IFReviewed by
Paul OBrian on 2006-07-20 09:09
Sometimes two heads really are better than one. Take
Robb Sherwin, an author with writing ability and panache to spare, but whose comp games have traditionally been major-league bugfests. Combine with Mike Sousa, whose Comp2000 entry
At Wit's End proved that he was capable of thorough, polished implementation and taut pacing, though his prose didn't particularly draw attention to itself (for good or bad.) The result is a game that uses each author's strengths to its best advantage. NTTS had me on the edge of my seat almost immediately, invested in the characters and sweating through the rapidly mounting tension. That sick, scared, hollow-stomached feeling isn't one I tend to enjoy, even when it's produced by fiction -- that's why serial killer horror is a genre I usually avoid -- but I have to admit, this game did an excellent job at producing it. Very short scenes, whose interactions are limited to a few, very obvious moves, pile rapidly atop one another, screaming towards a conclusion that left me breathless, saddened, and a little confused.
Right about then, the game did something that really pissed me off. Of course, I didn't know at the time to be pissed off about it -- I only found out later, after spinning in frustrated circles, trying to make progress. And even though this move is one of the major surprises in NTTS, I'm going to spoil it now, because to my mind, it's a terribly unfair trap lying in wait for people who approach IF like I do. You've been warned. What happens is that NTTS appears to end tragically. It then offers the standard "Please enter RESTORE, RESTART or QUIT" prompt, and indeed, you can restore or quit from this prompt, and those functions will work as advertised. RESTART, however, doesn't really restart the game but instead moves it to its next section. Now, it's true that this is not a new idea. At least one other game pulls a similar trick, but in that game, no matter what you type at the question's prompt, the letters RESTART appear. NTTS, however, offers a system prompt at which some responses will generate system actions and other responses will generate game actions. This is a very, very bad idea. You know why? Because I chose RESTORE, that's why. I restored my game, trying to "win" that first section, and failed, not knowing that failure was the only option. I was about to restore again, but I just couldn't think of anything new to try, so I checked the walkthrough, and found out that the way to solve this "puzzle" was to type RESTART at a system prompt that really wasn't. This is dirty pool. If you're going to sneakily integrate system prompts with the game, at least have the courtesy not to make the feature into a puzzle, because solving a cheating puzzle isn't any fun.
I approached the rest of the game with wariness and caution, unwilling to get too drawn in, which is too bad because NTTS apes Photopia's viewpoint-fragmentation (though not so much its time-fragmentation) to great effect, in the service of telling an interesting, multi-layered story. Of course, it was a story that still left a few major plot danglers swinging even when it reached its real conclusion, not to mention threw in cultural references from Jack The Ripper to Lewis Carroll without much to support them. Still, it was engaging stuff, and was peppered with one or two really clever puzzles. The overall design was solid, save for the one flaw, but that flaw was so glaring, I really can't ignore it. No Time To Squeal demonstrates that great things can happen when two IF authors combine their strengths, but unfortunately, it also shows that even teams still have their weaknesses.
