Review Slouching Towards Bedlam Developer: Star C. Foster and Daniel Ravipinto Publisher: Star C. Foster and Daniel Ravipinto Genre: Interactive Fiction Release Date: September 2003 Platform: Review by Ricardo Pautassi February 3, 2004

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Slouching Towards Bedlam (STB), a text adventure by Star C. Foster and Daniel Ravipinto, has been awarded the first place in the 9th Annual Interactive-Fiction (IF) Competition. Which are the virtues that made STB the best IF for the fans? Let’s consider some of them. First of all, the game is extremely polished: no bugs, no dead ends, no parser mistakes; this is, a bunch of features not often found in IF games. Second, the gameplay consists of an interesting blend of research puzzles and situations that allow the player to operate machines that, in turn, provide clues for the investigation. Not only that, but STB also provides five different endings, each one followed by a nice written epilogue which partially explains the background story as well as the fate of the main characters.

The game takes place in a nineteenth-century English Asylum, Bethelem (also known as Bedlam), which has been in an steady decline for years. You, a psychiatrist, have been causing some trouble to your superiors in Bedforshire; so, after the suicide of Bethelem’s Director, they decide that it is time for you to travel there and take charge of the decadent mental institution. Gameplay itself starts three months after your arrival and your first duty is to reconstruct what has happened in the interim (with special attention to a clinical case you supervised). Very quickly the player will became involved with secret societies, suspicious deaths, strange riddles and sinister messages. Story unfolds not only through description and dialogues, but also by a combination of documents disseminated in personal diaries and magnetophone cylinders.

Lovecraft reminiscence is quite clear in the game, tough the general atmosphere is neither as oppressive as in the texts of the Providence’s writer nor as good as the one depicted in Anchorhead (a great IF horror game). This is mainly due to the poverty of the environments. Immersion in the game is promoted by a an excellent prose but constrained for the scarcity of non-playable characters and the relatively few descriptions available. For example, when strolling trough the hospital there is no opportunity to interact neither with inpatients nor other coworkers, a detail that would have improved the global game’s setting. More important, the core of the story, which gives meaning to the player’s actions, is quite complex, and here is where STB’s main problems start. Instead of progressively providing key clues to uncover the plot, the game rests too much in the player’s deductive skills to put all the pieces together. Without spoiling the whole story, let’s consider a brief example (spoilers follow). The game starts with the playable main character in an office where a magnetophone cylinder is playing. Few references to the past appear, contained in these records and in some clues provided by your assistant. Early in the game you are also prompted to operate machines that serve the purpose of monitoring the patients as well as gathering information about their condition, but your character has zero knowledge about how to use these apparatus. So far, nothing seems to be wrong with these features of the game design. In fact, main characters with no previous background and the “manipulate this machine with minimal feedback” puzzles have been, since Infocom’s times, everyday duty for text-adventure gamers. But the thing is that, accordingly to the online hint/walkthrough system that accompanies STB, these are clues provided by the developers for the understanding of the plot. That is, the player should realize that the main character has a sort of amnesic condition, among other story elements (end of spoilers). This storytelling device, making the comprehension of the plot the core puzzle of the game, can be an ambitious and interesting idea, no word about it, but I have serious doubts about its success in STB.

On the contrary, the online hint system is perfect, providing exactly what most players want: multiple successive hints ranging from subtle clues to straightforward answers. I bet that many beta-testers also complained about how the story is told because a substantial part of the hints is devoted to answer plot-related questions, with topic titles such as “OK. Spoil me. What the heck is going on?” and “What on earth is going on here”.

But don’t let this reviewer take away your interest from the game. Once the plot is grasped, either by your own means or helped by the hints, you’ll be attached to the mystery that surrounds Bedlam. You’ll also notice that most of the puzzles are interwoven in the story, posing problems and choices more than simple obstacles. “Classic” puzzles are restricted to mastering the use of a panoptic (a real-life device that allows only one guard/physician to observe all the inpatients rooms at once) and an archive. They are fun to manipulate and not extremely complicated, rewarding careful observation and persistence. Your character also owns a sort of analytical machine, Triage, that’s very handy when puzzles come, because it stores information about many environmental objects and you can ask it to analyze items just by pointing at them.

As I already mentioned, five different ends are available, but they cannot be categorized under the labels “winning” or “losing”. A very interesting feature, it’s up to the player to decide which the best option is , according to his/ her moral values. This greatly enhances the replayability of the game and encourages the player to try different actions to see how they affect the story. Another interesting detail is that all the meta-commands (save, restore, quit, etc) have been modified to fit in the general aesthetic the game. As is required for any Annual IF Competition entry, STB takes about two hours for the experienced player to finish it; but you may want to invest more time in order to explore all the possibilities and get the emotional impact that the authors should have intended when writing and coding the game. Gameplay is suitable both for novice as well as die-hard text adventure gamers, and for the formers the command “about” triggers a help sheet containing most common verbs and the syntax to handle conversations.

So, can I say that STB should be considered a truly classic in the field of independent IF games, a category populated by games such as Curses, Anchorhead, Phototopia, Jigsaw and Kaged? I would be pleased to say so, but the flaws described in the preceding paragraphs preclude the statement, tough not obscuring the fact that the game deserves to be praised with an overall high grade. STB can be downloaded free of charge from the competition web site and requires a z-code interpreter, such as Windows Frotz (its latest release is available from the IF Archive).

All in all, Slouching Towards Bedlam is a very good game that offers innovations to the genre while suffering from some storytelling deficits. My final word about Slouching Towards Bedlam is a B.

Final Grade: B

System Requirements:

• Windows
• z-code interpreter