IFComp 2010: Aotearoa: An Interactive Adventure, by Matt Wigdahl

This is the nineteenth game I am reviewing in the 16th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. There needs to be some text here so that when Facebook links to it it doesn't include bits of the actual review. And thus it is that I say: it's interesting how Pacific languages, as a whole, have a lot more vowels and fewer consonants than others, and I assume that's something linguists have looked at and produced interesting explanations for.

Unless one of the few remaining games knocks me off my feet, we probably have a winner here.

There are a lot of really friendly features here, making this believable as an introductory game: the context highlighting, the unfamiliar-room highlighting, the reminders of where absent but seen objects are; this game was designed with a newcomer to IF in mind. Features like this tend to have occasional catastrophic, hilarious failures, but I only saw one, where an object taken out of play got an inappropriate "You last saw it at..." message.

Of course, the fact that the introductory features work as advertised shouldn't surprise me, because this is a game with a lot of polish, which must have received absolutely painstaking beta. The gameplay proceeds quite smoothly with good responsiveness to incorrect but promising solutions. The only place I had to hit the hints proper was on the stream-crossing puzzle, and even that was probably adequately clued in-game.

As to plot and structure: well, we have a pretty classic boy's adventure story here, the kind that appeared on the pages of the better class of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. The early-teen protagonist gets to ride dinosaurs and foil poachers and save the day and all that sort of thing. It's well-established narrative ground but Wigdahl treads it well. The ending is a bit abrupt, and I was kind of expecting more story there, but otherwise the pace is excellent. There's one complaint of some concern about the place where setting and plot collide, which is that the plot of a boy in an exotic locale saving the day, together with the occasional mystical elements such as the spirit of your father and the communion with the noceratops, treads dangerously close to the Dances with Wolves/Lawrence of Arabia/Avatar cliche of a white guy coming among the natives and being just plain better than they are. I think the author's aware of this possible interpretation and attempts to minimize it: Tim's in many ways the inferior to Eruera and the other adult staff members in terms of his actual fitness to deal with a crisis, but he's the only one who's actually in the right place at the right time. Nonetheless, if the native with a solid knowledge of his people's mysticism is telling the outsider how rare and special his gift of working with the animals is, well, it's hard to avoid this particular landmine.

Notwithstanding that mildly alarming interpretation of the plot, this is really a great deal of fun.

Rating: 9