798, a game trying to teach history about being a spy in the Napoleonic era; The Sands of Egypt with parallax animation coming from the developer’s arcade background; Toxic Dumpsite, a game from a Myst-like perspective for the TRS-80).

The whole point of All the Adventures is to not write reviews as much as view the entire tapestry of adventure games. I want to see the paths of where people went and try to learn why people made the choices they did. (Was there a technical limitation? Was everyone designing a certain way? Was there a specific non-obvious influence?) I want history at an explanatory level in a way that glows with the vital energy that adventure games have.

In order to do that, of course, the best things is to have — more games! Not splitting my multiple-part posts (like Misadventures 1 through 3) I’ve gone through this 434 times now.

1983, at my current list, has exactly five hundred games.

Mind you, there are still some that will likely drop off (I’m not replaying a translation of an existing game, for instance) and some that will sort into a different year (even back to 1982 or earlier) but that’s still more games than for the entire 14 years of the project. I don’t anticipate taking that long — for one thing, there were some gaps in those 14 years, and for another, I’m better at doing this, and for yet another, I’m going to do more combining together of multiple games into a single entry. (Mind you, doing that doesn’t save an enormous amount of time, but it saves some.)

Looking ahead we have
– Five Infocom games, including Planetfall and Enchanter
– Twin Kingdom Valley
– Nearly 150 ZX Spectrum games
– Four games called Haunted House
– The first big text adventure competition
– The year the Japanese adventure market starts revving, with at least 20 new games
– The first original adventure game in Spanish
and many more things, some which I don’t even know about yet!

Coming up: I’m reversing a bit to 1981, as I have a wildly obscure Apple II graphical game I am dying to share. I have other off-beat things scheduled and I’m also planning on taking a break in there somewhere. Somewhere?

IFTF’s 2024 Transparency report is online, summarizing the organization’s activity over the previous calendar year, including its financial income and outflow.

In September 2023, we opened our grant program for the very first time. The program exists to disburse small amounts of money in support of projects that serve the interactive fiction community. Since then, half a dozen Grant Advisors have reviewed each submission, providing their recommendations to the grants committee, who ultimately selected four projects to fund. We are happy today to announce our first batch of funded projects through this grants program!

Interestingly, we saw great diversity in the projects submitted, which altogether touch on the very different areas of interactive fiction. Thank you to everyone who submitted their ideas! Below, you can learn about the awarded projects and the people behind them.

iOS Test Device for Parchment – Dannii Willis

Dannii Willis is the main developer of Parchment, a web interpreter that lets users read and play through interactive fiction on the web. Dannii will receive $500 in funds to purchase an iOS device, allowing him to more accurately test how Parchment functions on the iOS version of Safari, as well as test Parchment’s accessibility in UserVoice. An iOS-native device will help Dannii run these tests and iterate faster than with other tools, in service of supporting iOS users in the community and those who rely on iOS accessibility features.

Teaching Indonesian Authors to Write IF – Felicity Banks

Novelist Felicity Banks will receive $1,000 to fund an IF workshop for 10-20 English-speaking writers in Indonesia at a writing festival next year, focusing on Twine and ChoiceScript. Felicity knows Indonesia well and is experienced in such workshops, especially for raw beginners; the funds will cover necessary travel requirements. Her project is inspired by the benefits that diversity brings to the IF community, and she intends to serve Indonesia’s vibrant writing community by helping them participate by introducing them to the medium and planting a seed towards a budding Indonesian IF community.

Writing with Inform Audiobook – Ryan Veeder

Based on his experience helping blind users get started with Inform 7, Ryan Veeder saw an opportunity to translate “Writing with Inform” documentation into an audiobook format, thereby making it more accessible to the wider IF community. While assistive technology like screen-reading software can help users who rely on it, it often fails to accurately represent the specific punctuation use and other formal considerations that are critical to Inform 7 code. Therefore, Ryan will receive $400 to start producing a few chapters of Inform 7 documentation in a bespoke audiobook format, to demonstrate the utility and feasibility of such a resource.

Improvements to Pre-Existing IF Research – Brian Rushton

Brian Rushton is a prolific chronicler of the history of IFComp and the XYZZY awards, and is the most active reviewer at the Interactive Fiction Database. Based on the positive reception his writing has earned in the community, Brian wants to fill in the years missing from his history and touch up existing research. He will receive $500 to devote his time toward continuing to write the history of IFComp and the XYZZY awards from about 2016-2022, as well as revising and editing other essays to be more professional, along with standardized and uniform citations. The resulting work will be disseminated for the community’s benefit.

It’s inspiring to see the variety of projects proposed in this cycle, each of which serve the IF community in different ways. We thank all applicants, and we’re excited to see how the awarded projects develop! And we would also like to thank this year’s Grant Advisors, who volunteered their time to review the projects and formulate a recommendation for IFTF: thank you very much to Grim Baccaris, Kate Compton, Emilia Lazer-Walker, Juhana Leinonen, Colin Post, and Kaitlin Tremblay!

Congratulations again to our first batch of funded projects, and keep an eye out for our next grant cycle!

Ryan Veeder is a 2023 IFTF grant recipient who recently completed his project and reached out to share it with us, and we are absolutely blown away by the effort and love put into this project, which can be found by clicking here.

Screen reader technology, while helpful, can fail to accurately render the specific punctuation use and other formal considerations that are critical to learning code. Ryan’s experience helping vision-impaired users get started with Inform 7 inspired him to create spoken-word documentation for this popular language for creating parser interactive fiction.

We spoke with Ryan about the triumphs and challenges of his project:

“Putting the audiobook together was more fun than I expected. Anyone who’s familiar with Writing with Inform remembers the friendliness and cleverness in its narrative voice, but only when I started recording did I realize that voice was really a character that I’d get to perform and interpret.”

In addition to honing his voice performance, Ryan also discovered that, “as I recorded these sections, it dawned on me very, very slowly that I hadn’t included the examples in my outline—and the examples contain a lot of the most useful (and most entertaining) material! So, just when I thought I was almost done, I realized there were 42 more tracks I needed to record.”.

“I’m very grateful to IFTF for the opportunity to pursue this project. Discovering Inform through the documentation was a huge thrill for me thirteen years ago, and it’s really exciting to think I can help provide that same thrill to a broader audience.”

-Ryan Veeder

We love cheering the successes and sharing in the lessons of our grant recipients, and we’ll continue sharing them here as they come. If you’re interested in participating in our grant program, keep an eye on this blog for updates on this year’s grant application period.

Brian Rushton is a 2023 IFTF Grant recipient who has recently completed his project, and we are delighted to share his success with you!

The annual Interactive Fiction Competition and XYZZY Awards have a history stretching back decades, and these events have been integral to developing and celebrating the art of interactive storytelling. Brian Rushton, a prolific IF reviewer and chronicler of community history, received a IFTF microgrant to revise and extend his year-by-year writeups of these key community events, helping to preserve this history for decades to come. You can access Brian’s project directly by clicking here.

We had an opportunity to speak with Brian on completion of his book, where we discussed the lessons and discoveries made in the course of his process.

