IFReviewed by
Paul OBrian on 2006-07-21 05:09
I have more thoughts about Fort Aegea than I'll be able to fit into these few paragraphs, and I'm a little concerned about it. See, I think this game's shortcomings may be more interesting than its successes, but if I spend more time talking about flaws than strengths, I may give the mistaken impression that I didn't enjoy it. So let me clear that up right now: I liked Fort Aegea quite a bit. Most of the game is really fun -- it has several good puzzles and action sequences, a nice propulsive plot, and some surprising and well-drawn details. In addition, the game employs spellcasting, which is a kick -- there are lots of moments that measure up to anything in
Enchanter, and the spells have the added virtue of being particularly well-suited to the character and thus helping to further define her. The game felt quite well-tested and proofread to me -- I found a few syntactical errors here and there, and maybe one or two bugs, but on the other side there are a number of rather complicated effects that the game produces with admirable smoothness. Oh, and lest I forget, Fort Aegea has some of the most gorgeous feelies I've ever seen with an amateur game, hand-drawn maps that positively exude
Tolkien. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this game to anyone who enjoys
Dungeons-and-Dragons-influenced fantasy IF, especially games in the Enchanter vein.
Very well then, now that that's out of the way, I want to look more closely at a few things that tarnish this game's shine. First, let's talk about that D&D influence. I've been on a yearlong Bioware jag, so the D&D rules are fresh in my mind, and this game hews so closely to them that it may as well have a Wizards Of The Coast logo in its banner. The main character is a druid, with spells like "Entangle" and "Warp Wood", who cannot use edged weapons but carries a mace and plate armor into battle. The game explains the philosophy of her order as one that strove to be "one with the world and viewed good and evil, and law and chaos as balancing forces of nature which were necessary for the continuation of all things." For anyone familiar with AD&D rules, this material will ring a churchful of bells. This, in itself, is not a terrible thing, though it feels a bit boilerplate, as if the story's characters don't really live and breathe in their own fictional universe but are cookie-cut from prefab templates. Where things really break down is when the characters start speaking as if they themselves are D&D players:
"He's the fabled Green Dragon, and he's not been seen or heard from
in over a century! What we know of him we've gathered from the Great
Book of the Dragons and here are the specifics: He's vicious and he
has a ferocious breath weapon; one that unfortunately we don't have a
defence for."
It strains the limits of my belief to think that a person who actually coexists with dragons would talk about their "breath weapons" -- it's just a little too close to saying something like "take a look at this fine sword -- it's +2!". In addition, there are linguistic anachronisms sprinkled throughout the text, such as the adventuring expedition that a history book characterizes as a "public relations nightmare."
The net effect of these choices is to drain the scenario of fictional credibility. Every D&D reference, every anachronism makes the game feel less like a story and more like an exercise -- instead of drawing us into its world, Fort Aegea keeps reminding us of ours. Instead of breaking, mimesis simply stretches thinner and thinner until it's nearly transparent. Here's another way that happens: for much of the game's plot, the PC's objective is to stay alive until nightfall, while being hunted. In the course of trying to do this, she finds several spots that would make outstanding hiding places, where one could easily wait out a day, emerging victorious after the sun sets. Unfortunately, the game doesn't allow any actual time to pass while the PC sits in these places, no matter how many times the player may type "z." I know, because I tried. It was one of the slowest mimesis breaks ever -- the more I saw the "Time passes" message, the more convinced I became that no time was passing. Once I knew that I needed to conform to the game's puzzly expectations in order to complete the scenario, my emotional involvement evaporated -- probably a good thing given that several horrible, unstoppable events occur in the course of play. Fort Aegea has a great deal of fun to offer as a game, but as a story, I found it a pretty inhospitable place.
