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Playing Deadline, Part 4

20 Jul

We’re now closing in on the end game, tailing our two suspects, Baxter and Dunbar, as they move about the Robner estate. Succeeding at another cat-and-mouse chase lets us observe an urgent, whispered conference between the two inside the garden shed, although we can’t make out the actual words spoken. But that doesn’t matter. We have enough now to ARREST DUNBAR AND BAXTER and win the game. When we do so, Blank gives us the full story in classic Agatha Christie fashion.

Mr. Robner's life was his company, as was attested to by a number of the principals. George knew that Mr. Robner had lost control of the company, and a story in the Daily Herald indicated that Mr. Baxter intended to sell the company to Omnidyne, the multi-national conglomerate, presumably to advance his career. Baxter admitted to the merger plans, but indicated that Mr. Robner was in complete agreement. This is contrary to what George and Mrs. Robner said. The note pad found in the library was Robner's last, desperate attempt to save the company, in which Robner threatened to expose Baxter's involvement in the 'Focus' scandal, whose details are unclear. Baxter denied getting the note, but it was not in the trash. The papers detailing Baxter's criminality in the scandal were kept locked in a safe in a hidden closet near the library. Only George and Robner knew the whereabouts and the combination to the safe.

Baxter planned to murder Robner, playing on the fact that Robner was known to be depressed, even suicidal. He enlisted the help of his lover, Ms. Dunbar, one of whose medicines was found to interact fatally with the medicine Robner was taking. Clearly the relationship of Baxter and Dunbar was kept quiet, although Mrs. Rourke had an inkling of it. After the concert at the Hartford Philharmonic, which both Baxter and Dunbar attended, they returned to the Robner estate. Dunbar placed some LoBlo in Robner’s tea, and Robner died some time later. Baxter, using the ladder from the shed, entered the library after Robner had died and exchanged the incriminating cup for a clean one (counting the cups and saucers in the kitchen reveals that a cup is missing). Coming down the ladder, Baxter presumably dropped the cup and inadvertently left one piece on the ground in the rose garden, nearby where Mr. McNabb found the ladder holes while tending to his roses.

If we fail to arrest Baxter and Dunbar immediately after their conference, he, fearing she is about to confess, goes up to her room and shoots her, then tries to make it look like a suicide (obviously something of a standard modus operandi for him). After that we can only clean up the damage as best we can; at least we can, if we’ve collected sufficient evidence, now arrest him for two murders instead of one. Indeed, and while the full solution is damnably difficult to get to, Deadline does allow for partial success (or failure, depending on how you look at it). It features quite a number of different possible endings. Blank saw this as key to the new adventure paradigm it represented, and a remedy to his biggest frustration with the Wheatley crime dossiers. From a contemporary article in Softline:

Reading the old game books [the Wheatley dossiers], he knew he was on to something, except that at the end, the solution packet was not able to say, “No, you’re wrong; try again”; it simply gave you the answer. It was not interactive.

“We wanted to come up with something where you have action/reaction,” Blank recalls, “where you’re told the part that you’ve missed after you come up with a potential solution, and you can go back and try again.”

Of course, given the game’s legendary difficulty players would be trying again many, many times. In addition to that dodgy rose-garden puzzle, I believe we can point to three factors that make Deadline so hard to crack, perhaps sometimes unintentionally so.

One factor is the very dynamic nature of this storyworld, the same thing that made Deadline so innovative. By having things happen of their own accord, Deadline makes it all too easy to miss those things without even realizing anything ever occurred at all. What happens, for instance, if the player happens to be outside when the phone rings? In trying to craft an adventure that felt more like a real story, Blank ran somewhat afoul of something I’ll call “story logic”: many times in stories the protagonist simply happens to be in the right place at the right time. In a sense the player of Deadline must recreate this story logic, by carefully plotting out the movements of the world around her over many failed plays to deduce where the protagonist needs to miraculously be and when. Whether this is always, absolutely unfair is debatable. It obviously falls into the prohibition against needing “knowledge from past lives” in Graham Nelson’s Player’s Bill of Rights, but if we come to it understanding what kind of rules it’s guided by it can be very rewarding to plot out and crack as a system. This is the puzzle-box mode of play, of coming to understand the game as a system and then devising a plan to guide it where you will.