“It gave me more of a sense for more modern games. I had spent so much time in the past playing old IFComp games that I had the top 3 games memorized for many years. But I had trouble even remembering winners from recent years. So this really helped me see new games from a new viewpoint. My overall sense is that skill and polish are at a higher level now than ever before.”

Brian also shared in the challenges he faced while working on the project:

“Citations were hard! I wanted to add them for two reasons: one, out of hopes that people would discover new games or old forum conversations that could help them. The other was to ensure that I was quoting people correctly. But it was so hard to track them all down; I ended up having to write Python programs and learn more about regex and api to automate most of the citations. There ended up being over 900!”

The funds from the grant made it possible for Brian to leave a part-time job to focus on the project, which included adding 13 more articles, including seven more IFComp history articles and six more XYZZY Best Game award articles, as well as updating Spring Thing’s history to the present day. Brian also added almost a thousand citations as well as implementing hyperlinks, an epub version, and an index.

“One feature of my grant is that the book would be free forever. It’s something I’d like to add to, and I imagine keeping it updated at the IFArchive. If it were useful in an academic setting, I’d be happy to have a version of it published as well, but I intentionally kept the style more chatty and conversational, so it lacks some of the rigor that is more popular in academia. So my current plan is to keep it on the IFArchive, Github, and similar hosting sites!”

We’re all so excited to see this book come to fruition, and so appreciative of the love and care Brian has put into this living document.

“This book simply wouldn’t exist without the IFTF’s help. I did the fun parts years ago, and all that remained was a lot of hard work, and I didn’t have much time. The funding from the IFTF gave me both the time to work and the accountability to get it finished. I definitely appreciate the fund and hope that it helps others as well!”

There are so many fantastic ways we’ve seen people in this community engage with what they love, and the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation wants to help in whatever way we can to bring these things into the world. If you know of an IF-related project that may be in need of some help getting to the finish line, then stay tuned to this blog for updates on this year’s grant application period!

The IFTF Grant Admin Committee is pleased to announce that the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation’s microgrant program is returning (after a successful pilot last year). Do you have a project in the works that would benefit an interactive fiction community and could use a bit of funds to get it over the finish line? We would love to hear from you: applications for this year’s program are now open.

In our first year, we provided funding to support four great projects:

• Improve accessibility features for Parchment on iOS (Dannii Willis)
• An IF Workshop for writers in Indonesia (Felicity Banks)
• Audiobook Documentation for Inform (Ryan Veeder)
• Chronicling the history of annual IF awards (Brian Rushton)

As the list of last year’s awardees might suggest, the goal of the grant program is to support projects that benefit the interactive fiction community at large (rather than funding the commission of new games, for instance). We especially love projects that provide tangible benefits to a community of IF players or makers in their work to preserve, maintain, and inspire the continued growth of this medium. Proposals are evaluated by an independent committee of advisors (distinct from the grant admin committee) for merit, feasibility, and potential impact.

Our budget for the grants program remains small: we have $3,000 of funds in total to split between awardees, with a maximum award per application of $1,000. (Requesting a smaller amount is okay and helps us support more projects.) To preserve our volunteer bandwidth, we will not consider funding projects needing less than $150. We will ask you to submit a simple budget to back up the amount you are asking for, as well as a few details about your project and its scope, but we try to keep the application process as simple as possible.

Some fine print: Grant awardees will be asked to submit a report nine months after receiving funds, meaning our funding is best-suited for projects that will be accomplished in under one year. Please note that those directly involved in the grant process (i.e. Grant Admin Committee members, Grant Advisors, IFTF Board Members) cannot apply. Those who have been banned from IFTF activities are not welcome to apply. If you are connected to someone involved in the process, please disclose that in your application so we can make appropriate plans to avoid conflicts of interest.

If you’re interested in applying or learning more about the process, please check out our grant guidelines. Applications will be open until October 31, 2024, and we except to announce accepted projects by January 31, 2025.

If you have any questions, please reach out to [email protected]. We can’t wait to see the ideas the community comes up with!

Dannii Willis has been the main developer of the open source tool Parchment for a very long time (has it been 15 years already?). Parchment is a very cool interpreter for parser games, allowing anyone to play the games directly in the browser. Dannii applied in 2023 for an IFTF microgrant, asking the organization to cover the price of acquiring a used iOS device; this would allow him to test the Parchment interpreter on real hardware himself, which would lend itself to faster iterations. Dannii was also in particular very interested to test the compatibility of Parchment on iOS with UserVoice, and try to push the envelope around accessibility features for blind or low-vision players.

We just received his report, which has great detail on the project and the work he accomplished using the iOS device he was able to acquire with our support — work for Parchment, but also on other cool projects! Hope you enjoy reading this!

Thanks to the IFTF grant I was able to purchase a refurbished iPhone 13, which has allowed me to test and resolve some significant issues with Parchment.

First, some virtual keyboard improvements: mobile phones and tablets are commonly used via virtual keyboards. While on most websites these work smoothly, they pose a problem for an app like Parchment which wants to adjust itself to fit perfectly in the remaining visible screen space, so that the status window etc will still be visible. Unfortunately browsers don’t act the same way with their virtual keyboards, so keeping a consistent user interface for both iOS and Android is difficult. In late 2022 Chrome introduced a meta tag for specifying which behaviour an app wants. Firefox added support for it in 2024, but Safari still doesn’t support it. In addition, while Safari does support the VirtualViewport API, which allows you to be notified when the virtual keyboard is opened or closed, its resize events are quite delayed, up to 700ms, which feels very sluggish. With my iOS testing device I was able to find solutions for these problems, so that Parchment now has a very smooth and responsive interface on all browsers.

The next two projects haven’t been added to the stable version of Parchment yet, but have been shared for testing. As part of a major comprehensive update to Parchment, I have developed a new file system and dialog. Similarly to the general virtual keyboard updates, it needed a little bit of special care to get working in iOS. Second, I have finally added sound support to Parchment! The Glk API that Parchment is built upon supports three sound formats, AIFF, Ogg/Vorbis, and MOD. Unfortunately Chrome doesn’t support AIFF, and Safari doesn’t support Ogg/Vorbis! (None of them support MOD, though MOD files are also rarely used, so for now I’m not intending to support them in Parchment.) I have added a small audio decoding library into Parchment so that AIFF and Ogg/Vorbis can be supported in all browsers.

And I have also used the iOS device for a bonus project: Infocom Frotz! This isn’t part of Parchment, but seeing as I used my iOS test device to work on it, I’ll mention it too: this year I ported Frotz to the web, finally allowing Infocom’s multimedia (sound/graphics) games to be played online. Infocom’s version 6 of the Z-Machine was a big departure from its earlier versions, and so even today it is only supported by some Z-Machine interpreters. Its window model is not compatible with the Glk model that most interpreters now use, and so playing Infocom’s Z6 games has required a stand-alone Z-Machine interpreter rather than the multi-interpreters the community usually recommends (Gargoyle, Lectrote, Spatterlight, or Parchment). But just because the Z6 model doesn’t fit our modern Glk model doesn’t mean that interpreters like Frotz aren’t high quality. Frotz already has an SDL version, and Emscripten, which I’ve been using for years to port the Glk interpreters for Parchment, also supports SDL. So it didn’t take a lot of effort to build Frotz with Emscripten, thereby allowing the Z6 model to finally be supported on the web. It still needed some extra polishing, most notably that Emscripten’s version of SDL doesn’t support mobile virtual keyboards. But I have a lot of experience with that! And of course, there were more viewport issues in iOS.

