Klaustrophobia

review by C.E. Forman

A winner in the 1994 AGT programming contest, the three-part epic "Klaustrophobia" chronicles your exploits as you leave on a two-week vacation from ICON Inc., your place of employment. Although strongly influenced by Infocom's "Bureaucracy," both in its humor as well as its events and puzzles, "Klaustrophobia" remains a very original, very challenging, and at times extraordinarily frustrating adventure.

This is also one enormous game. It's so large, in fact, that it's been divided into three separate segments, apparently due to restrictions in AGT. When you reach the end of one section you can save your status and go on to the next portion, but you can't start from Parts 2 or 3 until you've solved the sections prior to them. The menuing system for this behaves rather strangely, though. Selecting to play the whole game at once, then typing "QUIT" in one section, will move you to the next rather than exiting the game entirely.

Unfortunately, the game also serves as a perfect guide to the restrictions of the AGT system. IF fans familiar with the AGT parser know that it's unpleasantly quirky under the best of circumstances and can be absolutely infuriating in others. "Guess-the-Verb" games are not uncommon.

To be fair, though, the author seems to have realized the restraints of her development system, and in most cases has made a serious effort to deal with them, or has at least attempted to cover them up. "Klaustrophobia" really pushes the limits of AGT, and the tremendous effort that went into it shows. The writing is also extremely well-done, with references to "Bureaucracy," "Hitchhiker's Guide," and the novels of Douglas Adam.

Like the author, you're a female by default in "Klaustrophobia," but you can elect to change and become a male at any point in the game (with humorous results in a few special circumstances). Your character's sex has almost no impact on the game's story or puzzles, though.

Part 1 of the game starts you off on your trip to Hollywood, where you've been selected to appear on a game show. As might be expected, though, absolutely nothing goes right. From the game's inception, you'll be barraged with every annoying situation possible, from constantly having your flight rebooked, to being given the runaround when trying to pay bills, to never being able to find a pen when you really need one.

Compounding your problems is your evil cat Klaus, who, if not kept happy, will ruin your trip by shredding all your important mail and using your new Wafer-Stomper boots as his litterbox. Taking care of Klaus and running a million last-minute errands makes the first scenario an exercise in effective time-management.

A more difficult task is the unrealistic amount of foresight a player is sometimes required to have. It's quite likely that you'll overlook something early in the game and not realize it until later, when your progress grinds to a halt and there's no way to backtrack aside from restoring. In this respect, "Klaustrophobia" encounters the same problems inherent in "Bureaucracy," although the puzzles' solutions are far less obscure.

For the benefit of maze-haters, I should also mention that there are quite a few sprinkled throughout the game. Almost all of them are relatively straightforward, though, requiring only one or two moves in a single direction to get through.

Once you've finally managed to reach your destination, you'll enter Part 2 of the game, which moves you from TV gameshow to TV gameshow in much the same manner as Part 1 did with airports and planes. Eventually, you'll win a free trip to Mexico for the grand prize, thus moving the game into its third and final phase. The ending tells us that a sequel is planned.

Registering "Klaustrophobia" provides the player with numerous resources to draw upon, the most helpful being a set of pop-hints, similar to Infocom's InvisiClues. If you're anything short of an expert player, you'll probably need them, because this game is hard with a capital H. The difficulty stems equally from the puzzles-- most of which are very good (I loved the MacGuyver bit!)--and the AGT parser's limitations.

Intelligent, hilarious, and occasionally so true-to-life that it's scary, "Klaustrophobia" deserves a place in every I-F hobbyist's library. Until someone decides to port the game to Inform or TADS, though, it's likely to remain every bit as aggravating as the situations it makes fun of. But when one looks at the game itself, apart from the system it was developed on, "Klaustrophobia" is excellent.

The Gorreven Papers

review by Greg Soultanis

The Cold War may be over, but you can relive the intrigue of being a spy imprisoned behind enemy lines in "The Gorreven Papers." This game could be described as a "snack-sized adventure, " to use John Baker's term, since it only contains about 30 locations. But I was really captivated (no pun intended) by this game's danger-at-every-turn setting, the author's eloquent writing, and the good interaction with the game's NPCs.

In The Gorreven Papers, you play a spy with a straightforward mission: outsmart your captors, obtain the top-secret documents that give the game its name, and make a safe escape.

The game is a great choice for beginning players, because of its short length and the hints available during play. If you ask for a hint at any point during play, you'll receive a clue that's relevant to the area of the game you're in or the puzzle at hand, which is very smart.

If you make a wrong move during the game, you're instantly made aware that you've blown it, and you may be given a hint for what you should've done instead. So even though there are several "instant death" situations, you're unlikely to make the same mistake twice.

The text descriptions for each room and event during the game were richly detailed and always fun to read. My only gripe about the writing was the sparseness of the endgame. Why was there so much description earlier but such a brief ending?

Interestingly, the game's author devised the game's entire parser and development system, called Archetype. The Gorreven Papers is one of several games included when you download Archetype from GMD. The game's parser is well-developed and could understand complex sentences. The parser's responses weren't always as sophisticated as those I've come to expect from TADS or Inform games. The game's vocabulary, too, is rather limited; you can prompt the game to tell you the verbs it understands, and there were not very many that it did. Additionally, there were many verbs I expected the parser to recognize that it didn't, like SHOOT (since you use a gun during the game). Also, the game didn't seem to recognize the concept of "me" at all, as in EXAMINE ME. This I found very interesting, since The Gorreven Papers is written from the first-person perspective ("I'm standing by the north fence"), instead of the second-person perspective common to so many other text adventures ("You are standing in front of a white house."). I found the change of perspective very interesting; since it was so novel I can't really say yet if I really prefer it.

One operational difficulty I encountered was that I couldn't figure out how to restore saved gamefiles. I know that this is possible since Archetype did allow me to use the SAVE command, and did in fact create files with those names when I asked to save them. But I simply found myself unable to open or restore any of my saved games, either from the command line or from within The Gorreven Papers. As a result, I wound up having to play the game all the way through in one session in order to win. This wound up being OK since, as I mentioned, The Gorreven Papers is a relatively short game. Of course, I was frustrated when I walked into a deadly situation and made the wrong move, since I'd have to start all over again, but it I think it made me play with more concentration. But some clearer user documentation that clearly explicates how to restore saved game files would be a real bonus to all potential players.

There are a fair number of red herrings planted throughout the games. This made the puzzles not as easy to solve as they seemed at first glance. But hey, you're a spy trying to escape from enemy hands; it's not supposed to be a piece of cake! It was also difficult at first to determine which found objects you might need later in the game, but this is a common gripe in all text adventures that limit the amount you can carry at one time in your inventory.

It would be great to see a TADS or Inform port of The Gorreven Papers, since Archetype is only designed to run on PCs so far. Although I'm incredibly impressed with the author's ability to program his own development system, I don't think it poses a challenge TADS or Inform as the programming language of choice for new game developers.

The Gorreven Papers displays richly developed text descriptions and some clever but not difficult puzzles; it would be a treat to see more games from Derek Jones, no matter which development system was used.

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