You Are Surrounded by Trees. A Dirt Road Runs East and West.

I came across a game called Facade (http://www.interactivestory.net/). It's described as an art game and is free to download, a bad portent when both are combined. The concept is interesting: the player is given the role of an auxiliary but potentially influential character in a drama. You type and move around from a first person perspective as the other two characters, a yuppie couple, duke it out. Facade does alright, particularly at portraying the ensuing drama, but it becomes easy to tell, even during the first play through (the game is short and has many endings), that the game is switching from one preset event to another. Also, the method of user interface, moving around and typing as the player would normally speak, is ambitious, and I don't think Facade does anything to overcome the obvious pitfalls of that method.

Most notable to the player is the text parser. The website is very misleading when it states that the "innovative text parser allows the system to avoid the 'I don’t understand' response all too common in text-adventure interactive fiction." It does just that fairly regularly if you don't say the right things. What to say becomes more apparent after playing through a few times, but Facade does a poor job of directing the player. I personally believe the text parser died many years ago for good reason. Even if natural language processing were feasible, the focus of a game is likely more limited than many reasonable player responses. Hence dialogue trees. Dialogue trees aren't ideal because they limit suspension of disbelief, promote meta gaming, and require less creativity from the player. However, they're much easier to implement, guide the player to scenarios within the scope of the game, and allow complex choices. Also, if the player is controling a defined character, they may allow dialogue that suits the character.

I don't know if it's good or bad, but typical branching as in Choose Your Own Adventure-style games is replaced by several possible events that may be triggered. Some events may come in a different orders or not at all. Despite this, progression through the game is surprisingly linear. I'm not against linearity, though. Overall, I think the system is neat.

There's my review. Facade was worth playing, though flawed. Even though Trip and Grace responded with confusion half of the time and in turn had me responding in confusion, I found the game atmospheric and novel. Dialogue and story were fine. Voice acting was good. Graphics were 3D, but looked hand drawn by an average drawer. My guess is that they were.

I'll try to give a rundown of Dungeon Quest on Monday. I've came up with a lot more stuff in the last couple days. Hopefully I can cement the basics soon and then work on the long process of designing the dungeons and monsters.