Another, less positive contributor to Deadline‘s difficulty is that it’s very difficult to know where your investigation really stands much of the time. For example, when two suspects contradict one another, as did Baxter and Dunbar there at the end, that often counts as evidence that will weigh into the final verdict after you make your arrest(s). Yet it’s very difficult to determine what the program considers important and what it does not. Nor is there any way to tell whether you have enough to arrest someone without just trying it and seeing what happens. It all leads to a constant feeling of uncertainty and confusion, not just about the case (which is to be expected), but about just what the program knows about the case. Similar problems often dog even modern mystery implementations, although the opacity could be remedied greatly in a modern reimplementation of Deadline by a simple status screen with progress bars showing the progress of evidence collection. But Infocom didn’t have the resources to spare for such niceties.

Lastly, and least positively, there is a constant smattering of low-level bugginess, especially in the early releases of Deadline. It’s much, much harder to debug a dynamic system like Deadline than it was earlier, more static adventures, and Infocom’s QA processes were not yet what they would be in years to come. Sometimes this just leads to amusing oddities, like the “quantity of Scotch” you can pour out of the bottle and carry around with you. Other times it makes you kind of nervous as a player, uncertain whether you can entirely trust Deadline as a system, as when triggers don’t seem to fire and characters don’t react like you expect them to. In this new mode of play which Deadline represents, which absolutely depends on the game being a consistent and logical construct, such distrust can be deadly to the experience. The inconsistencies are perhaps not even entirely down to bugs, but at least in one case seem more the result of a certain authorial laziness. In the climax, it seems that Baxter simply teleports into Dunbar’s room to kill her rather than walking there, a stark violation of the game’s otherwise staunch commitment to realism. (I believe this at least was corrected in later versions.) At best, it all adds to that certain player uneasiness described in the previous paragraph. At worst, it destroys the player’s faith in the game as a solvable, consistent system.

In addition to the outright bugs, there are a million ways in which the game fails as fiction, most coming down, predictably enough, to character interaction. It’s possible to ask the same person about the same thing over and over, with the same response; to talk about one character with another while both are in the same room; to burst in on people in their bedroom or even bathroom without them seeming to notice or care. Still, given how difficult these problems still are for us even today, and given the game’s age and the technology on which it ran, it seems silly to quibble too much about this sort of thing.

No, better to talk about the strange fascination this dynamic little story-system still manages to inspire. Many who never managed to beat it nevertheless speak of it with a certain awe. Emily Short hit on some of its appeal with her review on the Interactive Fiction Database:

What captured my imagination then, and still has a certain appeal, is the recurring sense of excitement from observing without being observed: listening in on phone extensions, looking for secret rooms, following people. There was always the sense that important and significant secrets were hidden under every surface.

That sense of being thrust into an unfolding story was unheard of in adventure games prior to Deadline. Blank, from Softline again:

“In Deadline, we wanted to appeal to the nonfantasy people who would rather be part of a real story; people who always wanted to participate when they read the books. We designed the game to be open-ended and to have a large vocabulary, but at the same time, we didn’t want it too large and too open.”

Deadline demonstrates the first inklings of a deep rather than broad philosophy of design, in which the storyworld is more compact and focused, but filled with more possibilities for interaction and a deeper commitment to mimesis and realism. Few others were thinking about design on this level in 1982.

As something genuinely new under the adventuring sun, Deadline was greeted with great excitement. It became a deservedly major hit for Infocom, selling almost 25,000 copies in the last eight months of 1982 alone and helping to cement the company’s growing reputation as the most sophisticated and adult of adventure publishers. Today it stands as one of the most important of all the company’s games for its many formal innovations.

