This constellation contains eleven levels, eight of which have an advanced mode.

1-1

Which one is the real starite?

This one’s easy. Just create an axe to chop the tree down, or a ladder to climb, and grab the red striped star.

1-2

Place an object with similar characteristics in the empty box to complete the puzzle!

What’s similar to a plesiosaurus and a giraffe? Something with a long neck! This is the first puzzle with an advanced mode, so you’ll need three solutions. Try goose, zebra, and horse. Or maybe a zombie swan if you’re feeling the Halloween spirit.

1-3

Pit stop! The car needs replacement parts to get back on track!

Any car parts will do for this one. Have the car drive away with a new axle, steering wheel, and tire to complete the advanced mode.

1-4

Kick off the beach party!

You’ll need pairs of beach-related items to solve this puzzle. The two items don’t have to go together, though. To solve the advanced mode, try these six: barbecue, sunblock, umbrella, swimsuit, surf board, and volleyball. If you want to bring a frisbee along, you’ll have to call it a flying disc so you won’t get sued.

1-5

Help the step-brothers become friends! Their love of sports will bring them together.

It’s pairs again for this puzzle, but this time the two items must belong to a single sport. You can pick your favorites, but football and football helmet, baseball and bat, and hockey stick and puck will do.

1-6

Create a new extinction event without weapons or asteroids!

This is the first really fun puzzle, not because it’s difficult, but because you get to exercise your creativity. Try whatever interests you. A flood, disease, or volcano will make room for humans to rule the Earth. Or, for a more man-made disaster, pollution will do the trick. The key is that it has to be global–just making a lion to kill them one at a time won’t do!

1-7

Provide a home for each creature!

Another multipart puzzle: you’ll need one home for each of the three creatures, or nine total for the advanced mode. The mountain climber will be happy to live in a log cabin, tent, or just a plain house. The friendly tiger likes the jungle or savanna, but a zoo will do (or even a cage in a pinch). For the cow, a field, pasture, or farm will all work.

1-8

The boy froze! Help him!

To melt the boy’s frozen heart (and the rest of his body besides), you’ll need something warm. A fire will work, as will a radiator. If you’re thinking big (and why shouldn’t you be?), you can just summon up the sun and warm everyone up. If you’re more inclined to action, a flamethrower will do the job, but you might burn down the world while you’re at it.

1-9

The Create-A-Tron is used to assemble things by placing specific items inside. Help Maxwell make a body using the Create-A-Tron!

Another easy one. To assemble your own version of Frankenstein’s monster, just create six body parts. An arm, leg, torso, head, hand, and foot will be enough. If you prefer bones to flesh, an elbow, femur, spine, skull, wrist, and ankle will work, too.

1-10

Unlock the statues in the correct order! Remember, Maxwell can interact with nearby objects by tapping on them!

The key to this one is to notice that the statues are of people of different ages–they need to be unlocked from youngest to oldest. So make and use a yellow key, green key, blue key, and red key, in that order, to restore flesh from stone.

1-11

Invaders are coming! Give the villagers weapons to make an army!

This is another fun one. You’ll need to make one of each of four kinds of defender. It’s not enough to choose four different weapons; different weapons can make the same  type of defender. There are a few weapons that don’t work, but many that do. Pick a few to make your army. A policeman is made with a gun. A warrior is made with a pitchfork, knife, spear, or axe. A martian is made with a ray gun. A sensei is made with brass knuckles, nun chucks, or shuriken. An archer is made with a bow or javelin. A staff or wand will make a wizard. And I’ll leave the rest as an exercise to the reader.

The gameplay is fairly simple: write words in Maxwell’s notebook to create objects, and use those objects to solve the puzzles. Sometimes the puzzles are simply of the ‘think of a word that fits’ variety, and sometimes they require a little more effort. I should say here that I’m not very far through the game, yet, so I suspect the later puzzles will generally be more challenging and less ‘name a part of car’.

You enter each puzzle from the constellation map screen. Having selected a constellation, you’re presented with a list of puzzles contained in that constellation; later puzzles are unlocked by completing earlier ones.