The test iOS test device helped me accomplish a lot this year that I couldn’t have effectively tested otherwise. Even though the year is over I of course won’t be getting rid of the phone. So you can expect at least one more end of year report from me. Will Safari finally add support for the interactive-widget viewport meta tag? I can only hope so. See you then!

We wrap up this series of grant reports with this fourth and final blog post, on Felicity Banks’ project and how support from IFTF made her able to travel to Indonesia and spread the word about IF!

Felicity is a long-time IF author who lives in Australia but has ties to Indonesia, having travelled there over half a dozen times and learned the main language, Bahasa Indonesia. She applied for a microgrant to travel there for the Ubud Writers’ and Readers’ Festival, the largest writing festival in South-East Asia), hoping to offer an IF workshop as part of the official program track. However, after the festival declined the proposal, Felicity instead shifted the project’s focus to connecting with authors in Ubud around the time of the festival and giving a series of workshops. (Oh, and go to cat cafés and monkey forests.)

This proved to be very successful, with Felicity teaching 7 small workshops (focusing on the use of tools such as Twine) involving 18 Indonesian-speaking authors! The workshops went very well, as told by Felicity:

“It is wonderful to see people’s faces light up as they see their words transformed into a game at the touch of a few buttons. They are extremely impressed that volunteers on the other side of the world care so much about inviting Indonesian people into the community.”

Following these workshops, Felicity sought to keep the momentum going - as part of her application, she proposed to stay in touch with participants for two years after the workshops, to follow their progress. A WhatsApp group was created with over a dozen of Indonesian authors joining, and everyone keeps in touch and remains engaged with IF. Felicity also ran, in late 2024/early 2025, a small friendly comp for her students, with small cash prizes for the three best interactive stories.

We love this project - despite the fact that Indonesian is spoken by 200-250 million people, we are not aware of a Indonesian-speaking IF scene, and we would love for one to spring to life! Felicity’s familiarities and ties with Indonesia have allowed her to become an ambassador for IF there, and plant the seed among the community of authors; we are very happy the microgrants program was able to help make it happen!

“This was an incredible journey and I met lots of wonderful writers. Thank you so much.” -Felicity Banks

We are pleased to announce the recipients of the second round of IFTF microgrants, after a successful pilot in 2024.

The grants program exists to disburse small-value grants to peer-reviewed projects that benefit a community of interactive fiction makers, players, researchers, or educators. An independent committee of Grant Advisors review each submission and provide recommendations for funding to the Grants Committee, who this year have selected four projects to fund.

We saw great diversity again this year in the projects submitted, including a higher number of submissions compared to our pilot year. Thanks to everyone who submitted proposals! Here are the list of grant recipients for 2025.

Critical Essays On Interactive Fiction - Grace Benfell Grace is a co-editor of The Imaginary Engine Review, an online games criticism journal. Grace will receive $500 to commission three articles for the journal on significant interactive fictions written in the 2010s, exploring how these works continue the medium’s tradition of experimentation and introducing modern IF to a broader gaming audience.

No-code IF platform for web using Ink - Mark Davis Mark Davis is developing a web-based tool for interactive fiction builders that allows creators without coding experience to create interactive stories incorporating images and animations, using Ink scripts under the hood. Mark will receive $600 for hosting and branding assets for the in-development platform, crucial steps towards opening it up to outside testers on its road to launch.

Interactive Fiction Workshop for London Games Week - Katy Naylor Katy will receive $716 to host a series of IF writing workshops and Twine mini-jams at the 2025 London Games Festival Fringe, and present resultant works online in a special edition of voidspace zine. The workshops are aimed at people interested in games or interactive writing but who have not coded or designed a piece of IF before, hoping to bring new voices into the community.

Atrament, an Ink-based IF engine - Serhii Serhii is working on an IF engine that combines Ink scripting with Javascript as an alternative to Inky, creating a more full-featured release platform for Ink stories comparable to the mature web deployments for languages like Twine and ChoiceScript. The core of the engine is already complete: Serhii will receive $1000 to fund dev time writing documentation, testing and debugging the engine, and adding improvements focused on easier development and deployment workflows for authors.

We’re thrilled to see so much passion for expanding the audience of IF writers and readers in this year’s awardees. We want to thank all applicants, as well as our Grant Advisors, who volunteered their time to review the projects and formulate a recommendation for IFTF: thank you very much to Grim Baccaris, Kate Compton, Emilia Lazer-Walker, Juhana Leinonen, Colin Post, and Kaitlin Tremblay.

Congrats again to this year’s grant recipients! Check back in the fall for information about next year’s grant cycle. An announcement of the 2024 grant recipients is also available.

And lastly: if you like the grants program and want to see it continue, please consider donating to IFTF! Our Paypal page allows you to specify the program you’d like to see your money fund - you can select the grants program in the dropdown menu if you are so inclined. Thank you to everyone who has been donating to IFTF and allowing us to continue furthering our mission!

On February 22, 2025, IFTF elected two new officers to the roles of Treasurer and Technical Officer. The former position is being filled by Colette Zinna, while the latter, a new role, is being filled by Doug Valenta. Previously, these tasks were handled jointly by Andrew Plotkin, whose term on the board finished in March 2024 and whose time as Treasurer has now also ended. The board thanks Andrew for his many years of service to the organization’s administration; he will be continuing as the chair of the IFArchive committee and helping with the NarraScope conference.

Colette Zinna is a longtime fan of narrative games and an occasional game developer. She’s attended or volunteered at NarraScope every year since it began.

Doug Valenta is a programmer and creator focusing on games, narrative, language, and the web, and a two-time NarraScope speaker. Doug works as a software engineering manager, leading a platform engineering team at a data management startup. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner and two dogs.

As we celebrate our two new officers, we look forward to the organization’s continued growth as we continue to expand our purview, operational activities, and service to the world of interactive fiction and narrative games. You can read more about IFTF’s leadership, and join us on the Intfiction.org Forums to toast the new officers.

We are pleased to announce the creation of our new Institutional Relations committee! You can learn more by reading our charter here.

The intent behind this committee is to help support IFTF in establishing and nurturing relationships with institutions that align with our vision. Over the years, we have realized there are so many of them! Other non-profits (related to digital arts, video games, open source, etc.), educational institutions, libraries, museums and other preservation-oriented folks, video game studios, but also government bodies and granting bodies, and everything in between!

While IFTF has established a number of great institutional relationships over the years, there wasn’t necessarily formal internal resources or structures that could help in supporting these relationships; with so many committees with different goals and activities, there was a risk of a lack of coordination or visibility, and missing identifying interesting opportunities or potential synergies. This committee’s goal is to help with this, and also support the org more generally in things like communicating IFTF’s impact to various interested stakeholders more effectively, or having a more structured and more long-term-focused approach towards fundraising. We believe this is an important step in IFTF’s maturation, and we are very excited about it!