Next time I want to talk just a bit more about Infocom before we shift to something else for a while…

 

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22 Responses to Playing Deadline, Part 4

  1. Howard Lewis Ship

    July 20, 2012 at 6:09 pm

    A riff on Emily Short’s note, about observing interactions without being seen, recurs in more modern games; Deus Ex is my wife’s favorite, given that there are lots of NPC conversations you can overhear. I’m also a fan of the Splinter Cell games where such NPC conversations either add flavor, or are important to completing a level.

     
    • Martin

      May 31, 2016 at 1:56 am

      Deus Ex actually has a scene early in the game where you might actually check out the women’s bathrooms while someone in in there. If you go in there, she’ll treat you like a creep later on while if you don’t, she treats you like a normal person. Your boss also tells you to keep out of the women’s bathroom too.

       
  2. Mark

    July 28, 2012 at 4:42 pm

    Very interesting review. Do you have a copy of this interview Marc Blank did?

    I played this game for the first time last summer. The one thing I find very unfair is where you catch the son opening the safe. First,as you said,it is very easy to be unaware of the fact that this event happens in the first place. Secondly if you come in too soon or too late then you will not be able to find the papers that give Baxter a motive for the murder. And therefore be unable to win. It is not even possible to know that you need to find this. One could play this game without ever knowing that you barged in too soon. This is the biggest flaw in the game.

    The second criticism you made about not knowing what the game expects of you is another problem. After showing the ticket and getting two different stories you are supposed to arrest Baxter and Dunbar. Here is the logical flaw I find in this part. There is certainly enough evidence to arrest her but the case against Baxter is circumstantial. The safe papers give a motive for and the contradiction about the alibi gives the possibility of opportunity. Neither one gives proof that he was involved in the murder. Her part might have a motive but we have physical evidence linking her to the crime.

    And yes there is a physical evidence of a second person being involved with the broken china and the ladder. However that does not point to Baxter himself. It does suggest the person did not have access to the house but would eliminate the other suspects but this is not taken as proof by the game.

    Despite these flaws I think the game actually is pretty good. If it was remade with these problems fixed up it would be a great game instead of a good one.

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      July 28, 2012 at 7:26 pm

      Do you have a copy of this interview Marc Blank did?

      The interview is in the September 1982 Softline, which is archived in PDF form at htp://cgw.vintagegaming.org.

      The one thing I find very unfair is where you catch the son opening the safe.

      It’s definitely tricky, but I’m not sure I’d call it outrageously unfair in comparison to the rest of the game. I think that the thoughtful player can probably realize that George is up to something when he hightails it from the will-reading, and also, when she bursts in on George struggling with the locked safe, that waiting a few more turns might have been a good idea. Of course, the latter is an outrageous example of learning by death, so if you consider that automatically unfair then so be it. (But then, in that case you’ll find plenty else to gripe about in Deadline.) Within the rules Deadline plays by, though… I think it’s passable. I sure wouldn’t implement a modern game this way, of course, and a modern player working with different expectations would be justifiably livid if she encountered it.

      The second criticism you made about not knowing what the game expects of you is another problem. After showing the ticket and getting two different stories you are supposed to arrest Baxter and Dunbar.

      Yes, I think you raise a good point here. You really have very little on Baxter, other than motive and opportunity, and little concrete motive on Dunbar. I kept looking for more when I played, which kept giving Baxter time to kill Dunbar. In the end I finally just typed ARREST DUNBAR AND BAXTER, fully expecting to not have enough to get two convictions. Surprisingly, I’d had all I needed all along.

      You’re apparently meant to take the fact that Baxter dropped off Dunbar at the house as proof that he way there later, a sort of smoking gun. This seems quite a stretch to me. Even if Dunbar had indeed taken a cab home on her own, what’s to have prevented Baxter from coming by later? And even if he did drop her off, where’s the proof that he hung around until the murder was committed?

      Oddly, these holes in the case could have been easily filled if it was just possible to overhear the content of the two’s urgent conversation in the garden shed. Perhaps Blank just judged that that would be making the game too easy. Go figure.