The stars with crowns are intended to be replayed: if you solve the puzzle three times in a row, each time with a different solution, the crown turns from silver to gold, as you see above. This is a pretty great feature, because a lot of the fun is in thinking of outlandish ways to solve puzzles, and the developers clearly knew this. I only wish I could see a list of my previous solutions, but that’s unfortunately unavailable. Probably, it would have been too difficult to make it meaningful–not only the selection of objects but also their placement and what you do with Maxwell can be important.

The puzzles are often amusing, even when they’re not difficult: you can kill the dinosaurs in the above screenshot in any number of ways–I particularly enjoyed using a black hole.

A surprisingly large number of objects are implemented, so feel free to let your imagination go wild. Super Scribblenauts keeps track of how many distinct objects you’ve created, and how many distinct adjectives you’ve used, too, so you can measure just how creative you are, if you’re so inclined. Personally, I’m keeping a list of my solutions for each level, just to see how many ways I can solve them.

Not all of the puzzles are particularly inspired, and some seem a bit obtuse to me, but in general, the game seems to be great fun. I definitely plan on finishing this one.

(This post contains spoilers. Read at your own risk.)

EGH is rather heavier on the ‘fiction’ than the ‘interactive’. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does require some care to keep the attention of the audience. I don’t think that it really succeeded, unfortunately.

First, the good: the game really feels like it could have been written by and about a high school student. If it wasn’t, that’s pretty impressive. The interactions between the characters and the flow of events was more or less believable, with some exceptions. But then, there’s the other side of the story…

High school students are usually annoying and boring. The game gets that right, too. Plenty of time is spent whining about how socially underdeveloped the PC is, and reminiscing about arguments about who had fewer friends, and so on. A very large chunk of the game (or perhaps it’d be better to say ‘story’) is spent drilling into our heads that the PC is a social outcast that no one likes, and it’s pretty obvious why. Of course, there’s no reason that the PC must be likable, but if he isn’t, then the game has to work harder to keep me interested.

Also, as I mentioned, the game isn’t terribly interactive. Most of the interaction is only in the form of the conversation choices, and even examining things doesn’t usually yield anything interesting. Also, unless you choose the right things to examine, the game will whisk you away to the next scene before you can get the crucial details about the characters. You’ll have other opportunities, but the first scene is the best time to learn these things. Besides the normal criticisms I might give such a non-interactive IF (“Why not write static fiction?” and so on), the lack of interactivity worked against EGH in one important way: by the time I got to the critical scene in the school (the third scene in the game), I was convinced that since it was a memory, I wouldn’t be able to do anything but stay on the rails the game had set me on, so I didn’t try to do anything, and I gather that I missed some important things because of this.

This failure did lead to what I felt was the game’s greatest success, however unintentional I suppose it was. When the PC is hiding out with Yue during the shooting (And wasn’t it a bombing earlier? Never mind.), he pulls her along and then you’re presented with a conversation menu with four options: three variations on “are you okay?” and the ever-present “Say nothing”. It’s reasonable that this is all the PC could think of at the time (and another point in favor of the game’s verisimilitude), but what struck me was that after exhausting the other three options, all you get presented with is the option to say nothing for twelve turns. Twelve awkward turns of the PC being frightened and unable to say anything while hiding from the horror that’s going on so nearby. This felt, to me, like a real triumph of realism–what else could the PC do? How else could he possibly have acted? I really liked it.

Now, I gather that you have the option of acting during that time, when I assumed that you were trapped in the conversation while the events took place, and what I took to be a great indication of the PC’s powerlessness may have been merely a result of a poorly used conversation system and my own misconception about the mutability of the past events. No matter, though–I still liked that moment.

Sadly, that’s pretty much all I really liked about the game. Oh, I thought that the messages about not remembering exactly how things had been were nice, rather than just seeing the standard library messages, but they were really a thin veneer on the shallow implementation. I couldn’t really sympathize with the unlikable PC, so the emotional impact was rather muted. The ending was weak, if realistic, in an “a poorly adjusted teenager might recount events like this” sort of way.

So I rate the game 3/10. I didn’t like the game generally, wasn’t impressed by anything it did, and didn’t feel like it made any important points. It gets a little bonus for the scene I mentioned above, even if I suspect my appreciation of it is somewhat misguided, and for the realism of the writing, but I can’t rate a game I didn’t enjoy very highly.

