Played to completion?:
Yes
This is nutty but works far, far better than it has any right to do. With a
few minor exceptions, I almost always knew where to go and what to do, and had a
general idea of how to solve the puzzles that were in front of me -- thanks to
careful game design. The map and plot are laid out in such a way that it's hard
to reach a puzzle without already having seen all the components necessary to
solve it. I was rarely stuck or bored. A few solutions of the late game puzzles
veered from merely unlikely into mind-bogglingly implausible, but they were
hinted fairly extensively; there were only one or two things that I got hung up
on.
The setting was also strong; the credits indicate (if we couldn't have
guessed from the photos) that the author visited in person, and there's evidence
of that first-person experience throughout.
I very much enjoyed the photographs. They set the atmosphere and grounded the
game in reality. In general I think this is a great example of the sane way to
incorporate graphics in IF. Illustrating every location is hugely difficult, and
if you try to depict all the environment changes that the player can accomplish,
you start to lose one advantage of having a parser and text game in the first
place -- namely, relatively inexpensive interactivity. Instead, in "Bolivia" we
have illustrations that show up at important plot junctures and scene changes
(as a reward for accomplishment, sometimes) and show the setting, but don't even
pretend to be pictures of what is going on at the moment. [One mildly spoilery
example of how the author used the photos well: if the picture of the Zebra had
appeared before the Zebra character showed up in-game, I wouldn't have
understood what it was, other than Something Really Wacky. Having the photo show
up after the Zebra puzzle made me laugh, though -- it was like a visual
punchline to this joke. "Here, you've been imagining something silly? It's even
funnier than you thought."]
Finally, in my experience choosing the protagonist's gender in IF rarely does
anything interesting, so I was intrigued to see that playing a female character
made for some funny (or mildly disturbing) twists on the NPC interactions. The
game manages to walk a fine line -- the narrative voice is never snarky or
harassing about my gender, but some of the characters are, a little, and the
result is a reasonably successful depiction of being a foreign woman in a
culture of machismo.
If there's a drawback, it's the tonal inconsistency. It's a little strange to
have these light, goofy forms of enchantment operating alongside serious social
issues. But somehow I think it mostly worked, even so -- this would have been a
much more depressing and less enjoyable game without its leavening of humor,
magic, and cartoon violence. Meanwhile, the Bolivian history lessons were
interwoven in the game in a way that didn't make them too overwhelming.
"Bolivia By Night" wasn't quite cohesive enough to become a favorite of mine,
but it has a lot going for it, is fun to play, and introduces a setting I've
never seen before in IF. My initially dubious reaction to the talking Che
t-shirt wore off surprisingly fast.