      If it was remade with these problems fixed up it would be a great game instead of a good one.

      While I cut the game a lot of slack due to its age and pioneering nature, a modern remake that was less persistently opaque about some things would indeed be cool to see.

       
      • Jason Dyer

        April 13, 2022 at 1:46 pm

        Yay, I finally get to read these.

        Oddly, these holes in the case could have been easily filled if it was just possible to overhear the content of the two’s urgent conversation in the garden shed.

        It is possible to do this by listening to the door when the conversation is happening.

        I’m finding it odd picking on both the letter and the phone call. While someone might not be in the house on a playthrough, if you’re anywhere in the house at all when the phone is ringing you have a long leeway in terms of picking it up. Your writeup is the first I learned of you being handed the letter, I always just found it randomly. And of course, neither is necessary at all for winning the game. The only bit of timing that matters is the will reading, which you get told about explicitly, and then it’s pretty clear George is off to do something suspicious afterwards (he’ll even get mad at you if you’re trying to follow along unlike any other time). I admit my heading him off at the library was partially due to meta-realization, but I did parse by that point there might be a new will hiding somewhere.

        I think having the bar increase on the evidence would be a bad idea, given that part of the point is realizing you’ve seen a clue in the first place! I’m not sure a good “fix” to the opacity of the game but I find the methods of many current mysteries (which slam you over the head with the clues when you find them) to not be terribly satisfying.

        re: more evidence, the game expects you to also use as a clue Baxter lies about never having seen the note on the notepad. There was no doubt to me that an arrest was possible once his lying about his alibi (he was “quite alone” at the concert the whole night, then he switches to staying the whole night but sending Dunbar in a taxi, the fact he was still trying to keep up the lie about that chunk of time was damning to me). Where I got stuck (and I’m still surprised zero other people complained about) is that a syntax existed for applying ARREST to two people at the same time. Maybe I missed a spot in the manual about this. (Also, the Dunbar evidence _is_ weak, and the game is kind of explicit about that if you just try to arrest Dunbar — the point is more than Baxter’s evidence is strong once you realize Dunbar gives him the means/opportunity for the original poisoning, and the only reason Dunbar would do it is Baxter, and the only way for the cup to get spirited away given the sequence is for Baxter to do the deed.)

         
  3. Mark

    July 29, 2012 at 11:07 pm

    The source of this game is available on Baf’s guide and the IFDB. Do you know any company that would be willing to do a remake? Assuming of course that Activision would allow them to do it. But if the source code is public domain it seems they are not too concerned. I would be willing to work on a remake with another person who would need to have much more inform programming experience than myself.

     
    • Harry Kaplan

      July 29, 2012 at 11:48 pm

      The source code is not in public domain. Here is a link that will explain things – Volker Lanz sort of ported the original to Inform.

      http://www.volker-lanz.de/interactive-fiction/infocoms-deadline-ported-inform

       
      • Mark

        July 30, 2012 at 7:23 pm

        Thanks for the link. This was interesting. However isn’t inform the same language that was used by infocom in creating in Deadline. Graham Nelson basically reverse enginered Infocom’s original language. So except for some modern modifications like the undo command it is really the same language it was written in back in 1981.
        So calling it ported is a bit of a stretch.

        Maybe I am wrong. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

         
        • Arthur

          October 27, 2012 at 12:32 am

          The link on Volker Lanz’s site seems to be dead, but his Deadline source code is still available on IFDB. http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=p976o7x5ies9ltdh

          @Mark: Graham Nelson’s Inform is not at all similar to Infocom’s original source language. Remember, Infocom started out using MDL (later ZIL), a Lisp dialect. Contrariwise, Inform 6 is a “curly brace language” descended from C. Nelson’s Inform compiler does *output* the same Z-machine bytecode format used by Infocom, but the *input* language is totally different.

