For some time I've thought that there aren't enough IF games set in
non-western settings and mythologies, so I was pleased to see this one appear,
promising a taste of feudal Japan. Feudal Japan is, to my mind, extremely
fascinating: you have gorgeous art; a societal structure that I would probably
find infuriating to live in, but which is interesting to think about; and plenty
of refined etiquette. Even the violence is elegant. What's not to like?
The premise of the game bodes well, in a slightly predictable way. You are
(apparently) the American descendant of a samurai warrior, back to the estate
where he once lived to look for evidence about his mysterious past. As is the
nature of such things, you poke around, find your way into places that are
supposed to be off-limits to the public, travel through time, and so on. So far,
so good.
Along the way, there's a healthy dose of Japanese culture, mythology, and
art, especially focusing on Shinto gods and their standard representations. This
is where the game shines brightest, I think: this is material that is fairly
fresh to the IF world, and therefore evocative. The imagery is on-again,
off-again: there were some moments that I found rather striking, and some others
that felt a bit flat, trying for a wondrous quality that they didn't quite
achieve. The ones that worked for me, though, worked quite well. And there are
some neat details that are clearly there just because the author thought they
were fun -- the descriptions of the puppets, for instance.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to indulge my taste for these things as much as
I wanted to, because the implementation is somewhat shallow. I felt as though I
was manipulating the symbols of Japanese mythology in a detached and
mathematical way, but never that I was quite as drawn into the mindset and
culture as I would have liked to be. The game features some episodes that show
character interaction in the feudal past -- I don't think it is too great a
spoiler to mention this -- but it was pretty much impossible to affect how this
interaction proceeded. Instead of having conversation menus or ask/tell
keywords, you get uncontrollable cut scenes. What is particularly irritating
about this is that the cut scenes don't all play out in successive scenes, so
that you can be in the past, have three paragraphs of described automatic
interaction with the other character, and then have to *wait for three or four
turns* before the game chooses to infodump the next piece of cut scene. There
isn't (as far as I could tell) any way to change what the infodump would be, nor
to cause it to occur more immediately.
The experience is a bit like watching a movie while your little brother keeps
pausing the VCR. Now, I realize, of course, why the author did the cut-scene-ish
stuff: implementing all these conversations in full would not only be a royal
pain, it would also give the player too much control, especially over
things that are supposed to have happened in the distant past; multilinear havoc
would break loose if you could change the outcomes of any of the pivotal scenes.
Some people enjoy that kind of plotting/coding challenge, but not everyone, and
it's perfectly fair to want to keep the game on track. But there must be a way
to make it feel a little less jerky and distant; at the very least, I think, I
would have replaced ASK/TELL (where keywords never seem to be implemented
anyway) with a >TALK verb, as several other plot-heavy games have done, and let
the player at least have the privilege of triggering the next exchange.
To make matters somewhat more aggravating, I wasn't really certain, even at
the end of the game, what had happened. I had the basic outline of plot events,
but it wasn't clear to me in what degree I-the-player-character had altered or
not altered things.
Some of this is to be expected. The game advertises itself as old-school.
This is accurate. The treatment of space is different than in the average modern
game, for instance. There are more rooms with less in them; scenery often goes
unimplemented, and items with component parts often do not have separate
descriptions for those components. There is a fairly obvious formal structure to
the puzzles, too, especially in the mid-game; in this respect it brings to mind
something like Spellbreaker or Jigsaw, where one is looking for a certain number
of magic McGuffins.
But for something that bills itself as an old-school game, this should (it
seems) turn on its puzzles. Sadly, puzzle-wise, this game provides nothing
startlingly new; the puzzles range from the tolerable to the groaningly cliched.
Yes, he actually truly does trot out the old
measure-x-amount-with-measuring-cups-sized-y-and-z. On the good side, I guess,
this won't take people very long to solve, but many of the puzzles are on about
this level: blatantly contrived and leveraged into the game world without any
attempt at realism or novelty. Several of them also rely on your having
carefully noted things in previous scenes that are no longer accessible. A few,
I think, are insoluble unless you have already done the wrong thing once or
twice. It is easy to make the game unwinnable, though it does have the courtesy
to try to let you know when you have done so. But I'm not sure that that works
in all cases -- there was one point where I had left something vital someplace
that became unexpectedly inaccessible, and I don't think that the game caught on
to the fact that it was now unwinnable. I found that I had to keep a large
number of saved games and restore them frequently.
The experience is also somewhat tainted by the roughness of the
implementation. There are a lot of unimplemented synonyms; there are a lot of
places where I had the right action but the wrong syntax, and had to play
guess-the-verb or guess-the-noun. There are a few typos, and a few places where
actions are part of a room description ("You realize suddenly that..." becomes a
bit less convincing the second or third time you read it.) There is a hidden
item you can get to by moving a covering, but >LOOK UNDER COVERING tells you
that there's nothing there. You can try to do actions and get an annoying
response from the game along the lines of, "[PHRASE THAT THIS WAY: <correct
action description>]" If the game knows what I mean, why doesn't it just do the
action already?
Probably by this time you have the wrong impression. Make no mistake: I did
like this game, and the reason it gets away with some of the flaws and lack of
polish is precisely because it is so unabashedly old-school. Playing a game with
this sort of design and implementation takes a different mindset than playing
most modern games -- you are, in effect, fighting against the game, and the
challenge includes having the patience, determination, etc., to put up with
minor irritations and the need to restore frequently. I got into this mindset
fairly effectively, though in the endgame I gave up and referred to the
walkthrough. This is good, because there is no way I would have solved some of
the final puzzles on my own. But I was engaged enough in the problem of solving
the game that I replayed a couple of scenes over and over even though I was
convinced that there was a game stopping bug. (There wasn't; I was being stupid.
The game was a bit uncooperative, but mostly I was being stupid. I figured it
out eventually, after five or six replayings of the same scene. Normally I would
pack a game away if it gave me that kind of experience.)
Besides, when you think about it, the game makes at least as much sense as
Zork; it has a deeper-woven plot, which occasionally strays into the corny or
overwrought, but contains elements with much more emotional resonance than the
average old-school game; and it mercifully skips some of the very most annoying
old-school features. There is no maze. There are relatively few points where you
have to do stupid and repetitive actions, or worry about the management of your
inventory. There may not be any puzzles of the fiendishly clever variety -- they
mostly fall into the categories of "so cliched you already know the answer",
"requiring that you observed a specific thing earlier", and "you must read the
author's mind/guess his syntax to resolve this". But there are several that are
pleasing to solve. The solution to the light source puzzle made me laugh aloud.
So I do recommend this game. I think it will be better a version or two down
the line, if Rohde chooses to polish it up based on initial player response,
because there are some points where the implementation makes things
unnecessarily frustrating. But it succeeds at much that it attempts -- to offer
an old-school game with a cool, fresh setting. And it is ambitious enough to
take more than your standard-issue two-competition-hours to play, which is a
nice change, these days. If it were a competition game, I'd probably vote
it about a six: not technically clean enough to merit a seven or eight, not
jaw-dropping enough for a nine or ten, but definitely fun enough to be worth the
time I put into it.