Our committee has a few members to get started with, however we’re definitely interested in onboarding more folks! If you like building bridges, or know a few people in fields related to what we do, like to find missing puzzle pieces, enjoy the thrill of finding new partners, have some fundraising experience — or if just like interactive fiction and would love to help us and maybe gain some skills, please get in touch via email and we’d be thrilled to chat!

I’ve finished the game, and my previous posts are needed for context.

From a 1983 Acornsoft leaflet.

Last time I had left off being stuck on a volcano chimney, with a subsidiary issue of radiation sickness. Rather than obstacle-oriented thinking, the best approach was item-oriented thinking: what hasn’t been used yet? Everything had a clear purpose so far except for the space suit. That is, it was better to simply focus on: What does the space suit get used for?

Mind you, it was still tricky to work out what to do even when asking the right question. It’s an interesting enough puzzle I’m going to pause for a moment for anyone wants to try to think it out.

Via eBay.

The very first puzzle I had solved (by accident) was going past a swamp, and if you fail to step safely, the message is…

You gingerly step out onto the swamp. There is a rich gurgling noise as the swamp gives way beneath you. In moments it is over your head
Lacking any air, you choke to death

Rather than the game outright jumping to death, it gives the condition “lacking any air”. That means if we did have air, by, say, wearing a space suit, it would be safe to go in!

You gingerly step out onto the swamp There is a rich gurgling noise as the swamp gives way beneath you. In moments it is over your head.
To your delight, the oxygen in your suit works. You drop slowly through the swamp, and then come to a stop
You’ re at the bottom of the swamp, on firm ground. You can’t see anything but swamp, of course

This is quite an unusual design finesse — a previous failure state is being leveraged for a new location. Going in any direction drops the player into darkness which is yet another maze.

What you see above is an incomplete map. This time you can drop items to map the rooms out, just it is dark so you can’t see what’s there. Fortunately, the game’s command GET (with no noun) will get whatever happens to be in the room (we saw this trick with Brand X / Philosopher’s Quest). This allows somewhat slow mapping, and after not too long I had found a life support machine, a medikit (picking it up cleanses the radiation sickness) and the exit.

I already knew offhand that finding these two items brought my total up to twelve (six repair items, six treasures) so I decided to gun it for the exit and hope I was done with the maze (I was).

There are four exits from the room with the beeping machine above. All four lead up a chimney to the surface of the volcano (in other words, the solution to that puzzle was: it’s an exit you use from the other side). However, three of the exits are deadly.

Now, given modern save states it is possible to save-reload your way to the right answer, but I started to catch on that the number of beeps counted 3, 6, 9, or 12; if you interpret the number as if on a clock, then the direction given is the “safe” one. So 6 beeps go towards 6 on a clock, or south. 9 beeps means go towards 9 on a clock, or west.

That’s the last of the treasures! I didn’t have everything in one “run” yet but it didn’t take me too long to put together a sequence (I started with a save file that made a beeline for the dome first and defeated that) and I had a decently roomy number of moves left, somewhere in the 70s. I did not make a walkthrough this time but this game was shorter than the “remix” version.

In the end, I was quite satisfied: this is in the upper tier of the Cambridge games I’ve played. Despite it having similar attributes of cruelty to Brand X and Acheton on a surface level, the game nevertheless felt more “fair” and solvable.

To be more specific, there’s violations aplenty of the venerable Bill of Player’s Rights. I’ve marked in bold the offenders.

1. Not to be killed without warning
2. Not to be given horribly unclear hints
3. To be able to win without experience of past lives
4. To be able to win without knowledge of future events
5. Not to have the game closed off without warning
6. Not to need to do unlikely things
7. Not to need to do boring things for the sake of it
8. Not to have to type exactly the right verb
9. To be allowed reasonable synonyms
10. To have a decent parser
11. To have reasonable freedom of action
12. Not to depend much on luck
13. To be able to understand a problem once it is solved
14. Not to be given too many red herrings
15. To have a good reason why something is impossible
16. Not to need to be American to understand hints
17. To know how the game is getting on

Yes, this list is getting on in years considering Graham Nelson first posted it in 1993 (more recent discussion here and here about the datedness, and the lack of accounting for a game like Outer Wilds) but what I want to focus on here is despite the strong violations of rules 1, 3, 4, and 5 (and light violations of 8 through 10) this game was much more playable than many other rules-violators.

The very first door kills you if you try to pull it. The platform that falls after five turns: there is no way to know that this will be the exact move count without experimenting. It’s fairly easy to do things in the wrong order and get your game closed off (you need the acid can before the desert if you want the diamond, and you can only go through once). Yet: I was playing in a different mode of thought, one where I knew I had many clone duplicates running around the world gathering information. Within the norms of this condition, the game played it fair; for example, the fact the floating platform gives the ghost up after a specific amount of movement is heavily implied by the text.

I think the key here is point 2 (unclear hints), which the game deftly avoided: despite minimalist text imposed by technical requirements (even highly compressed this just barely fits on the goal computer), there really is enough text to figure out everything. This wasn’t the case with Brand X, which had (for example) a moment where if you don’t get an item from the starting zone, it will show up later; there’s no reason to suspect this! Contrast also with the ningy of Acheton, which had a weird and ambiguous message if you did things wrong and made the game unwinnable; there’s no such moment on Countdown to Doom.

A hideous mocking voice sneers: “I suppose you think you’re clever, don’t you!”

(That’s all Acheton says! You can get very deep into the game before realizing this message means “you made a mistake”.)

I have heard Castle of Riddles — which Killworth wrote right before this game — is not so fair. We’ll arrive there eventually in our 1983 sequence and reassess.

Coming up: my evaluation concluding 1982.

(Continued from my previous post.)

I’ve managed to ride a sandworm and do some time travel.

Cover from the late-80s Topologika release of the game, via Acorn Electron World.

Out of the various obstacles I had left (desert, monster, volcano tube, blob, hover-platform, cube) the hover-platform turned out to be the simplest to resolve.

>PULL LEVER
The metal platform whines and lifts off the ground slightly. It must be an old antigrav device!

>U
The motor unit and platform follow you obediently
You’re on the burnt ground
There is a motor unit here, far too heavy to carry. It is resting on a metal platform of some kind!
On the side of the platform is a large lever

I had experimented with various methods of fiddling with the lever trying not to break it, but I eventually discovered the simple fact that the platform will run out of juice after taking six moves. If you make a beeline for the cargo hold/engine room you’ll take five moves, so this is out of parity; that is, if you try to stall by going back and forth, you’ll reach seven moves, and the platform will land in the wrong spot. You can squeeze in an extra turn by taking a detour down the one-way “slide” from the Mountain Pass to North of the Desert.

Voilà, one motor unit. I’m not sure how the installation is going to work. Just in a structural solving sense, the presence of the one-way exit in the path (which otherwise doesn’t seem to serve much purpose) indicates to me a 98% chance this is the solution.

The blob, monster and cube turned out to be dependent on working out the desert, so that needs to come next.