(One note unrelated to the game: I’ve added a cut before the spoilery text of this review. I usually dislike having to click through to read things, but I guess in the case of comp games it may be warranted. Cuts don’t seem to work like I thought. Still: if you have strong feelings either way, leave a comment and I’ll take it into consideration for future posts.)

(This post contains spoilers. Read at your own risk.)

The central mechanic of the game is traveling between two time periods–changes in the past affect the future, and you can move some objects between time periods as well. I like games with time travel (for example, I think Day of the Tentacle is excellent) and the use of time travel in The Chronicler was pretty good, though simple–the idea of bringing a future object to the past so you have two copies is a little too obvious to make a good puzzle, I think.

However, The Chronicler is an incomplete game, and it shows. The implementation is very shallow–few scenery objects are implemented, and there’s a severe lack of synonyms. Too, the behavior of the device that transports you between time periods isn’t entirely consistent–it takes you to different rooms depending on where you use it, but it wasn’t apparent where the boundaries were, so I got stuck since I didn’t think to use it in the hallway, assuming it would take me to the Transfer Room. Finally, there’s no satisfying ending. I stumbled across both endings quite by accident, but they leave everything unresolved.

I like the idea behind The Chronicler, and I hope to see a finished version of this some time. If it were more deeply implemented and had a more satisfying ending (and a little better testing–I did discover a bug while playing), it would be a fun piece of short IF. The current version has potential, but that’s not quite enough. 5/10.

(This post contains spoilers. Read at your own risk.)

Erebus is severely under-hinted. I solved very few of the puzzles without using the hints. Actually, I didn’t even figure out that the booths were used for spelling out objects until I read the hints. It wasn’t even entirely clear that you were trying to escape. For all I knew, you were supposed to make friends with the cyclops and learn his secret of eternal life.

Some of the puzzles felt positively obtuse. Spelling out PUB in order to get a drink? Was there some hint that I missed? Making a cup and a tub were pretty obvious, but that’s pretty much all I managed alone. And the ending puzzle is absolutely impossible to guess, as far as I can tell. “You could use some assistance in escaping from Erebus. A student who will follow your instructions would be ideal.” Why would I even consider that?

There were some other problems, too. It was necessary to repeatedly travel around collecting ingredients (or, rather, letters) to try out puzzle solutions. Every time I needed a pea I had to go get one, open the pod, then use it. Eventually I just collected a big stack of bees and peas and dropped them near the booths, but I still had to make trips for the tea, ewes, and eye. I get that, from an in-game perspective, there should only be one eye at a time (though it reappearing sort of ruins that), but there could have been a whole flock of sheep I could herd to the booths, and I could have poured a small amount of tea out of the tub, leaving it little diminished. It was also a pain to have to take things out of the pack repeatedly. I’m of the opinion that if there’s no good reason to restrict the player’s inventory size, you shouldn’t do it–I believe players will forgive at least that failure of realism in service to playability.

Erebus wasn’t all bad, though: there were some nice responses; the various ‘bonus’ words you could make were amusing–though not amusing enough to make me want to make them all, given the painfully large amount of work involved in making just one word; the changes in the response to examining yourself were nice; the fact that the backpack became a wristpack was a nice bit of attention to detail.

I guess there were some things I didn’t explore. I couldn’t work out how to explore the pit, though the ten points I got for making it would seem to indicate there’s more to it. Maybe I should have tried “TILT”? But it’s too late now, and I don’t think I’ll ever go back to it.

I regret that Erebus‘s shortcomings so outweighed its successes. The environment seemed like it might be fun, and I do enjoy wordplay–Ad Verbum is one of my favorite games. But everything I did in Erebus just felt like slow work. With better hinting and an easier way to create the words, Erebus could be a pretty solid game. As it stands, though, it’s just more trouble than it’s worth.

Sadly, Sonic 4 doesn’t live up to its predecessor–not by a long shot. It just does so many things wrong: the physics is bad, the game looks perpetually zoomed in, and the levels are unoriginal and rely on the homing attack thing way too much.

The physics: Sonic stops moving when you stop pressing forward. It doesn’t matter if you were running full speed and made a leap to get over a pit–when you let go of the forward button, Sonic drops like a hedgehog-shaped rock. Why? In the old games, a good part of the fun was getting up to full speed and bouncing over or past enemies so you never have to slow down. And on the topic of speed: it feels like Sonic takes far too long to speed up, and moving slowly is boring.

