{"id":680,"date":"2010-11-06T14:29:07","date_gmt":"2010-11-06T21:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/islemaster.wordpress.com\/?p=680"},"modified":"2010-11-06T14:29:07","modified_gmt":"2010-11-06T21:29:07","slug":"ifcomp-2010-the-blind-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/ifcomp-2010-the-blind-house\/","title":{"rendered":"IFComp 2010: The Blind House"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/dr_john2005\/328072564\/\" title=\"Broken Mirror, 2006 by Dr John2005, on Flickr\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm1.static.flickr.com\/135\/328072564_1ab6ed6473_m.jpg\" width=\"240\" height=\"180\" alt=\"Broken Mirror, 2006\" class=\"alignright\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The Blind House&#8221; by Maude Overton<\/p>\n<p><em>I scarcely know the woman at my side. I don&#8217;t even know why she was the one I turned to. I can only hope that we haven&#8217;t been followed, that she won&#8217;t ask too many questions. The only choice left to me now is to trust her.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Back to comp games, after a break to get settled into a new living space myself.  So is this about a house belonging to a blind person?  Or a house with no windows?  Or a house that&#8217;s just a house, and has no memory of the people who have lived inside?  Discover this and more in the spoilers beyond!<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The game&#8217;s introduction tells me that it&#8217;s more &#8220;interactive fiction&#8221; than &#8220;text adventure,&#8221; and that puzzles are not the main point of this work.  Great!  It sounds ambitious.  I have high hopes.<\/p>\n<p>First, this game does a lot of technical things right.  I have no technical complaints, and a number of praises.  Whoever this author is, she has mastered her toolkit.  Bravo!<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The cutscenes revealed one paragraph at a time scan well.\n<li>The prose inventory listing fits the style of the work.\n<li>The way the protagonist sensibly leaves certain objects in certain rooms (&#8220;There&#8217;s no need to carry that brick\/blouse around&#8230;&#8221;) is a clean solution to inventory overload, and a technique I will probably steal at some point in the future.\n<li>The in-game map really did help me orient myself while playing.\n<li>The current thought\/motivation in the status bar becomes a key part of play.\n<li>Opening\/unlocking doors is automatically handled after the first time you do it.\n<li>I did approximately zero verb- or synonym-guessing.\n<li>The writing is good, without distracting grammar or punctuation problems.\n<\/ul>\n<p>All of the little things that reviewers love to complain about are taken care of.  And yet, <em>I didn&#8217;t like this game<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>I think I dislike it because after playing to the end and UNDOing to read two other endings, the only emotion I&#8217;m left with is &#8220;what just happened?&#8221;  I mean, I really can&#8217;t tell you want this story is about.  I know that I played as a terrified woman, coming to live with another terrified woman in a dreary house.  I know that I always carry a knife, that I was mysteriously injured in the middle of the night, and somebody is producing sinister paintings (and they look like I painted them).  I know that I can&#8217;t see my reflection in the mirror.  So I spent most of the game trying to figure out if I was schizophrenic, or if the other woman was, or if we were both part of one person.<\/p>\n<p>Then I read three different endings, and they led me to believe that I&#8217;m either a serial killer, a lesbian, or just depressed and cutting myself.  No schizophrenia involved.  I&#8217;m unhappy.  There&#8217;s no explanation for the mysterious paintings, no purpose for the hole in the brick wall, no clue who bloodied me in the night.  I feel like we&#8217;ve just blown past <em>Donnie Darko<\/em> levels of vagueness into the great mysterious un-story.  We have all the ingredients of conflict and we got as far as plot batter, but somebody forgot to install an oven.  There&#8217;s loads of atmosphere, but a lack of resolution.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t like it.  That doesn&#8217;t make it <em>bad<\/em>; maybe it&#8217;s just too avant-garde for my taste.  It&#8217;s possible a good afterword by the author could reverse my opinion.  However, I think there&#8217;s also a design issue here.<\/p>\n<p>For a game that&#8217;s more focused on plot and atmosphere than puzzle-solving, I turned to the walkthrough waaay too often.  Looking back, I&#8217;ve figured out why:  The plot is frequently advanced by the THINK ABOUT action.  There&#8217;s nothing wrong with this by itself.  Though THINK ABOUT is not a standard action, it&#8217;s pretty common in IF and it&#8217;s mentioned in the game&#8217;s introduction that it&#8217;s important.  The problem is that I don&#8217;t trust the THINK ABOUT command here.  While the game is well-implemented in most other respects, thinking about most objects (even apparently important ones) gives a default response.  After a while, I forget to THINK ABOUT anything that seems slightly mundane.  It didn&#8217;t occur to me to THINK ABOUT THE NOTE.  It certainly didn&#8217;t occur to me to THINK ABOUT THE CALENDAR, and I was doubly miffed when thinking about the calendar (not examining it, mind you) was the only clue to the location of the study key.  I didn&#8217;t realize that I needed to think about the email after reading it&#8230; I figured reading involved thinking, I guess.  Over and over, I managed to THINK ABOUT all the wrong things.  This could have been remedied by some out-of-character clues to think about things after examining them, or a generic THINK command that would provide a list of currently available thinking topics.<\/p>\n<p>In the end, this is an extremely polished work that I couldn&#8217;t comprehend, with a small design problem that interfered with its storytelling.<\/p>\n<p><b>Verdict: B+<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;The Blind House&#8221; by Maude Overton I scarcely know the woman at my side. I don&#8217;t even know why she was the one I turned to. I can only hope that we haven&#8217;t been followed, that she won&#8217;t ask too many questions. The only choice left to me now is to trust her. Back to&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-ifcomp-2010"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}