You are in a valley north of a desert of green sand. There is a unclimbable slide leading up, and a path going north. You feel you should be quiet around here

>S
It is rather warm
You’ re in the desert, with a sandstorm blowing, and your compass spinning like a top
A long-handled fishing net lies here

I wish I had some magical insight here, but I mainly got this via brute force. The verb list I had gotten from my previous “try all the standard verbs” procedure was

CLIMB, BREAK, OPEN, WAIT, KILL, LIGHT, THROW, JUMP, PRESS, PUSH, PULL, MOVE, SAY, WEAR, SHOUT, LIFT, SWING, ATTACH

so going through the possibilities there wasn’t much to try other than to SHOUT. This summons a “giant sandworm” that takes you to a “city square”.

The mention of being quiet to the north of the desert was a lateral hint; the fact nothing happened with SHOUT was still indicating that SHOUT might do something nearby. For an extremely lateral solving method, the inspirational drugs I had obtained last time did signal a Dune-esque type of universe, so making noise in a desert could count as solving by reference (except I didn’t make that connection until after the fact).

Moving on:

You can technically head back into the desert but this just kills you so I’ve left it off the map.

The southeast just has a hint to a puzzle I’ve already solved (“say flezz to robot” which required writing the letters in a grid):

You’re at an open space in the rubble, with a path back the way you came.
The wall of one building has a square pattern of dots, five on a side, printed on it

(Is there a word to the phenomenon of finding hints to puzzles you’ve already solved? Should there be?)

To the south of town is an entirely different issue, a pit that dissolves the player.

We’ve seen a similar obstacle recently with Scott Morgan’s Fun House, but this time the science needed to solve the puzzle is less dodgy. Remember we had a can full of acid from back in the swamp; here is where we can THROW CAN.

You hurl the can into the pool. The alkali dissolves the can, and there is a violent fizzing as the acid and alkali neutralise each other

The pool has a “cubic foot of pure diamond” so that’s another treasure racked up.

Heading west from the city leads to a jungle — the same jungle as the maze — but we end up at the west side of the river, the river which had thermal goggles on the right side. There’s a vine and you can just CLIMB VINE and it will initiate swinging back over to the main part of the map.

The path here (optimizing for shortest moves, we still have 220 turns to beat the game) makes it tempting to wait on getting the thermal goggles. However, to get the can of acid (needed to get the diamond) the thermal goggles are meant to be needed to get through the swamp … unless you’re like me and lucked out at the very start of the game and didn’t need the goggles at all. Optimization by random chance, huzzah!

From the desert there was a fishing net; now is when it gets used. I figured out most of this puzzle quite quickly, except I went over to the blob falling off a cliff and did THROW NET which just gets a default response. It was only later (after pointlessly trying to outwit the monster and futilely banging on the cube) I found I was using the wrong parser command.

Fortunately, using the net on the blob about to fall off the cliff was irresistible; I thought maybe it was a timing issue, but I also inadvertently tried out a few extra verbs in the process, coming across CATCH.

There’s no deep descriptions while back in time. You’re on the same map you were before, more or less. I tested the “ancient phaser” and it’s still ancient even given we’re doing time travel:

What’s deeply weird is if you take an object from the future and drop it somewhere, it appears in that spot in the past! If I were trying to rationalize this I’d say the planet has some time-loop weirdness going on, which wouldn’t be out of character, but in truth I think the author just didn’t bother to go that far with the coding.

This did suggest a hint for what you’re actually supposed to do, which is go up to the area with the navigation box (previously described as “non-functional”) and the space suit (described as “highly decrepit”). They are both still in the same places but in rather better shape.

The time travel is on a set timer, but making a beeline for these items still leaves some time left. I decided to check out the monster nearby, and it was also affected by the time travel:

You re halfway along the crevasse
There is a handful of dilithium crystals here!
A tiny baby six-headed monster is floundering around on the ground
You’re back in time

The monster was previously gigantic and deadly. The monster is still deadly (KILL MONSTER leads to the player’s demise) but fortunately the creature is small enough now to be ignored. You can run to the west and grab some “rare spices”, and also get the dilithium crystals that are just sitting there. The crystals have their own issue, though.

With some careful timing I can get the crystals on the last turn right before moving back forwards in time (still carrying the new navigator box, functional space suit, and rare spices) and this gives enough time for you tote the crystals all the way over to the ship and drop them off without immediate death. Unfortunately future death is suggested because “you’re feeling queasy” is mentioned over and over, just without the death; I am guessing I’m missing an item to deal with that. Or maybe you can win even with the radiation sickness? (That would go well with the now-tiny escapee of Mysterious Mansion and the permanently-blue survivor of The House of Professor Folibus.)

That nearly takes care of everything!

desert
monster
volcano tube
blob
hover-platform
cube

All that’s left is the volcano tube. In addition to the various ship supplies and treasures (navigation box, portable nuclear reactor, motor unit, dilithium crystals, tiny black hole, perfect conductor, magnetic monopole generator, cubic foot of pure diamond, visionary drugs, rare spices) I still have a space suit, sword, thermal goggles, and fishing net. I have not been able to get help from any of them.

You can throw things (“something clatters down the chimney”) but none of the items I’ve tried have helped (I don’t think I’ve comprehensively tried every single one, but I know I’ve tried the tiny black hole which seemed the most suggestive). I’ve also tried using WAIT for many turns both above the chimney and inside and with no help, just the occasional “ship collapse” message.

Still, given there’s only six ship parts and six treasures, I must be very close to the end.

(Continued from my previous posts.)

I’ve made enough progress for an update, although the game is still high on difficulty.

The cart format of the game, via Acorn Electron World.

I managed to clear out the “Jungle” first to the west, which turned out to be both more straightforward than I expected but also more irritating. Dropped items disappear into the undergrowth, but I figured I would try a bit of wandering anyway to see if I could get something to happen at random:

A few steps in I realized the room descriptions were different, and there are in fact four different rooms with very similar text.

Room 1: You’re in a jungle with exits in all directions

Room 2: You’re in the jungle, with exits in all directions

Room 3: You’re in the jungle. There are exits in all directions

Room 4: You’re in the jungle. Exits leave in all directions

This is intended to be another repeat of the all-different maze from Crowther/Woods; you simply use the text differences to map things out.

At the end of this you end up on the east side of a river (no swimming, remember) with some thermal goggles. I think this is meant to be the only prize.

You find yourself standing in an open patch to the west of the jungle. A wide river lies west, with more jungle beyond. Crevasses block progress along the river bank
There is a pair of infrared goggles here

I could just make grumpy noises and move on but despite this being the sort of maze designed on a spreadsheet, I wanted to test something out: is there a mathematical way to determine how difficult the maze is? I’ve mused about this before with no good result but finally came up with simply cranking the maze through a Monte Carlo Simulation. I have a program that starts the player at the Landing Area and has them wander for 100,000 turns, while keeping track of how many times the player arrived at a particular room. The results:

That means out of 100 random turns, the player reaches the goal approximately once.

A random walk is not absurd player behavior, even — sometimes I have just started typing directions randomly in frustration, and depending on the maze design, that can lead to good results. Authors did think for and account for this; even Don Woods made a “diagram of the first maze (the all-alike maze), used to check whether any simple repetitive actions would get you out.” Here, at the least, there is no connection going from Room 1 to Room 4 but plenty going the other way, so there’s at least a “trap door” effect so beloved of authors in this time period.

