Zarf Updates

A note on content restrictions

2026-10-03T19:07:57+00:00

One of my readers mentioned that eblong.com is now showing a "restricted website" warning for some UK users when browsing with iOS.

Thanks to Stuart Langridge for the screenshot.

If you try to modify the "Allowed List" preferences, you find an iOS notice: "To change these restrictions, the UK requires you to confirm you are an adult."

I want to be clear that I didn't do this. It's a restriction built into iOS. It apparently popped several months ago:

Apple is rolling out age checks for iPhone and iPad users in the UK that will ask them to verify if they are adults to access "certain services" such as 18-plus apps.

After customers accept the latest iOS 26.4 software update, they will be asked to verify their age, which they can do by providing a credit card or scanning their ID, according to an Apple support page.

Those who do not confirm how old they are or are underage will have web content filters turned on automatically.

-- BBC News, 25 March 2026

It is true that I added UK content restrictions to the IF Archive. That is an IFTF policy, set up on the advice of IFTF's lawyer. However, eblong.com is my personal web site, not an IFTF service, so it is not subject to that policy. Same goes for zarfhome.com, which is more player-facing but still run by me personally. Ditto the Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog and the Visible Zorker (both hosted by me on eblong). And this blog (on zarfhome).

Obviously (a) I am unthrilled about this but (b) there's nothing I can do about it. Apple does not, to my knowledge, offer a "solemnly swear my website is not evil" button. But I only know what I'm reading in this article and Apple's support page.

It seems clear from the lack of public screaming that most UK users have been silently "verified as adult", probably due to having a credit card tied to their Apple account. (App Store, Apple Music, etc.) (But "Debit cards aren't eligible" according to the support page.)

There's alternate sources for some of my stuff. My games are on the IF Archive, but as I said, that has server-side content restrictions.

The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog is mirrored on the Internet Archive. (No connection to the IF Archive!) You can pull my Visible Zorker pages off of Github.

As for the rest, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine may provide a browsing path. ("The dead past is the living present," thank you Isaac.)

eblong is my record of everything I've done in the past thirty years. It's more than half my life. The point is to provide context and an anchor. Erasing that -- erasing that for children -- is an enormous disservice. You don't need me to tell you that. I just wanted to get it in writing, for those who can still see it.

I am not particularly interested in apportioning blame between Apple and the UK government here. I don't have an inside view and I'm biased. As are you. The result is the same, regardless. This crap is not done getting worse.

(This post is mirrored on Github in case you can't see the original.)

Infidel goes wild

2026-10-03T00:17:48+00:00

Planetfall was yesterday's public release, but of course I've spent the past few weeks concentrating on Infidel. A couple of days I came across the most egregious bug I've yet seen in an Infocom game.

This bug is extremely difficult to detect by playing the game. I must the first person to notice it, just because I'm the first person to play the game with (the equivalent of) a memory-level debugger.

So why do I call it an egregious bug? Most people would call it a "trivial" bug, since it almost never impacts gameplay. But look you: it's a wild pointer bug which scribbles over memory in an unintended way. As a C programmer, I am legally required to regard memory corruption as the worst of all possible sins. On top of that, it's a compiler bug!

(Warning: This will get into ZIL code and Z-machine implementation details. Note that I will be analyzing Infidel release 22 serial 840522, the update for Macintosh. The original release, serial 830916, has the same bug with slightly different memory addresses.)

Let's set the scene. Infidel takes place in the remote Egyptian desert. You start out in your camp. The Nile is to the west. To the east are nine desert locations, a 3x3 grid. (One of these holds the buried pyramid you're searching for.)

If you venture outside that region, or leave your camp in any other direction, you are officially lost in the desert. You can travel as far as you want; you'll just find more desert. (Until sunstroke finds you.) This is a known trick, first seen in Enchanter; a single room called ENDLESS-DESERT represents every unmapped desert location. When you move, if you haven't blundered back to your camp or the mapped area, you just loop back to ENDLESS-DESERT. The game keeps track of your latitude and longitude.

To make this convincing, the game has to juggle objects. If you drop stuff in ENDLESS-DESERT and then move, those items are shifted offstage. Their lat/long coordinates are recorded in an array called DESERT-TABLE. If you return to those coordinates later, the game can shuffle those objects from DESERT-TABLE back to ENDLESS-DESERT, and you will find them waiting for you.

