A Quiet Evening at Home

When presented with a game entitled A Quiet Evening At Home, I expect a story about anything but. Surely such an evening within Interactive Fiction will be interrupted by invading aliens, or the discovery of my neighbor’s body, or even the Rapture. Alas, no. This game authored by Anonymous offers what it promises: You, the daunting adventurer, spend a quiet evening at home performing a few mundane chores so that, ultimately, you can go to sleep.

This is clearly the anonymous author’s first attempt, or one of his first attempts, at writing IF, the dead giveaway being the “I implemented my apartment” world model. The other giveaways are that basic gameplay and writing flaws abound. Indeed, the very first room demonstrates several of these:

Sidewalk
You are standing on a densely-settled residential street in front of a beige house with red trim.  A short flight of stairs leads to the front door

Note the missing period at the end of the paragraph. And…

>x door
You can't see any such thing.

And …

>x house
it's the shortest house on the street, and it's got beige-painted siding.  It's home.

you've got to use the restroom!

>enter house
That's not something you can enter.

After seeing these numerous capitalization errors and the fact that I couldn’t examine a door or enter a house that was clearly in front of me, I nearly quit on my fourth move. Nevertheless, I continued onward, since, to the game’s credit, it was clear that I had a goal. I did find the bathroom, though as far as I can tell, I never actually *used* the bathroom. Apparently, the game simply flags the fact that you enter the bathroom and that’s that. No notification is given to the player that the mission has been accomplished.

Similar errors and quirks throughout the work deprived me of my enjoyment, so I eventually quit without finishing. Too bad, since according to other reviews, the ending awards the player with a dream about weird alien sex… or something.

If a lesson is to be learned, authors, it is this: Unless your first game is a polished work of IF, please do not submit it to the competition. By all means, submit it to the community. Folks will be more than happy to test the game and offer constructive feedback. Use the knowledge to build a new game with more polish, more pizazz, one worthy of the competition. In other words, keep writing, anonymous, and hopefully you will feel that your next game deserves your name on it.