IFCOMP 2005 - Phantom: Caverns of the Killer

     Well, it’s a pretty short game. I finished it in an hour, although I might not have finished at all without the maze solutions found in the walkthrough. The rest of the game was pretty simple, but those mazes… well, I’ll get to that soon. Kudos for using Inform instead of a hand-made parser. Again, I have no room to talk in that regard, but with the flaws in the game itself, I can only imagine how unplayable it might have been without the stable Zcode framework to keep it on track.

     Just about everything that can be wrong in a game is wrong with this one, with the exception that it’s not really buggy. What I mean is, the game is flawed in a large number of ways, but I found nothing I would consider a bug. Rooms connect together. The map (aside from the mazes) makes sense. No errors crashed the game. It can be won with a full 100 points, and it doesn’t seem possible to repeat the same points.

     The text: It’s bad. This includes sentence fragments, run-on sentences, general misuse of commas, missing apostrophes in contractions, capitalization problems, spaces before commas where no space belongs, no space after commas where it does belong (sometimes referring to the same comma), bad spelling, and stray 1’s and 2’s (a digit) in ending text.

     Implementation: Not good. Implemented scenery is hit and miss (usually miss). “Enter shack” says you can’t enter it, but “X shack” says you can. The answer is a simple “in” – odd. In the Dome of Life, the same lengthy room description was used for both halves of it, with just a minor variation at the end. There is no difference between a 61-point ending and the 100-point ending – at least, no difference that I could see. These treasures don’t even have a purpose, except to give a higher score at the end of the game.

     Puzzles: Easy or impossible, with no middle ground. Points are gained just from picking up important objects found in various areas. Two of the most important puzzles in the game, the four doors and later the four boxes, can be solved with an “undo” followed by the next possible choice. I’m not sure Brandon realizes “undo” isn’t just available at an ending. Both puzzles would be insanely difficult to figure out otherwise, yet this makes them just minor obstacles that don’t really pose a challenge. Then, there are two mazes (well, three, but the third isn’t hard). The first might be possible to solve, because variations to the text and available exits at least provide feedback to the player. I gave up and got the answer from the walkthrough. It might be okay if either was a real maze, but that’s not the case. These are pseudo-mazes where the solution is a special combination of directions. In the first maze, failure brings you back out of the maze. The second is tougher, because not only is every room identical (every room can be exited in any direction), but the solution involves going one way and then back the way you came. Who could possibly solve this?

     The story: It’s pretty generic. You’re an archeologist looking for the tomb of a mythical (and possibly evil) warrior, which was written in a legend in a rare (but apparently readily available) book. The premise is never really developed, though. The phantom isn’t even there, and instead, you ultimately confront an ages-old deceased explorer who might also be evil. At the very least, he might have warned me before I joined in his fate. Also, if he had been there for 500 years, why was a note written to him just lying outside the tower?

     I hate to be so negative about Phantom: Caverns of the Killer. I think the author is probably young, and I know he must have spent a lot of time working on this game. I cringe to think of what other reviews he’s likely to see, and I just hope that this isn’t too discouraging. It takes time to get this right. I would encourage him to practice even non-interactive writing. Get better at that, and read a lot. Then make each game better than the one before, and before you know it, you could have a top-10 entry one of these years.

     To rank this one accurately on my scale, I have to give it a 2.5. As it is, there just isn’t much here to be excited about.