Spiritwrak: a paragraph or two

["Andrew C. Plotkin" <erkyrath+@CMU.EDU>]

This is not a review, because I haven't finished playing it.

Obvious comment one: this is a pastiche of the world of Zork. Maybe
that turns you off. When you play Spiritwrak, you are not moving into
a fresh new universe. But don't get me wrong; the game material itself
is new. You may recognize the names, but you're exploring places
you've never been before. And the spirit is right. It *felt* like
Quendor. 

Let me say this: I woke up earlyish on Sunday morning -- like, 9:30 --
and I hopped into the computer room and booted up Spiritwrak. And I
played it for three hours. I was exploring new areas, correlating
stuff with situations, making progress, and opening up new areas. Of
Quendor! It was *great*. It was *exactly* like being sixteen and
whizzing around Beyond Zork or Spellbreaker. That was the feeling.
It's a weekend, it's 11 am, you haven't eaten breakfast yet, and
you're playing a text adventure. Remember? Remember?

Oh, man.

This is a more complex matter than it appears. Spiritwrak is not very
difficult, and some of the puzzles are not hugely subtle. Spellbreaker
was a lot harder. But -- this gets back to my earlier post -- the
puzzle aspect of a game does not have to be *hard* to be *effective*.
It shouldn't be superficial, of course -- nobody likes endless reams
of "find unit X and put it in slot Y." But *having to decide what to
do* is important to what I enjoy about IF. That is the involvement
that I am looking for.

Spiritwrak is in the general shape of games like Beyond Zork and
Curses, where you have a whole lot of elements and situations
available very early, and you spend the body of the game sort of
figuring out what goes with what. (Contrast Jigsaw, Legend, and
Spellbreaker, where you have a plot more or less laid out, and at any
point in the game you're at a particular point in the plot. (The
categorization is not strict by any means, but you get the idea.)

Obvious comment two: Lots of spelling, punctuation, and capitalization
errors. And extra or missing blank lines. A couple of major bugs.
Don't complain here; list them up and mail them to the author. I am.

Some of the puzzles are awkward and arbitrary. Others are really very
nice. Nothing too difficult, as I said. A couple have attention to
multiple solutions (unless I'm misinterpreting a bug), but generally
you wind up solving it the way the author intended. There are
resource-allocation problems, but not super-strict ones (the way "A
Change in the Weather" was. :-)

There are places where your survival depends on luck, even if you go
into the situation fully prepared. I am reporting these as bugs, since
they can be changed without affecting the structure of the puzzle --
in my opinion, of course, and it's up to the author.

The writing is unpolished -- see aforementioned comment about typos.
The plot design is, mmm, unsubtle. This is not a big metaphor about
life. Then again, neither was Spellbreaker or Beyond Zork. Don't
expect the next Trinity here; just have fun.

I am looking forward to getting home tonight and playing a lot more.
:-)

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."