The ‘zoomed in’ look: Sonic is huge in the middle of the screen, and you can only see a few steps on either side of you. When you’re running at full speed (always remembering not to let go of the forward button), you have no time to react to enemies suddenly popping up in front of you. There go your rings, and, more importantly, your speed. Time to crawl back up to speed again. It seems like the game is designed to have you slowly walking up to enemies, killing them with the homing attack, and then moving on to the next segment, at least, when you aren’t being moved about by the dozens of boosters liberally scattered around. And speaking of such things…

The levels and the homing attack: the levels in many ways feel like inferior copies of classic Sonic levels. I guess that they were just making an homage to those games, which is fine, but there are way too many similarities. I’d have been happy with just the wrecking-ball type of boss fight from Sonic 1, for that. There are lots of repetitive segments, too, which is odd for a Sonic game–I’ve always felt that the diversity of the levels was one of the great things about the earlier games. In Sonic 4, it sometimes felt like the only time the level changed up was when they were about to fling you blindly into a bunch of enemies you’re supposed to mash on the homing attack button to defeat. Yeah, I get it. Sonic can attack them from mid-air and cross gaps and things. Lovely. But how many times am I going to be pulling off the same trick? I’ve got a lot of more specific criticisms of the levels, but I think those should probably wait until I’ve played a bit more.

Basically, Sonic 4 is just disappointing. I was hoping for–and, naively, expecting–a great game, but what I got was just an okay platform game with none of the charm of the older games. I really don’t think it’s worth the $15, which is a shame.

Avoiding the word ‘year’? Check. Awesome apostrophes? Check. Journey from which no adventurer has ever returned? Yep! Let’s make a journey to the cave of cliches! Good luck!

Cliched-and-basically-nonexistent plot aside, The Wizard’s Castle is actually a pretty solid game. You start by choosing some basic stats for your character (race, sex, strength/intelligence/dexterity, equipment), and off you go to explore the castle and hunt for the incredible *ORB OF ZOT*. You’re aided in your endeavour by a map of the dungeon which is meant to fill in as you explore or use items that reveal information about the dungeon, like flares or the lamp.

Unfortunately, in the version I played, the map is already filled in, which I guess is a bug; I’m told later ports give you a properly blank map to start with. One annoying thing about this game is that the map legend is on the help screen, so you have to keep switching between the map and legend until you learn the meaning of the map symbols. Similarly, the player’s stats are only shown upon moving into a room, so you have to move around to check them. There is plenty of room on the right for both of these, I think. Another, more minor problem is that you must press ‘M’ whenever you wish to show the map; since that is likely to be all the time, it means that the game consists of lots ‘EMSMEEM’, manually checking the map every few moves. It would have benefited greatly from just automatically showing the map.

Map issues aside, how is the game? Well, let’s have a look at the map: the player is on the square marked by angle brackets above; to the west is a monster; to the east is a sinkhole, which drops the player down a level; to the south is a flare, which would ordinarily be very useful, as it lights up the area around the player, but is, in this version, useless due to the map being all filled in. Monsters can be fought, fled from, or bribed, though some (trolls, ogres, dragons) don’t seem to be damaged by the sword I had, so it may be impossible to (successfully) fight some of them. Sinkholes cause the player to fall down a level, and stairs can lead either up or down. Items, such as flares, gold, and treasure, will be picked up automatically, and can be used or (in the case of gold and treasure) traded with the vendors the player will encounter in the dungeon.

Successfully navigating the dungeon involves carefully planning your route, lest you find yourself very dead:

Not all fights should be avoided, though. With the lamp, it’s possible to tell precisely what monster is in an adjacent square, and the weaker ones can be fought for large sums of gold, which is very handy. However, it’s not only the fights that can be hazardous: magic pools can be drunk from, and may either help or harm the player, and books, too,  can be either very helpful or very dangerous–even the chests might explode or release toxic gas upon being opened. After picking up some treasures, the player can choose to leave the dungeon, or continue on, seeking the ultimate treasure in the form of the Orb of Zot.