Alas, we still can’t just look at that percentage (“1%”) and call that an objective measure that allows comparing all mazes in adventure games. For one thing, there is a significant difference in gameplay when objects need to be dropped, and especially if the player has an object shortage and needs to shuffle objects around the maze as things get figured out (which is why I’ve sometimes had maps with rooms like “Dagger 3” and “Rope 4”). Even without that, there’s the “repetitive action” that Woods was testing for; with the Jungle if you just keep going NW you’ll get to the destination of the maze. This doesn’t get accounted for in a random walk. Tricks like the diagonal exit in the All Alike maze of Adventure (where every exit is north/south/east/west, except for the very end) don’t get calculated in either. Additionally, if the author keeps sticking to particular patterns, even if they use the “most extreme” design possible, by staying consistent to a pattern it can make it so the player has an easier time puzzling it out.

For example, the most extreme example of a maze is the “all or nothing” style, with a sequence of rooms where

a.) only the right direction makes forward progress
b.) all other directions are wrong and will always send the player back to the very start of the maze

(For an example of this in the wild, see Adventure 500.) Testing this configuration in my Monte Carlo setup using the same number of rooms as the jungle maze, I get that the player will reach the final room only 1 out of every 100,000 tries (rather than 100). However, the majority of players will catch on to what’s going on and start to just search for the forward-exit in each room and ignore the other ones; it additionally makes for an easy to chart diagram.

A (nearly) all-or-nothing maze I saw recently from Magic Mountain.

One of the issues here is how comfortable the author is with the player hitting a solution “at random”. Some seem offended by the idea of luck playing a part in puzzle-solving, while others are more relaxed about it. An author who hates wins attained at random might be more likely to pick the all or nothing structure (even though the effect in gameplay is unrealistic, on top of making the act of mapping more mundane).

Speaking of hitting solutions at random….

…I was mostly wrong about the swamp last time. I had, by sheer luck, found not only that I could step onto the swamp by going northeast, but also all steps after went to the north. This is generally not what’s supposed to happen. The thermal goggles from the jungle are meant to aid in figuring out where the safe spots are, and it isn’t always going north. Otherwise the result is the same (getting a black hole and a can of acid).

Besides that, the progress I’ve made is back at the mysterious alien dome.

Entering, again, requires dropping all items, so this section is entirely self-contained. You start by following a path eventually leading to a dead-end, getting a sequence of shapes that is randomly determined out of square, triangle, hexagon, and pentagon. Pressing one of the symbols (it doesn’t seem to matter which) drops you in a maze, where the direction you are facing is now tracked, and the only commands are AHEAD, BACK, RIGHT, and LEFT.

This time my map is not fully-made out because it seems at least the shapes have some randomization, and I confirmed after enough testing the only things to find were a.) a set of four symbols on the floor, that can be picked up and b.) a hole leading down further.

The next level has a sword and a nuclear reactor, followed by a robot (with the solution I mentioned last time still holding — it doesn’t seem to be randomized — the word is always FLEZZ). The robot is followed by a giant rat. Last time I killed it with the sword, but this time I just ignored it. This turned out to be a wise choice (I’ll explain why in a moment). Last time I also didn’t realize the symbols on the floor were portable, but this time I took them along, and after some struggle realized THROW PENTAGON (etc.) would get them in the machine. I had to follow the same sequence as earlier:

If you’ve killed the rat, you get a different message:

You have passed all the tests, earthling, save one — you killed without reason. Begone!

The intent seems to be to lampoon fantasy adventures and their tendency to kill rats with swords on sight. (SIDE NOTE: There’s a little more lampooning in the verbs. I singled out RUB and WAVE last time; apparently Killworth thinks along similar lines, as if you apply the verb to an object like the sword, the response is “This isn’t a fantasy game you know — doing that won’t help.” Rather than roaming into sci-fi as simply a different window dressing to the adventure form, Killworth specifically is trying to root things in a marginally more scientific world. Marginally.)

And that’s essentially it! Going down there’s still exits with the four symbols, but this time you can pass through safely (although again, you need to repeat the same sequence as before).

Once to the end you can go through an exit out the back, leaving the artefact behind for good.

Still remaining to reckon with: the desert which causes the compass to go haywire, the monster at the icy crevasse, the volcano tube which shoots up lava when trying to climb inside, the blob which eventually falls off a cliff, the hover-platform without an easy shutoff, and the mysterious large cube which you can enter.

You are inside a three metre cube of metal that vibrates slightly as if it only partly exists. The exit is north

(If I remember right this allows time travel somehow? The game might suddenly get much bigger. I have yet to get the cube to acknowledge my presence, though.)

DOOMAWANGARA. Abbr: Doom.

Climate: varies dramatically from desert to jungle, glacier to swamp [N.B. Reason unknown; exogeologists baffled]. Atmosphere intensely volatile; explorers must guard against rapid corrosion of equipment and spaceship alike.

Dangers: Atmosphere, as above. Automatic defence system. Also the artefacts, reputed to have been the home, aeons ago, of the Ancients; none who has entered them has ever returned.

Special features: The large number of crashed spaceships littering its surface, many of which had been carrying treasure from one planet to another, make Doom a potentially lucrative source of income for that special breed of explorer known as adventurer.

[Extract from Intergalactic Times, 3,7,187/qbf.]

— From the expanded version of Countdown to Doom

There’s the 1982! Is it a typo or was the intent to have a much earlier release date? Via eBay.

Let’s take a tour! But before a tour of planet, a tour of the game’s verbs:

The pale purple verbs are ones where the game helpfully nudges that they won’t be used, even though they’re understood, like

>EAT
Nothing on this planet gives sustenance

or

>SWIM
On an alien world? No way!

There’s no absolute guarantee they won’t be used, but it’s more likely they won’t be.

RUB and SHAKE are useful to keep track of because they tend to be used in non-obvious situations (where gizmo X is used by either rubbing or shaking), SAY lets you type anything as a noun (suggesting a “spoken keyword” type puzzle”) and SWING is the only one I’d call rare, and the response suggests it is only used in a special situation, like hanging off a rope:

>SWING
I’d be interested to know how you’d do that!

Continuing from last time, I had busted through the front door of the ship to reach a clearing “under a dull copper sun”. There’s lots of directions to go in, and I’m going to start with southeast and rotate clockwise. As the quote from the start implies, we’re going through a wild variety of environments in the process.

Southeast is a mountain pass.

You can enter a “vent hole” by just going down, leading to a “narrow chimney” where “you’re dripping with sweat”. Trying to go farther down leads to death:

As you climb, a red hot spout of lava shoots upwards and engulfs you

(There’s a lot of death coming up, if you can’t tell.)

Back at the mountain pass there’s another turn you can take leading to a box canyon with the message “write steep, read flat” which will come up later, you can also veer left to land at the south route via an alternate method.

I tried to get another death here for my collection but despite the warnings about sound, SHOUT doesn’t do anything (“Thanks, I needed that!”) To the south there’s a desert, and all I have been able to do is pick up a fishing net then get lost and die (phew, was feeling deprived for a moment).

Going back to the clearing, southwest goes back in the ship we started in, and west goes into a jungle, with the same sort of getting-lost as the desert, except without a thirst timer.

