by Roody_Yogurt » Sun Nov 20, 2011 5:05 pm
Slouching Towards Bedlam, IF Comp 03 winner-
In my previous attempts to play Slouching Towards Bedlam, in the moments before I clicked the “close window” box, the game seemed like a steampunk adventure that promised loads of information to process (my natural inclination was to set it aside for some time that I would have the attention span for it). Interestingly enough, after having played through the game, that description seems both apt and yet wrong.
It has several things going for it. It tackles a genre rarely touched by IF, and without being well-versed in steampunk, I felt it did that well. I also thought that it did the whole historical-fiction-writing thing well- without leaving me with a bunch of nagging feelings that this or that sentence structure was unduly anachronistic. The characters are written well. I felt like each seemed well-developed with his or her own motivations and a backstory. Unfortunately, though, the ASK/TELL conversation system makes it seem like the full story is on the other side of a crevasse- if actually in the game at all.
(Getting information out of the first NPC you meet, James, was complicated by the fact that when you asked about things like “predecessor,” answers would include names in a way that one isn’t sure if that meant that your predessor was named X.)
The steampunk devices- especially the Triage- are cool. I like using in-game menus to represent reading books. Last, the game goes meta in a clever-if-yet-still-amusing way. I applaud all of these things.
Interestingly, the game, geographically, is not that big. Early on, it seems like you’re going to be exploring the hospital’s 24 corridors (with 6 rooms apiece). In the end, you are limited to one corridor, and half of those rooms are unavailable. Two of those rooms are useless, even. In retrospect, I am glad things were simplified, but disgruntled me still wonders if such red herrings were even necessary.
(Anyhow, that was my sloppy segue into the things I did not enjoy so much.)
It doesn’t take a whole lot of progress to see that the game consists of small puzzles (in the “what do I do now?” sense) whose rewards are info dumps that do most of the heavy-lifting in the game’s explanation of the backstory.
The plot itself relies on knowledge of Hebrew and Jewish mythology. It does make a reasonable effort to explain things to the ignorant, but as someone who didn’t even get through the remedial class of Hebrew-as-it-pertains-to-numerology by watching all of “Pi”, I felt like a fair amount of its impact was lost on me.
After beating the game, it informed me that I had found one of several endings. It turned out that other endings involved (mostly) various combinations of killing NPCs. The command for doing this is >KILL <NPC>. I dunno, as a player, it just won’t occur to me to do that unless I am given weapons or if there are hints within the text. Of course, the usefulness of killing people is only understood with a full understanding of what’s going on, but I feel like the player is tipped off in a kind of awkward way (most likely reading the hint menus at a point of frustration).
Besides that, there were the annoying kind of things like locks that wouldn’t automatically open themselves with the proper key or doors that don’t automatically open and other things that I don’t want to see anymore as a spoiled IF player (I wish I could remember all of my preferences when I am writing my own games).
So yeah, those excellent things in the first half of this review? They were excellent. That said, I am disappointed enough by the other things that I didn’t find STB to be the awesome game I was hoping it’d be. Still, I can see what people saw in it and am glad that it was so well-received, especially in light of Star Foster’s tragic death. It is a shame we won’t see her gift for writing IF again.
[b]Slouching Towards Bedlam[/b], IF Comp 03 winner-
In my previous attempts to play Slouching Towards Bedlam, in the moments before I clicked the “close window” box, the game seemed like a steampunk adventure that promised loads of information to process (my natural inclination was to set it aside for some time that I would have the attention span for it). Interestingly enough, after having played through the game, that description seems both apt and yet wrong.
It has several things going for it. It tackles a genre rarely touched by IF, and without being well-versed in steampunk, I felt it did that well. I also thought that it did the whole historical-fiction-writing thing well- without leaving me with a bunch of nagging feelings that this or that sentence structure was unduly anachronistic. The characters are written well. I felt like each seemed well-developed with his or her own motivations and a backstory. Unfortunately, though, the ASK/TELL conversation system makes it seem like the full story is on the other side of a crevasse- if actually in the game at all.
(Getting information out of the first NPC you meet, James, was complicated by the fact that when you asked about things like “predecessor,” answers would include names in a way that one isn’t sure if that meant that your predessor was named X.)
The steampunk devices- especially the Triage- are cool. I like using in-game menus to represent reading books. Last, the game goes meta in a clever-if-yet-still-amusing way. I applaud all of these things.
Interestingly, the game, geographically, is not that big. Early on, it seems like you’re going to be exploring the hospital’s 24 corridors (with 6 rooms apiece). In the end, you are limited to one corridor, and half of those rooms are unavailable. Two of those rooms are useless, even. In retrospect, I am glad things were simplified, but disgruntled me still wonders if such red herrings were even necessary.
(Anyhow, that was my sloppy segue into the things I did not enjoy so much.)
It doesn’t take a whole lot of progress to see that the game consists of small puzzles (in the “what do I do now?” sense) whose rewards are info dumps that do most of the heavy-lifting in the game’s explanation of the backstory.
The plot itself relies on knowledge of Hebrew and Jewish mythology. It does make a reasonable effort to explain things to the ignorant, but as someone who didn’t even get through the remedial class of Hebrew-as-it-pertains-to-numerology by watching all of “Pi”, I felt like a fair amount of its impact was lost on me.
After beating the game, it informed me that I had found one of several endings. It turned out that other endings involved (mostly) various combinations of killing NPCs. The command for doing this is >KILL <NPC>. I dunno, as a player, it just won’t occur to me to do that unless I am given weapons or if there are hints within the text. Of course, the usefulness of killing people is only understood with a full understanding of what’s going on, but I feel like the player is tipped off in a kind of awkward way (most likely reading the hint menus at a point of frustration).
Besides that, there were the annoying kind of things like locks that wouldn’t automatically open themselves with the proper key or doors that don’t automatically open and other things that I don’t want to see anymore as a spoiled IF player (I wish I could remember all of my preferences when I am writing my own games).
So yeah, those excellent things in the first half of this review? They were excellent. That said, I am disappointed enough by the other things that I didn’t find STB to be the awesome game I was hoping it’d be. Still, I can see what people saw in it and am glad that it was so well-received, especially in light of Star Foster’s tragic death. It is a shame we won’t see her gift for writing IF again.