Seeking the Orb of Zot is harder than it sounds. Scattered about are orbs the player can gaze into in order to gain information about what lies in the dungeon–these will occasionally tell the player that the Orb of Zot is in some particular location, but this isn’t as helpful as it seems–the orbs may claim that the Orb is in several different locations, and I have yet to find it by going to these locations. I suspect there is a trick to it, but I’ve not spent enough time to puzzle it out. For now, I’m satisfied with picking up the lesser treasures.

The dungeon is randomized each time you play, so if you care to, you can play as many times as you like without running out of new dungeons to explore.

The bottom line: The Wizard’s Castle is pretty fun. I’m sure it would have been much more challenging to collect the treasures if the map had functioned correctly in the version I played, so I suspect this game would be good for a few hours distraction here and there. There’s something satisfying about a nice dungeon crawl, and for all its simplicity and lack of polish, The Wizard’s Castle isn’t bad at all. It’s no Nethack, but it’s worth a look.

I’ll note, first, that this review will contain spoilers for several of the levels, and to best enjoy the game, you should play it through, at least partly, prior to reading my comments.

The game starts, deceptively, with a totally mundane first level–not a puzzle at all, simply an empty screen with a door at the right. Walking to the door takes you to the next level.

The game quickly becomes more interesting. The rooms following this all have hints, of a sort, written on the wall, apparently in blood. Sometimes the hints give very literal advice:

In the room pictured above, walking to the left, rather than right, will teleport the character to the door. In fact, in one case, the hint text is itself a hint:

As you can see above, the hint text, “HINT”, is, or is placed on, an invisible platform that is used to reach the door. Not all hints are to be blindly trusted, though:

The room pictured above is exactly what you’d expect: the boxes are to be stack in order to form a platform so the player can reach the door. Sometimes, rather than being misleading, the hints simply aren’t very helpful:

“UP AND OVER” is obviously what you need to accomplish (barring some trickery), but there’s no clue how to do it. Eventually, you reach the boss:

He reveals a little about the ‘plot’ of the game, then attacks with the red triangles you see. If you can work out how to beat him, congratulations! You survived Lab 14. For now…

I’ve got to give this game credit for challenging how we perceive the games we’re playing, and the assumptions about what the rules really are. Completing Lab 14 requires you to interact with the game in ways you wouldn’t ordinarily expect. The ‘plot’ revealed at the end is underwhelming, but that’s not really the point of the game. Some of the puzzles are very easy to work out, and some are rather more difficult. I got stuck a couple of times, but I doubt it took more than a half hour to beat the game, and it can be beaten in only a few minutes, if you know what to do. Sadly, that means there’s no replay value at all, so while it’s fun to work out the solutions, the only way you’ll want to come back to Lab 14 is if you no longer remember how to solve it.

Lab 14 (or, more accurately, the version of Game Maker it was made in) doesn’t work in Vista, so if you want to play it in Vista, you’ll need a little tool.

A complete, annotated walkthrough of the game is below. Play it first!

Gameplay: 6/10

The controls work pretty well, and some of the puzzles are quite clever. The total lack of replay value, and the couple of stupid levels keep this from scoring higher.

Graphics: 7/10

The graphics are very simple, but not bad. The all-white-and-grey look does get a little boring, though.

Audio: 5/10

There are no sound effects, and the background music isn’t terribly inspiring. A little more here might have made for a much-improved experience.

Personal Slant: 8/10

I enjoyed it. I admit to getting a little frustrated when I got stuck, but I eventually worked my way through.

Total: 6.5/10

Lab 14 is pretty good. If you enjoy puzzles, and have a few minutes, give it a try. None of the individual elements of the game are spectacular, and some of the puzzles are less than stellar, but it’s still a good experience, and the price is right.

In Phage Wars 2, the player is a lab tech whose goal is to create the most powerful virus ever. This is accomplished by playing through the 32 stages (called ‘experiments’) and adding the gene proteins you discover to your virus in order to improve its strength, speed, defense, agility, and ability to reproduce.

Each of the 32 experiments contains a number of cells and enemy viruses. The player can choose to infect cells or attack cells which are already infected by an enemy virus in order to take them over. Once a cell is infected, the virus inside begins to reproduce, so the player can then attack other cells. The stage is won when no enemy viruses remain. A new gene protein is discovered after beating each stage for the first time.