          I vaguely recall that Nelson had to reverse-engineer the Z-machine’s specs from scratch, and didn’t have any inside information about ZIL; it was only many years later (in Internet terms) that official details of ZIL started appearing in the antiquarian community. :) See for example this internal Infocom manual from 1989: http://www.xlisp.org/zil.pdf

           
  4. Dan Weber

    July 18, 2014 at 1:52 am

    1. general issues

    This game has parser problems, and not just from design decisions, like GARDEN and GARDENer being the same thing. When interacting with the ebullion, the game sometimes refuses to distinguish between the “bottle of ebullion tablets” and the “ebullion tablets,” necessitating dropping one of them in another room to properly interact.

    As you said, Baxter seems to teleport. If you cheat you way into the bedroom balcony he’s not there, and if you happen to be sitting under the balcony, you can’t ever catch him.

    I don’t know how to turn the calendar backwards, only forwards. “CLOSE CALENDAR” gives me a double ‘error’ message: “It’s not worth the effort” and “You must be very clever to do that do the calendar.”

    Version 27 is missing critical abbreviations: “G” isn’t “AGAIN” and “Z” isn’t “WAIT”

    You can accuse Marshall (the victim) of murder from anywhere.

    You can “FOLLOW PERSON” to essentially teleport to them, even if you see them through a second story window.re

    Oh, this has a very useful bug I also found in “Infidel”: You can “LOOK AT ALL”. (In “Infidel” you can “EXAMINE ALL”.) It makes finding every single thing in a room very fast.

    2. rooms

    Directions are very confusing. You can’t always tell in which direction something is. Trying to map the outdoors as going SOUTH then NORTH can land you in a different place.

    The room description doesn’t always list exits. If you are in a bathroom, you can’t EXIT or LEAVE (although some rooms, like the dining room, recognize this). You need to say WEST if that’s where the door is, but the room description doesn’t say that.

    I’m disappointed that there isn’t a traditional Zork-like map in the Invisiclues bundle.

    3. easter eggs:

    SNIFF SUGAR: There is no high from sniffing this powder.

    MOLEST: You can do this (or something more aggressive) and sometimes the game reminds you of the criminal code, and sometimes you do it, and go to jail.

    CLEAN WINDOW: You think you’re clever, don’t you? The window is so dirty that it isn’t easily cleaned.

    You can turn the stereo on and off. This can trigger some kind of significant parser error when the song was supposed to end:

    The vRobner vnggnt6wp qdoesn’t vsomething vv iare gdkgThere kseems yn has ended (and not soon enough).

    I can take the book from Baxter but he still reads it. It seems to exist in a ghost state at this point.

    I and Dunbar can both sit on the sofa, but LOOK AT SOFA asys there is nothing on the sofa.

    GET ON CHAIR: This isn’t the kind of thing to sit on! (oh, kay.)

    4. on the fairness of the game

    I remember from my misspent youth that there was a way to make _someone_ panic after the will reading. Your walkthrough helped me remember to show the calendar to George.

    I was lucky and on my first playthrough I opened the door on George at just the right time. But between opening it too soon (when he has nothing) and opening it too late (when he has the will) so I think I would have figured out that there was a proper time to open it.

    I, too, was surprised that I just needed to say ARREST BAXTER AND DUNBAR. I didn’t even need both of them to be in the room when I said it! I did like the fact that I could feel myself getting closer and closer to the “right solution” when I would read the arrest reports and see just what more was needed for the jury to convict.

    The game felt a little short. There was a breadth and difficulty of puzzles, but not much depth. Then again, I don’t think I ever solved it before, so I guess it took me decades to complete.

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      July 18, 2014 at 5:52 am

      Deadline provides a very good negative demonstration of just how much Infocom’s rigorous testing and polishing regime added to the games, having been created before that regime was in place. I’d say it’s definitely the “roughest” of all the games. The Zorks and Starcross also pre-date the version of Infocom we would come to know and love, but, being much more traditional and less dynamic creations, there’s nowhere near as much to go wrong.

