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