Blasting Requires Dynamite

IFComp09 Review: Condemned

The Interactive Fiction Competition is an annual event that’s been running since 1995 (this is the 15th iteration). Anyone can participate, whether by submitting a game or by voting on the entries. I’m doing the latter.

There are major spoilers in the following review; consider yourself forewarned.

(Game: Condemned | Author: A Delusioned Teenager)

I played this game through to the end purely out of a morbid sense of curiosity, which was amply fuelled by the opening—I’m wearing a gag I can’t remove and seem to be about to crucify myself? Well, that sounds like fun… but flippancy aside, it was a good story hook. I’ll now focus on the negatives and return to the positives at the end of the review.

The writing is deceptively bad. Before Condemned, I had played a couple of apparently untested and under-implemented games, and so the presence of full sentences and proper descriptions was initially a relief. However, on closer inspection, said descriptions were rather oddly written, e.g. “…the bicycles looking down at you in asphyxiated agony…”. It’s also so full of self-loathing that I thought it was a parody (I laughed at the dead bicycles, that’s how heartless I am), but no, it’s sincere. The melodrama is caked on, and I just couldn’t take it seriously.

It’s when you get into the flashbacks that the real problem of Condemned reveals itself: the game is on rails. There are interminably long exposition-laden conversations with your sister, which basically involve you entering ‘g’ and ‘z’ over and over again, and there’s one set path to go down with no way of avoiding it. It should have been a short story, because as it stands it’s not really interactive fiction. The morality is also caked on, incidentally, and the failing here is that the game assumes you’re going along with the whole thing (and sure, if I had then it would have been effective in an intensely depressing kind of way).

Unfortunately, it’s obvious from the start that said sister is going to die/be mutilated horribly/etc at some point (I think you actually tell yourself that you don’t know what you’d do without her…), so I quickly became frustrated with my boneheaded character and his inability to stop acting like an idiot and/or my inability to control his actions sufficiently. Taking the helmet from my sister didn’t feel like a choice, but rather a predestined decision by the author, so I didn’t care when that action ended badly. Of course, a major plot point rests on that action (and a few others), but I felt that it could have been more subtly achieved.

And now for the positives! The implementation is good. I don’t remember finding any jarringly absent descriptions/objects throughout, or any bugs. From the technical side of things, it works. There were also a few genuinely creepy moments in the midst of all the sledgehammer-subtlety and self-flagellation, namely the parts in the house just before the mother and now-horribly-mutilated sister return home. If the author had concentrated on more such events and in a slow but sure undermining of the main character’s grasp on reality, this would have been a more successful narrative.

On reflection, the complete disregard for the writing rule of “show-don’t-tell” was what ruined the plot, the story and ultimately the game for me. All the way through our character’s feelings are painstakingly explained, the back-story and motivations are gone through in minute detail, and the result is that it feels like the game is telling us what to think. Add that to a loss of interactivity and a really dark subject, and you don’t end up with a good game. I’ve recently been replaying Anchorhead, which has many dark moments in it. The difference is that these moments almost always just happen, and the main character doesn’t go on for a paragraph or two about how terrible she feels and how awful her life is. It’s left to the player to decide how he or she will react to the horrible revelations, which is infinitely more effective.

Condemned doesn’t just take away physical interactivity, but also emotional interactivity, and from my perspective that’s the main failing.