      No game written for the standard Z-Machine, however, would have been able to distinguish GARDEN from GARDENER. For technical reasons, the parser only reads the first six letters of each word…

      Thanks for sharing your experiences/impressions here!

       
    • Lisa

      July 19, 2014 at 5:59 am

      I don’t know how to turn the calendar backwards, only forwards.

      Turn the calendar to a specific date prior to the one currently showing, e.g. TURN CALENDAR TO JULY 6.

      Directions are very confusing. You can’t always tell in which direction something is. Trying to map the outdoors as going SOUTH then NORTH can land you in a different place.

      This is true of a number of locations across various Infocom games, though (and indeed IF in general). That said, I found the outdoor geography in Deadline unusually confusing as well.

       
      • Dan Weber

        July 19, 2014 at 7:42 pm

        Ah, I can “TURN TO JULY 15”. That led to the following fun things:

        >turn to july 0
        Do you suppose that would be June 30?

        >turn to july 31
        Thirty days hath September,
        April, June, and November,
        All the rest have 31???

        Looks like an off-by-one error on how many days in July.

        Other fun things I found looking through the source code that weren’t mentioned in the Invisiclues:

        >break china with basket
        As you reach for the china, you think of the pension awaiting you upon retirement. “Is it worth it?” you think, to be booted off the force for an impulse of anger and stupidity. Fortunately, you calm your temper.

        >break china with basket
        With a sweep of your hand, you smash all of them! Mrs. Rourke runs into the room, screaming.

        >kill baxter with gun
        A shot rings out and Mr. Baxter falls to the ground, dead. Good shot.

        >play player
        You are adept only at playing the fool.

        >sigh
        It has been a long day, hasn’t it?

        >hello
        Good day.

         
    • Lisa

      July 21, 2014 at 7:07 am

      Bug #22 here seems to address the stereo: http://www.microheaven.com/InfocomBugs/deadline.shtml

       
  5. Mike Taylor

    November 1, 2017 at 11:51 pm

    “it seems that Baxter simply teleports into Dubar’s room” — typo for “Dunbar”.

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      November 2, 2017 at 8:01 am

      Thanks!

       
  6. Esrom

    June 6, 2019 at 9:10 pm

    Ah, Deadline. I still have a lot of nostalgia for this one. And yes, it basically requires you to be in the right place at the right time a LOT. I’m not sure which is the worse in this regard – Deadline or Suspect.

    I stumbled upon the solution to the whole ‘George’ thing by accident. After following George, he stayed in his room telling me to leave him alone. Since I was getting nowhere with him, I wandered to the library balcony, and was surprised to see him enter when he thought I couldn’t see him. Up until that point, I hadn’t the slightest clue that what he was REALLY after was in the library and that anything suggesting it was in his room or elsewhere was just a red herring.

    As for Baxter ‘teleporting’, well if you go into the master bedroom (directly across from the hall from Ms. Dunbar’s room) and ‘Look into balcony’ you’ll get ‘Mr. Baxter is here’ if he hasn’t already entered the master bedroom (if so, you can look into the master bedroom and get ‘Mr. Baxter is here’). From there, you can do one of three things:

    1. surprise Baxter in by entering either the master bedroom or the master balcony before he kills Dunbar and be shot dead on the spot

    2. hide in a closet in the hall if you’re there (or in the hidden room or the master bathroom) and then hear a pistol shot close by. Returning to the hall or the master bedroom will result in you seeing Baxter running quickly past without him noticing you. This is one of two ways to prove he committed the second murder.

    3. ARREST BAXTER AND DUNBAR and end the case there.

    As far as I know, it’s not possible to run into Baxter outside below the master balcony and catch him running down the ladder after killing Dunbar. I think he basically just teleports from up there to somewhere in the immediate outside vicinity.

    As for bugs, I reported the ‘Mr. Robner’s ghost’ bug to Graeme Cree’s Infocom bugs list. I’m not sure if that’s still around or not.