You’re in the jungle with exits in all directions

If you try to drop items they get swallowed up (“Something disappears in the undergrowth”) so you can’t do standard mapping. A general pattern of the game seems to be “geographic puzzles, but no standard mapping”.

Northwest, north, and northeast all lead to a swamp, although only northeast is safe, and only if you are holding no items; otherwise you fall in and die. This has the curious effect that for most players the section wouldn’t even be a puzzle, but for someone who happened to search in those directions while holding an item, they might not even realize the reason for their failure.

The first items I picked up in the game. The can has acid and opening it kills you.

East is complicated and gets its own map.

Events start out on an “area of scorched ground” where there is a blob approaching a cliff. Wait a bit and the blob will fall off a cliff, presumably to its doom, so I’m guessing there’s some timed thing here.

The sequence here freezes in time if you just pass through, so it’s possible to go by the blob, come back through, and still save it (or whatever it is you’re supposed to do). I remember a blob from the 2000 edition of the game but I just remember it blocking a path, not approaching doom like the game Lemmings.

Let’s consider the scorched ground a new sub-nexus and get rotating again; south moves the player into a mysterious metal cube that “vibrates slightly as if it only partly exists”. Down leads to a motor unit (presumably a ship part) on a platform, and while the unit is too heavy to carry, pulling a lever will cause the platform to float and follow you.

The hard part is to get the hover-platform to stop following because the lever breaks if you try to push as opposed to nullifying the movement.

East is, straightforwardly enough, a junction leading to a dead end with a phaser. The phaser is described as ancient and will overheat and kill you if you try to use it in most circumstances:

The cooling system in the ancient phaser isn’t too good; the phaser melts in your hand, which is not good

I have found the circumstance it does work, but we’ll see that later.

Northeast is a rather elaborate section with a “grey metallic dome” which is an ancient artefact. It’s possible to go in to find a new section, but first, a side trip to a random message on a cliff nearby:

I originally thought maybe this was the decipher code for a cryptogram and tried writing the letters a through z underneath, but I ended up going past by one; there are exactly 25 letters. That led me to suspect maybe I was dealing with a grid instead, so I broke the letters into groups of five, then spotted the word “say” while reading down:

sedlr
azieo
yzstb
ftaho
lobet

Fully deciphered this is “say flezz to disable the robot”, which is a codeword that will come in handy inside the artefact. The message “write steep, read flat” clearly was meant to hint about this but I only realized the connection after I had already solved the puzzle. (It indicates writing the text vertically and reading horizontally, which will give an equivalent solution.)

Now, inside the dome:

You are required to drop all items before going in (otherwise you get stopped by a sort of force field). The game in general starts to take a more abstract style like Xenos.

There’s a sequence of four shapes at it appears to be randomly rolled; for the instance I first played, I got the sequence square, pentagon, triangle, hexagon; on the second time through I got hexagon, pentagon, square, and triangle. Pushing on one of the niches drops the player into a maze where the compass has been broken.

This is a relative-position maze, and is fortunately consistent in terms of bi-direction; that is, if you go forward from one room, going backwards will return you to where you started. The symbols (square, pentagon, triangle, hexagon) are placed in such a way that you just need to keep track of their relative position (that is, if a hexagon is “near the door to your right”, and then you go right followed by backwards”, the hexagon will now be at your feet).

Eventually — and I don’t know the pattern to this yet, and if it’s important to even work it out — you will run across a hole going down to a new area where there is a store room with a sword and a cramped cubicle with a portable nuclear reaction (again I assume a ship part).

The way north is blocked by a robot but you can use the earlier word FLEZZ to get by.

This is followed by a giant rat (which you can just kill with the sword, but that might be wrong) followed by a “weird vegetable mass which is also a computer. I don’t have anything to put in the slot so I may have needed to explore the maze more.

Going down from here leads to a “square room with four exits” and the four symbols again (pentagon, hexagon, triangle, square). All of them killed me when I tried it via the computer dropping a “heavy weight” so I assume I missed something while exploring. (I remember this whole sequence in the 2000 game but I remember the atmosphere and vibes far more than the exact solution. The vibes are excellent and feel on the right edge of alien but understandable.)

But that’s not quite everything yet! Way back at the starting clearing we have done all compass directions, but missed that going UP is another direction as well. This leads to the exogeologists just quitting in frustration as we go up to a glacier.

There are some persistent messages about being very cold (as well as a “non-functioning navigator box lying around, I haven’t fiddled with it yet). Climbing up higher leads to an ice wall and the message that “you’re freezing to death”, which would normally be a bad thing except we have the phaser from earlier.

Inside is another treasure, some visionary drugs for navigation (I’m guessing the ships work kind of like Dune?)

Finally there’s a branch off the glacier to the north, where you find it warmer and can pick up a “decrepit space suit”; further on is a “crevasse” and I’ll just give the screenshot this time:

There’s plenty for me to prod at, so I’m not in any sense “stuck”, but I figured I had enough of the layout to give an update. I remember from my last playing that there’s some options in what sequence to tackle puzzles (notice how the alien dome takes away all objects, so it has to be self-contained) but the puzzles aren’t entirely separate from each other either. Curiously enough I remember more the overall events than details about how to solve things, which I suppose makes this more like a real play-through. (Maybe it’d have helped me remember to have some sort of diary that follows along with my playing. I’ll need to get on that.)

A few weeks ago, Guillaume Lethuillier posted "The Myst Graph: A New Perspective on Myst":

Upon reflection, Myst has long been more analogous to a graph than a traditional linear game, owing to the relative freedom it affords players. This is particularly evident in its first release (Macintosh, 1993), which was composed of interconnected HyperCard cards.

It is now literally one. Here is Myst as a graph:

The second part of his post digs into his findings, including unreachable states which were left in the game.

That was awesome, and I twooted about it at the time. Now Guillaume has posted a third article, describing how he did it. Also the source code of the tool he used to make the graph!

There's some neat subtleties to how Cyan used Hypercard:

When the first card is pushed (push card), the second card just backtracks to the first.

However, when the first card pushes another card (push card id {ID} of stack “{stack name}”), a more complex transitive relationship emerges, making the player navigate from the first card to the pushed card through an intermediate card (which “pops” to the target card).

-- from "Creating the Graph Using DeMystify" (May 9)

This is all delightful, with only one problem: I am impatient and didn't want to wait six weeks for part three of Guillaume's post!

My goals were somewhat different from Guillaume's. I didn't want to build a graph; he already did that. I just wanted to browse the HyperTalk scripts. The Infocom source code has been wonderful for understanding the context of 1980s text games. I figure that Myst's source code would be just as great for 1990s graphical adventures.

So I, um, wrote my own HyperCard stack extractor.

(Of course I held off releasing it until today, the day after Guillaume released his source code. I'm impatient but I'm not a jerk.)

Guillaume's project uses stackimport, a C++ tool which parses HyperCard stacks and exports their data as XML. The stackimport tool was written by Uli Kusterer, one of the early pioneers of Myst code spelunking. (See this thread, originally posted to Twitter on 2021.)

However, even though I'm familiar with Uli and his GitHub page, I sort of totally missed the existence of stackimport. Whoops!

So I just wrote a Python script to do the same thing. Hey, at least I had fun.

