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Art 3160 - Photopia
I am starting to realize that interactive fiction is just not the genre of gaming for me. The lack of instruction in Photopia, may be viewed by some as cleaver and intriguing, instantly gave me the “oh no, here we go again” feeling coming off of the other games we played earlier For a Change and Dead Like Ants, which i also disliked. As a designer, you cannot assume that people know how to play interactive fiction. I found myself repeatedly resorting the failed command of “kill self” after trying twenty or so other random commands, trying to figure out what the game wanted from me. And often, what I thought were failed commands, we actually time-delayed commands. It all made the game feel broken, and the responses from commands were equally, if not more, ridiculous, and made me feel like an idiot while typing west, east, and north, about a hundred and fifty times each, at one point. I don’t even want to get into the specifics regarding her wings, or the badly thought out solution fix its own bad design, like magically giving you the shovel, you were apparently supposed to have picked up a while back.
There is a very futile attempt at humor here, which is found to be more irritating than anything else. When the “writer” is constantly giving me the definitions from a slightly higher and impractical vocabulary, i’m not sure weather he/she wants to genuinely help me or is trying to get me to take the overly subtle hint that I should remember these words for the future. You may call me doltish (see I can use a thesaurus too,) but what frustrated me the most is that nothing came from it all. The stories didn’t seem to intersect at any point. The moral of one story didn’t cross over to the next. The entire segment of the winged-astronaut was completely arbitrary, and I have an odd loathing towards Alley, (and I tend to like children.) In simple words I don’t get it (“I don’t get it”, means, the game isn’t written very well.)
All these games are trying way too hard to be clever. Good concepts, and a interesting mechanic of flying back and forth between scenarios, don’t save this interactive game from being completely pointless. A good story may lie within here, but it is so deeply buried beneath abstract design and poor execution, that when it was over, instead of feeling glee for the circle of life, or whatever the “writer” was trying to moralize, I felt glee for the fact that I could now go spend my time doing more interesting things, like counting the tiles on my kitchen floor. This game doesn’t give me much hope for the journey i am about to embark on, in creating my own interactive fiction game. I can only hope to make it interesting enough of a story, for the player to want to get through.