    Another bug is that you can give things to the characters by putting things inside them. Such as ‘PUT BOOK IN GEORGE’ and then look to see that ‘George is holding: a book’. However, when you try to give things to characters in the normal way (GIVE (whatever) TO CHARACTER), they will usually refuse.

     
  7. Will Moczarski

    May 21, 2020 at 7:47 am

    In the “Softline” quote it says Blanks which should merit a “sic!” or be corrected to Blank.

    there are a million way -> ways

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      May 21, 2020 at 3:59 pm

      Thanks!

       
  8. Jeff Nyman

    September 19, 2021 at 6:50 pm

    Important points!

    uncertain whether you can entirely trust Deadline as a system

    depends on the game being a consistent and logical construct, such distrust can be deadly to the experience.

    Yes! This is very much a case of where a game can remove the one quality that matters most: trust. Once a player stops trusting the system that makes the game possible, enjoyment can ultimately suffer.

    Consider a (recent) game like Dishonored 2. These are games that are predicated a bit on stealth and on covering your tracks a bit. In this game, in the opening mission, you can kill your target and leave him where you killed him. Later, as you are escaping the area, a guard announces that their leader is dead. However, you can also kill the target but then hide his body in a secret room, locking the door behind you with a special signet ring that only you have. When you do this, that same guard announces that the leader is missing.

    With no way to access the room containing the leader’s body, his fate remains a mystery. And the game reflects that.

    And think about this: the experience is really just one line that a guard says. But it very much provides an experience that builds that trust. The game builds my experience based on what I actually did. This means the game seems to see the details as important. This also means the game respects my ingenuity, acknowledging when I’ve tried to do something, like cover up the fate of the target.

    Either experience was possible within a single play-through and however that experience played out, it taught me a bit about the mechanics. Either: “If I leave a body around, it’s likely to be found.” Or: “I can make sure a body isn’t found.” Either way, my style of play now opens up because there are times, for example where having the body found might be exactly what I need (such as a distraction or misdirection).

     
  9. Jeff Nyman

    September 19, 2021 at 7:27 pm

    “…it destroys the player’s faith in the game as a solvable, consistent system.”

    Agreed. And I think in the case of story-driven games, there is also an added component to this trust, which is focused around: “Do I trust this game to tell a compelling story?” Do I feel the story is being compromised by the game mechanics? Do I feel the story is really nothing more than the game mechanics?

    As is said here about Deadline:

    “…the game fails as fiction, most coming down, predictably enough, to character interaction.”

    Yep. And I do believe that focus on people — something I brought up in a previous post/comment — is something that text adventures never really managed to get right. People, and thus their motivations and interactions, never came off as authentic to me. I think ultimately this was true for a lot of people thus, partly, explaining the demise of the text adventure.

     
  10. Vince

    September 22, 2023 at 8:45 pm

    Going through the blog is finally giving me the excuse to be playing Infocom’s catalog in order, games I always found fascinating but which I missed as a kid due to not being a native English speaker and growing up more in the graphic adventure era.

    I was able to solve Deadline with no hints (unlike Zork 1 and 2), it took me about a month, in fits and burst, with long pauses in between.

    I will say that, after understanding how the game wants you to play it, I didn’t find any of the puzzles particularly unfair, just difficult.

    I was probably lucky to find the fragment right away; arresting Dunbar and Baxter felt the obvious thing to do after reading the endings from arresting only one of the two, while having all the evidence, but I was also surprised that it just worked.

    Finding the hidden closet was what took me the most time to find out, but in hindsight showing the calendar to George was the obvious thing to do.

    As noted by Jimmy and others, the main difficulty is to understand if your actions contribute to progressing or not, and that what you discover is actually taken into account by the game.

    I disagree that Infocom did not have any means to do it: the score command taunts you constantly, while it could have been used effectively to that end.

    Overall, I really liked the game as I love this kind of puzzle, made up of trying multiple attempts until you finally have enough information to make a “victory run”.

    A modern game that does this perfectly is Outer Wilds.

     

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