IFCOMP 2008 - Magic

     >xyzzy
     Everyone enjoys the XYZZY spell. Sadly, children are rarely willing to travel from their birthday parties to a debris filled room on the other side of the world in order to see it in action.

     >plugh
     You invoke the grand spell PLUGH and with a poof you are instantly transported to exactly where you were! For some reason this spell never gets a positive reaction at parties.

     It’s hard to know just what to make of Geoff Fortytwo’s Magic. It’s dark humor, mixed with the absurd, sprinkled with some disturbing imagery (such as the rotting corpse of a dead mime). It begins with little more than expressions of insecurity shown by a children’s party magician (apparently suffering from low self-esteem), but gradually gets more and more weird as wild rabbits attack in a run-down city, a cult of bunny-worshipers help and hinder progress, and real magic becomes a tool for the protagonist to use.

     The game offers adequate short-term goals, but doesn’t present the player with a primary objective until very near the end. Much of the game is spent just interacting with what’s around, hoping something good will come of it. These small steps peter out after a while, when there are no more hats to find or wounds to bandage. It becomes a matter of working backwards from what appears to be the primary goal: getting a hand grenade. Even this becomes a “do it because it’s there” objective, since it’s not clear why the protagonist would need such a thing until the very end.

     The game is solid. As far as I could tell, it was bug-free. I didn’t notice any guess-the-verb issues or other rough spots in the implementation. It’s also written pretty well, without noticeable spelling or grammatical problems. This alone puts it a step above much of what was entered in this year’s competition. So, that leaves the story and the puzzles.

     I already described the story: dark humor, absurd, a little disturbing in spots. It’s interesting and original, but it seems to meander a little without offering a clear point. For most of the game, it’s just a scenario in which the protagonist does stuff. Usually, when a protagonist does stuff, it’s for a reason. Here, it seems too unfocused. It’s not the typical problem of puzzles taking the place of a story, because the game is obviously trying to tell one. It’s just a hard thing to pinpoint or explain in brief, because it ends up not feeling like a story in the traditional sense.

     The puzzles hint at brilliance, but suffer from poor cluing. The protagonist learns a magic trick that plays a part in several puzzles, but it’s never quite consistent in what it does. Of course, that's not necessarily a negative -- it gives variety, after all. It transforms one thing into another, based on a comparison of the two. It allows the protagonist to look like certain NPC’s, but not every NPC. Sometimes it turns one thing into the other thing. Sometimes it gives one thing the properties of another, using the other thing as a sort of metaphoric inspiration. At least once, the transformation involves wordplay. It’s gimmicky but slick, and not something I’ve seen in IF before.

     (The next paragraph contains probable puzzle spoilers.)

     Poor hinting makes some of the puzzles next to impossible. Halfway through, I took to the built-in hints and relied heavily on them for the remainder of the game. The protagonist is expected to do certain non-obvious things that aren’t prompted or motivated in any way. It’s probably possible to stumble on them with enough trial and error, but I often felt that I wouldn’t have been able to figure out what to do without the hints. Part of the problem is that the game allows the player to beat his or her head against a dead end, without making an effort to redirect the player back to other areas. It’s necessary to solve certain puzzles before others, but it’s often unclear how that works because the player has no idea what reward will be found. For instance, a player is likely to get stuck trying to pilfer a coin from a collection plate, completely unaware that elsewhere in the game is a coin you’re supposed to find and put into the plate. In another example (the hamster wheel), a vital piece of it is hidden two objects deep, and is only discovered in a disambiguation question.

     Magic scores a “7” even without the bonus point, due to its solid implementation and well-edited writing. It’s an interesting game, but the puzzles are brought down by a lack of adequate hinting. The story, too, could be more focused than it is. Still, this is one of the more enjoyable works of IF in this year’s competition, and I recommend it.