As you see, the MystExtract repo contains all the extracted HyperTalk scripts as text files. I figure I'm already the guy with the archive of Infocom source code; I might as well host the Myst source code too.

To be clear, this is the original 1993 release of Myst for Macintosh. The 1994 Windows port was not based on HyperCard; it was reimplemented from scratch. And of course subsequent releases of Myst have used the Plasma engine (for RealMyst in 2000), then Unity, then Unreal.

Anybody can replicate this work, using either stackimport or my script. The original Mac Myst CD-ROM can be found at the Internet Archive. I used the hfsutils package to extract the files from the ISO disk image. Yes, I own the original Myst CD-ROM -- it's on a shelf right behind me, right next to the external CD drive that I never use any more either. The Archive ISO was easier.

Are there any surprises? Let me refer you to Jeff Barbi's Mysterium presentation last year, where he dug into the source code using HyperCard itself (on a Mac emulator). For example, Jeff refers to this bit of code, which insta-flips every marker switch if you option-click on the Dock marker switch. This is commented out for release (don't bother trying it!) but it was obviously handy for development and testing.

Feel free to browse around and look for more fun stuff!

And now I have to think about the possibility of doing a "Visible Myster", as a followup to the Visible Zorker. Play Myst in your browser, and watch the source code execute every time you take an action!

It's a neat idea. But I'm afraid it's not going to happen any time soon. Sorry! I've played fast and loose with the Infocom IP, but Cyan is a living company and they're making money from Myst right now. (And they do need the money, sadly.)

Anyway, a Visible Myster would be a ton more work. For the Zork project, I had a JavaScript Z-code interpreter ready to go. Are there JavaScript HyperCard interpreters? Well, this one turns up...

Hm. Maybe I should email Cyan and ask for their blessing.

(Yeah, I know, it would still be a ton of work even with a working interpreter to start with. For a start, I'd have to transcode those ancient Quicktime videos into something Web-playable. Animated GIFs? Do I care about sound? I might not care about sound.... Oh, gah, now I'm thinking about the problem.)

No matter how small an Adventure you write, it will take far, far more time and effort than you thought it would.

— Peter Killworth from How to Write Adventure Games for the BBC Microcomputer Model B and Acorn Electron

Double surprise!

You may be wondering why I am ending my 1982 sequence with what I am marking as a 1983 game. As of this writing, Mobygames, CASA Solution Archive, and IFDB all list the game as 1982. Unlike Critical Mass where I could find a physical copy with the date, there’s no rationale I can find to even get the year by mistake. Acorn User in their May 1983 issue states outright that

Acornsoft are due to release seven new packs this month — three on chemistry, a programming package called Microtext, Draughts and Reversi, Starship Command (see reviews) and another adventure — Countdown to Doom.

Ads start to appear in the second half of the year, so I am fairly certain I have already ended my 1982 sequence and am starting 1983 (however, I’m still happy to hear evidence to the contrary).

Via Mobygames.

To backtrack to the history: this is another game by Peter Killworth. We haven’t seen him for a long time, not since Brand X / Philosopher’s Quest, but technically he’s been busy, because 1982 was the year he took Brand X (which he wrote for the Cambridge system with Acheton, Hezarin, Avon etc.) and turned it into a commercial product for Acornsoft.

Back in 1979, he had taken the language used for Acheton and made a small puzzle involving a cliff:

I had a problem which revolved around using a pivot to get up a cliff. Put weight on one end, and the other goes up — but you have to be careful to get the weight right. I programmed it on the mainframe, and left it for a friend to have a look at. When I came back next morning, I was deluged with messages from people I’d never heard of, all telling me where I’d gone wrong in the program.

With the launch of the BBC Micro, Acornsoft started looking towards Cambridge University for software, with the offer of a BBC Micro to takers; a friend of Kilworth’s had a program accepted so Killworth decided to convert Brand X (which is how it became the originally-abbreviated Philosopher’s Quest).

Converting from a mainframe to a home computer means — like Infocom by necessity, and Level 9 by choice — he needed to include a text-compression algorithm in order to fit everything he needed.

I have an unofficial competition running with Pete Austin of Level 9 and various other people on text compression. We’ve got it to about fifty per cent.

Throughout 1983 — which we’re now kicking off — he wrote Castle of Riddles and Countdown to Doom as original games for the BBC Micro, and also converted Partington’s Hamil. Eventually, with all the Topologika editions that happened in the late 80s, he wrote an expanded version. Unlike Philosopher’s Quest which essentially restored the mainframe content, the new content was written specifically for Topologika. A third edition appeared in 2000 when Killworth announced conversions of his three “Doom trilogy” games for z-code (that is, the type of file Infocom used that can be run with software like Frotz, Nitfol, etc.)

Killworth in 1984.

This game is fairly special to me in that not only have I beaten the game before (in the year 2000 incarnation) it represents what I might call the first difficult adventure game I’ve ever beaten without hints. (Infocom? Always relied on the Infoclues somewhere. This makes my memory of how to solve the puzzles foggier, which is why I barely remembered Zork III’s content at all when I played through. I had beaten Lucasarts games without hints but none of them were “difficult” in the same way as a game by a Cambridge oceanographer who moonlights with adventure games.) Part of the reason I had waited until the end of “1982” to play this is I figured some extra passage of time might help with forgetting how things work. I still have the walkthrough I had to write to beat the game in the end, though.

What I haven’t beaten (or played before) is the older, shorter version, and after much waffling that’s the version I’m going with. This is partly to juke my memory of the game even further, but also because this is a case (unlike the other Cambridge games) where the extra content was truly a late-80s addition.

As implied earlier, this ended up being the first of a “Doom trilogy”, a set of games on the planet Doomawangara. The first game is a relatively traditional solo-character treasure hunt, the second involves timing out a series of events akin to a mystery like Suspect but it’s a planet-adventure instead, and the third game involves a group with multiple characters.

Our ship crash lands and we need to look for six “components”. In addition to the components there are six “treasures” which seem to be optional (I don’t remember them being optional before) although like any proper adventure we’re going to try to get them all. (It’s not an “innovation” exactly as even Acheton let you get away without having all the treasures, and on my Hezarin playthrough I skipped two, but it is interesting that the game is formally set-up to let you bypass all the treasures.)

There’s a hard time of what seems to be 220 turns; this is why I needed a walkthrough last time I beat the game, because while it isn’t a ludicrously tight time limit (like Madventure, which required solving puzzles in different ways to optimize) it also isn’t one that you can hit by natural exploration.

You start trapped in the ship you crashed in as the exit door is jammed; there’s fortunately an explosive that can help as long as you LIGHT EXPLOSIVE followed by THROW EXPLOSIVE (and clear some space). Unfortunately, just trying to open the door from that kills you, as a reminder this is still a game from the Cambridge family of authors.

Using PUSH DOOR instead gets out, and leads to many directions to explore. We’ll search around the planet next time.

(I’m still doing a “concluding 1982” post like I did with 1981, but I’m going to finish this game first. Since I’m updating my recommendation lists, feel feel to speculate what might land on them; the four categories are Games everyone should play, For adventure enthusiasts, Things I personally enjoyed quite a bit that didn’t make the above list, and Some bonus games for historians.)