TAG WEEK 1: Slouching Towards Bedlam

Flack · Post by **Flack** » Thu Nov 17, 2011 8:37 am

TAG Game #1: Slouching Towards Bedlam
Download Link: http://www.wurb.com/if/game/2186
Parchment Link: http://iplayif.com/?story=http://www.ro ... /slouch.z5

Slouching Towards Bedlam is a 2003 work of Interaction Fiction, written by Daniel Ravipinto and Star Foster. The game won multiple Xyzzy Awards in 2003.

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To participate in Jolt Country's Text Adventure Gang bang, all you need to do is:

01. DOWNLOAD this week's game.

02. PLAY this week's game.

03. SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS about this week's game in this thread.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Fri Nov 18, 2011 12:37 am

I'm in. I should have a working PC as long I don't blow up any more hard drives.

And while Slouching Toward Bedlam has gotten a ton of reviews already, I've always wanted to play it, it's two hours long, it's interesting and I'm curious how others do with it.

So I can consider myself part of the bang here.

Roody_Yogurt · Post by **Roody_Yogurt** » Fri Nov 18, 2011 12:48 am

I'm in, as well. I already got a head start in playing it today (after seeing that it was chosen), so I should most definitely be in a place to write something over the weekend.

RetroRomper · Post by **RetroRomper** » Fri Nov 18, 2011 3:48 am

I'll start Saturday and write a review Sunday. Sounds interesting...

Flack · Post by **Flack** » Fri Nov 18, 2011 8:49 am

If anyone wants to play the game remotely or just doesn't feel like downloading/installing a 'terp, I saved the file to my website and you can play it online using Parchment.

http://iplayif.com/?story=http://www.ro ... /slouch.z5

Roody_Yogurt · Post 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.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Mon Nov 21, 2011 8:11 am

Hey, I just wanted to say: I love this idea and I love this concept and I love the game that was picked. I am just going to be basically away from computers until next week. Can we extend the first TAG 10 days?

Flack · Post by **Flack** » Mon Nov 21, 2011 8:49 am

Slouching Towards Bedlam:

When it comes to experience in playing text adventures/interactive fiction, I am the Yang to Mr. Yogurt's Yin. I have very little experience in playing them, and despite enjoying them, I'm typically pretty horrible with them. It is with that preface that I present my personal review of STB.

I like games that start me off in a small room that I get to explore. I'm pretty awful at getting my bearings at a new game, so I like when a game starts slowly. By listening (reading) to the recorded cylinders, the first thing I noticed was that the writing in this game was top notch. I really enjoyed the text in this game.

I did notice a few common TA/IF object issues. The drawer which is described as unlocked "is not something that can be locked", the open window "is not something that can be closed", and the ink blotter "is hardly portable". I just about drove myself crazy trying to fix things like these in my own game (and still didn't catch them all), so I was glad to see other people have had similar struggles.

The next thing I typically do in a TA/IF is figure out my immediate boundaries. In this case this appeared to be Bedlam Hospital. I eventually found a key and played around with some machines and then got stuck. I was turning dials and printing out punched tape and looking into a giant viewmaster, but I never really understood what I was supposed to be doing next. I wandered outside, chatted with the stagecoach driver, went back inside, chatted with the receptionist, walked east and west, played with the various machines, scanned just about everything with Triage, my trusty robotic sidekick ... and then just kind of quit.

This morning I read the two paragraph summary of this game on Wikipedia and (a) learned more than I learned by playing the game, and (b) felt pretty stupid for not picking up on more of the story on my own.

I checked out a few other reviews regarding this game and several people seem to enjoy the idea of having to figure out "what's going on". I just felt confused and dumb. I did eventually resort to peeking at the solution file and had to wonder if I would have ever figured out some of those machines on my own.

I guess I would say that the style of prose in this game very much made me want to play through it, but my poor text adventure skills limited my progress. If we keep doing TAG, hopefully I will get better at these games and, if so, I will come back and play this one some more.

Roody_Yogurt · Post by **Roody_Yogurt** » Mon Nov 21, 2011 11:27 am

I am not above hitting up a game's built-in hints, and I did so a bunch with this one. For the most part, in the puzzles I didn't solve myself, looking at the solution, I could see the logic behind it. I have to say, though, that the "whole point" of the game (as explained by wikipedia), while in there, is too easy to miss. Even having beaten the game, I wouldn't have understood what it all meant without the hints having a section for explaining what it all means.

P.S. I noticed that problem with the open window, too, as I eventually learned that one of the things you can do is to jump out of it.