Between experiments, the player has the opportunity to add the gene proteins to his virus. The proteins have varying effects, and can increase some statistics while decreasing others. Additionally, each protein takes up a certain amount of space in the virus’s genetic code, so the player must choose between them to create the strongest virus.

The controls are pretty simple: click and drag from a source cell to a destination cell to send your viruses to infect or attack. To send viruses from multiple cells to a single destination, just drag over all the desired source cells. The best strategy I found was to infect as many cells as possible as quickly as possible, and then to attack the enemy viruses once all the empty cells had been claimed. To support this, I improved the attack, defense, and reproductive ability of my virus, though I understand that improving speed and agility is also a valid strategy.

Here lies the problem with the game: it’s really much too easy. With a decent bonus to reproduction, the viruses will fill a cell quite quickly, and with a decent bonus to attack, it’s not hard to destroy any enemy virus given a mostly-full source cell. The game requires a little juggling to make sure you maintain control of your cells, but it’s not really hard to do, and by improving defense even that becomes very easy.

Phage Wars 2 has basically identical gameplay to its predecessor, with the exception of the ability to add proteins to improve your virus rather than simply choosing a virus at the beginning. The idea isn’t totally original to this series, either–the concept is basically just Risk, and the game’s particulars are rather reminiscent, to me, of the primordial soup subgame in The Time Warp of Dr. Brain.

The lack of difficulty and originality aren’t really so bad that they ruin the game; it still pretty fun. To be honest, I’m not sure I know any way to make the game more difficult without also making it frustrating or otherwise less fun. As for the originality–well, some ideas are reused because they work, and I’d say this is one of them. Give the game a shot if you’ve got the time to spare.

Gameplay: 7/10

The controls are nice, the mechanics are understandable, the concept is solid. It’s a little too easy, though, and the main skill required, I think, is clicking and dragging very quickly at the beginning.

Story: 2/5

The story’s just an excuse for the gameplay, so this only counts half. On the other hand, the story’s obviously just an excuse, so minus some points.

Graphics: 9/10

The graphics are polished and lovely. Minus a point since the foreground and background were sometimes hard to distinguish, and there was nothing that really impressed me.

Audio: 5/10

There’s nothing really wrong with the audio, but it didn’t stand out in any way. Some more interesting audio might have made my interest in the game last a bit longer.

Personal Slant: 6/10

I enjoyed the game, though I think the sequencing part was a little dull, and the lack of difficulty made it drag on a little by the end.

Total: 6.4/10

Phage Wars 2 is worth a play, though not a replay. In fact, I’d say that the moment you begin to become bored with it, you should abandon it–it’s just more of the same, and the ending isn’t worth plodding through the game if you’re not enjoying it. It only takes a few minutes to play through the first few levels, though, and those few minutes are worth it.

According to the teaser on the game’s web site: “The Queen has told you to return with her heart in a box. Snow White has made you promise to make other arrangements. Now that you’re alone in the forest, it’s hard to know which of the two women to trust. The Queen is certainly a witch — but her stepdaughter may be something even more horrible…”

As can be seen by the huge list of authors above, Alabaster is a collaborative work. Emily Short wrote the introduction, then the others followed up on this with conversation text, which was all edited together into the final game. In my opinion, it all flows very nicely–you wouldn’t guess that it had so many authors just by playing the game.

As I mentioned, conversation is the primary gameplay mechanic–except for a few actions, the entire game is centered on conversing in order to learn what the truth of the situation is, so you can decide how to act–whether or not to help Snow White, and how to do so. Depending on what you choose to do and how much you know, you will reach one of eighteen different endings.

I think that the gameplay was pretty good–at least the first time or two. As I continued to replay the game to try for other endings, though, it began to feel less immersive–more like I was pressing buttons to have the plot dispensed to me than actually participating in the conversation. I’m not entirely sure why this is–I don’t usually feel that way about games I play repeatedly. I would guess that it’s some combination of the lack of non-conversation actions and the hinting system which suggests topics for conversation (“Perhaps you could ask her about foo.” Fine, do that.). I don’t mean by this that I dislike either of these things–in fact, I was quite grateful to have the hinting system (though I thought it might be hinting a bit too often), since I usually have trouble working out what topics I can or should discuss in IF.

Enough about the mechanics; let’s talk about plot. Spoilers follow, if it isn’t obvious.

