#parser-based if

This was a fun short game (a little over an hour for me): lots of things recalled the Enchanter trilogy, mostly in positive ways: the time-travel puzzles, the sensible magic system, the spare writing all show that they played a role in influencing the game. It’s a fun, snarky romp where you play a druid sent back in time by your order (I myself pictured the Federal Bureau of Druids as something along the lines of an American Ministry of Magic, but it’s never fleshed out) to avert the apocalypse, an event caused by a ritual performed by a group of cultists. Sent partway back in time, you need to find more elements to feed into the time-travel spell so that you can move through time more freely, investigating how the cultists came to bring about the apocalypse, then disrupting the ritual.

It’s a good concept, and it’s pretty well implemented. The small map that changes as you move back and forth between the four seasons gives you an opportunity to see the coming apocalypse from a variety of perspectives throughout the game ... and for a piece of IF with such minimal NPC interaction, the story certainly is person-focused, with many puzzles being of the knowledge/information/persuasion type. The small map repeated (with variations) across all four seasons is well designed, and the overall map for the game as a whole, integrating all four sub-maps, is even elegant. The small space becomes almost transparent to move through as you play (and the graphical map that’s automatically built at the top of the interpreter screen is helpful in achieving this: it’s an attractive but not distracting touch that helps to orient the player, signal where things are, and track which parts of the geography haven’t been explored yet).

The writing is usually rather good, too: spare, and sometimes to the point where that’s a fault, but also indicating player focus on the urgent tasks the PC is performing. Significant moments (the beginning, the endings) are usually still short, but rather punchy, and there’s a wry humor in a lot of them that can be very funny. The few minor grammatical errors are definitely in the “well, there are bound to be a few in any medium-sized interactive work” category and not in the “clearly the author didn’t care about proofreading” category. There was some good slapstick-type humor, here, too, and some snarky observational bits that I quite enjoyed: the chicken and the road, for instance.

The puzzle structure is also elegantly thought out: the early bits of the game have comparatively simple puzzles, largely of the object-manipulation type, that gate access to the ability to travel through time to different seasons; but while solving these puzzles, the player gets background information that’s needed to solve the puzzles later in the game; and once all four seasons are accessible, the puzzles begin to be more focused on the time-travel mechanic itself, first making the device mobile (instead of requiring the player to return to a specific location in the middle of the map), then making it possible to carry objects through time. Each of these changes substantially alters the map for the player, making solutions possible to outstanding puzzles, and each requires that old objects be rethought in new ways. The puzzles themselves are basically fair, and I even found most of them to be too easy; but two—getting past the cow, and moving the quartz forward in time—I found underclued and went to the walkthrough for solutions.

I suppose what I really wanted here was for things to be both tighter and more fleshed out. Tighter, in the sense that I wish the objects were more frequently reused in different ways, and that the time-travel mechanic were made use of more thoroughly throughout the game; and more fleshed out, in the sense that I wish there were not only more implementation depth but also more backstory: we get virtually nothing about the three major religions in the story aside from a few very vague suggestions (solar, military; druidic, planty; cultic, strange). Having some of the cultural and religious depth fleshed out here would have added a lot, I think. But this was a fun game, and it was a good way to spend an hour and a half or so.

Overall rating: 8/10.

“It’s a mistake to anthropomorphize humans” is a really good opening line. For one thing, it sets the tone that the PC uses throughout the game—cynical, worldly, experienced, a little superior, just a little didactic. Completely appropriate for a "memoir of a demonic spy in the Cold War between Heaven and Hell,” as the description has it. For another thing, it sets just the right note of “something is different here” with a basic logical disconnect: how can the narrator say one shouldn’t anthropomorphize humans? Aren’t humans already anthropomorphic? By definition, even?

So it’s a clever, fun-to-play, puzzly bit of parser IF that tells a well-controlled story that gradually opens up the scope of the investigation, as a good detective story should: at first, you arrive at the casino seeking only to discover why another demonic operative has abandoned (what you know at or near the beginning of the game to be) a camouflaged outpost for Our Side, but discover, in the course of your investigation, that much more is at stake: there’s a plot afoot by Heaven’s zealots to turn the cold war hot, and it becomes your job to investigate that plot and put a stop to it.

The writing stays wonderful throughout: snarky, weary, knowing, just a little tired; then, after the middle game, increasingly alarmed at what’s happening. The tone is spot-on throughout. The basic puzzle mechanic is clever, too: the conceit is that, since you are a spiritual being, you cannot interact with (most) physical objects and need to manipulate humans into doing so by giving them motivations (verbs, roughly, although things are of course not that simple), and “manners” (adverbs, roughly). This is an unusual form of indirection, and it basically works quite well, although some of the puzzles are rather fiendish, and there are places where I wish they were less fiddly.

For me, it was the puzzle hardness and some small bits of implementation wonkiness that kept this from moving up to being an unqualified ten: the puzzle involving manipulating the diplomats into coming to a peace treaty was difficult, because the motivations for the three of them were opaque; and the usually-excellent built-in hint system almost seemed to be actively misleading in this case: nothing I did based on the hints managed to get the diplomats to come to a deal, and I had to take another tack entirely to solve the problem. (This was the only place where the built-in hint system failed me, though. It also was enough to get through the endgame’s final puzzle, though it was a little vague there, too.)

But all in all, this was wonderful: challenging without being impossible, puzzly without sacrificing narrative, story-based and well-written, with a dozen and a half or so well-implemented NPCs. My biggest complaint, overall, is that there wasn’t more game, and I really hope that Sidewinder the demon shows up in a sequel.

Overall score: 9/10.