IFComp09 reviews: The Ascot
Suggested alternate title: Loquacious D and the Day Cravat of Destiny
This is a terrible, terrible game, and you should go play it right now.
This is another CYOA. CYOAs are a lot less interactive than standard IF, so that's generally a point against it. Not only that, this CYOA is "a Shake 'n Nod Adventure", which is to say, the only interaction you have with it is to say YES or NO.
I realized this and figured that the best it could hope for was a 2.
But it turns out that this minimally interactive fiction is nevertheless more engaging than quite a few freeform IFs. The general mechanic is that the game begins telling a story, and then it will ask you, "Hey, do you want to do X?" or an NPC will do something similar. The sheer amount of random things it allows means that you still feel like you're doing something, even though the choices may be of no consequence. If anything, the choices of no consequence enhance what immersion there is.
The writing is mostly going for Generic Wacky, and comes off like a geeky 16-year-old on a serious Pixie Stix rush. It isn't good writing, but you can do Generic Wacky and fall flat, and this, I found, didn't really do so.
It's got a number of both good and bad endings, and the plot doesn't stall unless you try really hard to make it do so.
And, of course, the fact that the only inputs it really accepts are YES and NO means that the usual issues with the ADRIFT parser are entirely nonexistent.
So at that point, I figured that this would be Not A Waste Of Time, but still not really what we're looking for as a Good IF, so it would be a nice solid 4.
And then, I managed to work out how to get the best ending, which involves (rot13ed for Even More Spoilery Than Usual) npghnyyl rkcybvgvat cnefre reebef naq znxvat gurz cybg-fvtavsvpnag. This means that the player formulates an actual plan, and then executes it, and then it can actually work. All through an interpreter that only really accepts YES/NO answers.
At that point, I was sufficiently impressed that I had to consider this solidly a middle-tier game. Its precise score will have to wait until I compare it against the others.
Well done, Bowman. This isn't really the kind of thing I'm looking for in the IFComp - it never had a chance at top tier - but it's really quite good for what it is.