I enjoyed the plot, although I certainly anticipated quite a bit of it. For example, Snow White will reveal at some point that the king has disappeared, and this can be followed up by some discussion of how to find the king, and how to restore him. It’s seems pretty likely at this point that the PC is the king, though actually confirming it takes a bit more effort. Depending on your conversation choices, there’s no compelling reason for the PC to suspect he is the king–the player, though, may suspect it for mostly metafictional reasons. So the player knows something the PC doesn’t–a situation I usually don’t like much. It often feels like the PC is being intentionally obtuse in order to force you through whatever series of actions the author had in mind to provide the player with the already-guessed information. I didn’t get that feeling with Alabaster, but I still dislike coming to conclusions for metafictional reasons.

The same issue came up with one of the endings. If you talk enough, Snow White (or, rather, Lilith) will reminisce about Adam, and say that she wants a man who is her equal. There is some fairly heavy-handed hinting here that the PC should offer himself as a companion to Lilith:

“You ask what I want,” she says slowly. “I want what Adam should have been, if he had chosen differently. I want a man who is my match, who is clever and private and wise; one who likes the wasteland and the night-time and the open sea rather than the daylight crowd of Eve’s feckless brood. With such a man, I would be mortal, live my days, and die, not cursed but reconciled.”

You yourself prefer the wasteland and the open places.

Of course, given that Lilith is a demon, has just mentioned that she kills children, and that the PC has mostly been rather terrified of her, it seems a little bit too much to expect the PC to actually want to offer himself to her. But the player knows that this is expected, so the PC will do as the player directs.

I should mention that these things–discerning that the PC is the king or offering yourself to Lilith as a companion–are not actually required. There are endings in which the PC never realizes he is the king, and you can decide that, lonely or not, Lilith is a demon and should be killed. I don’t have any problem with the game offering the player the choice of what to do, I just feel like the game is setting the PC up to do unrealistic things, and actually performing the more likely actions (killing the demon, failing to divine your identity) feel like deliberate obstruction by the player.

Of course, the preceding observations are subjective. It’s quite possible that someone else could play the game and either feel that becoming Lilith’s consort is reasonable or that the game isn’t really pushing too strongly toward that choice. No doubt a part of the reason I feel that way is that I know that the other endings are mostly bad endings.

I have only one further comment regarding endings. There was one ending I hoped to see, but which was not present. If the PC puts the hart’s heart in the box and burns it, Lilith is driven out from Snow White. I had hoped, then, that the PC could, (perhaps out of fear of the queen’s wrath, and hoping to save himself) kill the innocent Snow White. A suitably tragic ending, which isn’t so much darker than the implemented endings. But it was not to be.

These complaints are very minor things, though. I enjoyed Alabaster quite a lot. I found around half of the endings, then consulted the walkthrough so I could see the others. Probability aside, the endings were interesting, as was the game itself. The hinting for the conversation improved the experience for me, and the way Snow White acted and reacted based on the direction the conversation took was interesting itself, providing continuity to the conversation, which are usually rather disjointed in IF.

Alabaster can be had from the blog post linked above, or directly from the Inform site. It’s available bundled with an interpreter for Windows or Mac, or as a standalone story file. The source code, a walkthrough, and a conversation diagram can be had from the inform site, as well. Additionally, Emily Short is looking for feedback on the conversation system, so visit her blog after playing.

Gameplay: 9/10

The hinting for the conversation ensured that the game never devolved into guess-the-keyword, and the thoroughly implemented world was a nice backdrop. It eventually got a little repetitive going through the same conversation repeatedly, but I’m not sure that there’s anything that can be done about that.

Story: 8/10

The story was interesting and fairly engaging, although it loses a couple of points for pushing the player toward improbable actions.

Personal Slant: 9/10

I enjoy ‘fractured fairy tales’, and I enjoy interactive fiction, so Alabaster was a pretty obvious choice. I’ve mostly exhausted the game, so I don’t know if I’ll ever return to it, but it was fun while it lasted.

Total: 8.6/10

Alabaster is a good game, and should be accessible to both experienced and inexperienced players. Playing through to an ending only takes a few minutes, and it’s pretty obvious how to get several different endings, so even someone new to IF should be able to play it a few times and see the story from different perspectives. It’s absolutely worth doing, in my opinion.