Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Wednesday, 6 August 2003

# 6:55 PM

game review

Recently (pace this Slashdot article) an old PC-DOS game, Beneath a Steel Sky, was rereleased as freeware to run under the ScummVM emulator. So I gave it a try. BaSS is a 2D point-and-click adventure game of the style popular before there were first-person shooters or massively multiplayer online roleplaying games. LucasArts is perhaps the best known developer of such. They are not unlike text adventures with graphics. BaSS was done by a tiny British game house, Revolution Software, that I'd never heard of; I imagine they're hoping to draw attention to their current offerings by providing this one as freeware.

This sort of game is generally all about solving puzzles. The puzzles in BaSS are well thought out, not too easy yet possible to solve with the information available within the game - with one horrible exception, the second-to-last puzzle, which seemed completely unmotivated. I had to resort to an online hints site to figure out that one, and after reading the hints it still made no sense.

The game world is a fairly standard postapocalyptic cyberpunk city, surrounded by wasteland. The art is good for its time (not all that much can be done with two-dimensional prerendered frames in eight-bit color at 320x200 resolution) and the user interface is pretty smooth. The hero possesses a Highlander Trenchcoat (noun: a trenchcoat capable of holding an unlimited number of large bulky items in its inner pockets without displaying any visible bulge) so the inventory mechanism is utterly straightforward. There is lots and lots of game dialogue. Unfortunately, it suffers from a problem that Andrew Plotkin has complained about, which is common to this genre: dialogue menus aren't really interactive. To quote him:

...when you talk to a character, you get three to five choices of things to say. If you get a little farther into the conversation, you might get a submenu of four or five topics to ask about. And you know what? The right answer is always to ask about all of them. They're all important clues -- or important background information, or character-building, or some other carefully crafted message from the designers.

And that means each conversation is a cut scene. It is not interactive. I can't put it more clearly than that. You sit back and listen to the pre-scripted dialogue, occasionally clicking a menu option to hear the next paragraph. You could skip some options, or leave early, of course -- but why bother? You're just going to come back later and listen to the rest. It's the shallowest kind of interactivity.

I didn't mind it very much in this game, because all the dialogue is really interesting and fun to listen to. However, at one point I neglected to save for a long time, and then got killed, and had to run through the whole sequence again. And then it was tedious and annoying. This is another problem with the game: there are only a few points at which you can be killed, so you get lulled into a false sense of security. But the lethal points all give you no warning whatsoever. You're walking down a tunnel, and a giant spider pops out of a hole in the wall and eats you. Whoops. Hope you saved recently.

There was another problem with the dialogue: all the NPCs were far too willing to talk to the protagonist. The setup goes like this: the protagonist has been captured in the wasteland and brought to the city by its security forces. Their helicopter crashes, and the protagonist takes the opportunity to escape. Security goes on alert, everyone is told to watch out for the saboteur, and the inter-level elevators are disabled (getting them to work again is one of the major puzzles). Now the protagonist is walking around asking questions which clearly indicate he's new in town. Yet no one even for a moment suspects him of anything. They all tell him all sorts of crucial and sensitive information. Even the policemen themselves are like this! Needless to say, this seriously messed with my suspension of disbelief.

All in all, it was a fun game, but nothing wonderful.