Ordinarily, I can't play Adrift games: I lack easy access to a Windows
machine (or at least one on which I can install things at will). The other day,
however, I was at Dan Shiovitz's house, and we decided to try Eric Mayer's
Doomed Xycanthus. Since this is the first Adrift game I have ever played, so
I am not sure how much of my criticism applies to the system as a whole and how
much to the game. I tried to be fair and flag items that might be the fault of
the system as a whole, but if I miss the boat, apologies in advance.
Eric Mayer's Doomed Xycanthus plays with one of the standard sources
of IF atmosphere: a ruined city with a mysterious secret. This is not in itself
necessarily a recipe for cliched writing and game-play; as in many other cases,
what the author adds to the trope is more important than the repetitive nature
of the trope itself. Mayer has dressed up his setting with a number of
interesting touches, hinting at a peculiar lost religion and a decadent, wealthy
society.
Unfortunately for the player, the world-building is in fact fairly slight and
shallow. Some of the problem is simply depth of implementation: there are only a
handful of rooms devoted to the ruined city (far fewer than are given to the
forest surrounding it); each of these contains only a few objects -- several
bits of examinable scenery, and perhaps one item that may be taken. Moreover,
the information that you can glean from these items all point to the same basic
two or three facts: this was a decadent society with a weird religion. You find
more information to reinforce that point, but very little to adumbrate any
greater nuance or complexity.
So as a world in which to wander around, this one leaves something to be
desired. Of the weird things that one may find, there is often very little
underlying logic, little to explain why or how the things got that way. Other
than the oft-invoked rule that strange religions always leave behind strange
machinery and artifacts, that is.
The game play is also somewhat deficient. One spends the first half of the
game wandering around a not-very-interesting forest. There are various scenery
objects in the forest, but there's not much there by way of plot. More
frustratingly, there is an assortment of random-death rooms. Some of these are
more or less signaled in advance, if you happen to have noticed the hints;
others are as far as I can tell not signaled at all. It is a truth universally
acknowledged that game-ending sudden-death traps, unprovided with warnings in
advance, that befall you just because you happen to explore a certain direction,
are Bad Game Design. But I find that I resent this all the more in the context
of Adrift, where you cannot undo a game-ending move. Instead you're forced to
restart and then after the restart restore a save. Arrgh. One of these unfair
sudden deaths remarks self-consciously that there was perhaps not enough
warning. Well, how cute. I'm sorry; it still doesn't excuse doing that in the
first place. So, like, don't.
Puzzles. There are some, and they are rather unintuitive. Or rather: one of
them is easy if you've got the right information (but there's nothing obvious to
tell you where that information would be if you happen not to have run across
it), and one of them was impossible without hints. (Another irritation, possibly
the effect of Adrift as well, is that the game chides you for asking for hints
in the first place. I suppose this is appropriate to the Old Skool of game
design in which the parser is allowed to snark at the player extensively for his
lack of playing cleverness, but I find more and more that problems with puzzles
are often at least as much the author's fault as they are mine, and consequently
the snarky parser just seems to add insult to injury.) Nor do any of the puzzles
seem to anticipate reasonable but incorrect attempts to solve them, so that the
player can try a number of apparently perfectly intelligent actions with no real
feedback about what is going wrong, or where to go from there.
There were some surface flaws as well. Descriptions did not always change
after events that should certainly have affected them; a door is described as
locked after you have already opened it, for instance. There is a bug that has
to do with the map - and again, I'm not sure whether this is Mayer's fault or
Adrift's - such that when you click on a certain location the game refuses to
take you there or even, apparently, to recognize that location. Everywhere else
generates a nifty auto-go command, which is certainly convenient - except when
Adrift's shortest-path-finding routine takes you through rooms that you have not
yet visited, so you find the prose whipping by without a chance to examine it.
This is irritating.
The game could use a careful spell-checking. The tone of the writing is also
a bit peculiar: there are bits of humor embedded in the horrific, breaking the
mood a bit. In spots the writing is also an odd combination of the excessive and
the banal, remarking chattily and casually about eyes that glow red with hatred
and creatures that scuttle in the dark. The descriptive passages are sometimes
more clever than specific. Mayer hauls out the big-time vocabulary ("lambent
light," eg), but the resulting descriptions are often confusing rather than
evocative. Several times during the play session I was left blinking at the room
description, trying to figure out the geography of the territory, because it
seemed not to be what I had assumed from the previous descriptions.
Despite its deficiencies, however, this game is not without its points. It's
an unambitious, unpretentious piece that can be enjoyed in a fairly short play
session. Some of the backstory is intriguing, though I would have liked to know
a bit more about it - here, having the world-building better fleshed out would
have been nice. On the whole, I found that I enjoyed it most if I approached it
on its own terms, rather than expecting the same sort of experience I expect
from a full-length game in one of the major IF languages.
Additional comments by Dan Shiovitz:
I played through this with Emily, so I feel obliged to add a few comments to
what she's already said. I agree that the game is in many ways shallow and
somewhat roughly-written; it would have benefited both from proof-reading and
from adjusting several aspects of the gameplay. On the other hand, having just
played through all the games from the '01 IF Competition, it was easy to see
this game had a, hmm, fundamental spark of originality that most of those games
lacked. This was partly aided by the game's smallness and incomplete
development; had it been more fleshed out it may have been that my imagination
wouldn't have had as much room to fill in good bits as it did here. But still,
there's something fundamentally right about a lost city in the midst of a
mysterious forest and this game does that well; there are weird beasts and
skeletal toes scattered around outside, and a creepy civilization inside.
The quality of realness is, more or less, that a thing which has it feels as
though it exists independently from the game which describes it, as though when
you turn off the game, *it keeps going*. Maybe it's just, again, the smallness
of Doomed Xycanthus that gives it that quality, and I'm filling in the
rest of the world myself. But for me there were enough hints of an extended city
and peopled world beyond to make this real. Having just finished playing through
the comp games, as I said, I realize again how rare and valuable this quality
is. I can't completely recommend Mayer's game, what with the aforementioned
problems with game design and writing. But it's worth playing if only to try and
see how a small game gets something fundamental right.