(Probably. When you drop an item in ENDLESS-DESERT, there's a one-in-three chance that it is immediately covered up by sand and lost forever. That's not relevant here, except that it makes the bug harder to uncover, as we'll see.)

Okay, so far the plan looks solid. Let's see it in action:

Desert You are in the desert, a vast wasteland of sand and heat.

>DROP AXE, SHOVEL pick axe: Dropped. shovel: Dropped. A brief but strong gust of wind comes up off a dune, whipping sand in your face, blinding you for long enough to lose track of the shovel.

>EAST Desert You are in the desert, a vast wasteland of sand and heat.

>WEST Desert You are in the desert, a vast wasteland of sand and heat. There is a pick axe here.

Both locations are the same ENDLESS-DESERT, but the pickaxe maintains the illusion of distinct rooms.

(Wouldn't it be more realistic if the shovel disappeared silently, buried in sand, while your back was turned? Maybe that playtested badly.)

Anyhow, that seems to work fine. Where's the bug?

Let's take a look at the DESERT-TO-TABLE routine that makes this work:

<ROUTINE DESERT-TO-TABLE (
                         SLOC 
                   "AUX" (TBL ,DESERT-TABLE) 
                         (CNT 0)
                         (F <FIRST? ,ENDLESS-DESERT>)
                         N)
  <REPEAT ()
      <COND (.F <SET N <NEXT? .F>>)
            (ELSE <RETURN>)>
      <COND (<EQUAL? .F ,WINNER>)
            (<FSET? .F ,TAKEBIT>
             <REPEAT ()
                 <COND (<==? <GET .TBL .CNT> 0>
                        <PUT .TBL .CNT .SLOC>
                        <PUT .TBL <+ .CNT 1> .F>
                        <SET CNT <+ .CNT 2>>
                        <REMOVE .F>
                        <RETURN>)
                       (ELSE
                        <SET CNT <+ .CNT 2>>)>>)>
      <SET F .N>>>

There's a similar TABLE-TO-DESERT routine to bring stuff back. We'll focus on this one.

The routine has one required argument: SLOC, the lat/long coordinate. (This is encoded as a single number, but never mind that.) Then "AUX" marks the four optional arguments, which also serve as local variables; the Z-machine doesn't distinguish. TBL is the array address we'll be writing to. It defaults to DESERT-TABLE. F is initialized to the first object in the ENDLESS-DESERT contents list. CNT and N are initialized to zero.

As it happens, when this is called, the game only passes one argument, SLOC. It relies on the default value of TBL=DESERT-TABLE. (If there were two endless deserts in the game, it would want to call this routine with two separate tables. But there ain't.) DESERT-TABLE is an array of 100 values (200 bytes) starting at address 11129.

The function body loops through all the objects in ENDLESS-DESERT (starting with F). Every portable object (ignoring scenery and the player) is removed, and we add two values to the TBL array: the coordinate SLOC and the object ID. The table might already have entries (you can drop stuff in multiple places), so we're careful to find empty slots to fill in. When we reach the end of the list we're done. If the logic looks a bit convoluted, remember that we're dealing with a linked list.

All sound good so far? It sounded good to me. "Hey," I said to myself, "I should display the DESERT-TABLE contents in the State tab! That way people can watch the objects being shuffled in and out."

So I set that up... and it didn't work. The DESERT-TABLE array remained resolutely empty. I could see the objects disappearing and appearing -- just look at that pickaxe above! -- but where were they going?

Any C nerd looking at a fixed-size array will ask "What about array overflow?" But DESERT-TABLE has a comment:

;"length should be 2*number of takeable objects"

Indeed, 100 values at two values per entry is enough space for 50 objects. Piling up every portable object in the game would get you (I think) 45. Anyhow, nothing is being stored anywhere in the array.

Time to disassemble the DESERT-TO-TABLE function from the game file and take a look. (I warned you we'd go deep...)

Routine 109bc, 5 locals (0000, 001e, 0000, 0000, 0000)

109c7:  GET_CHILD     ENDLESS-DESERT -> .F [TRUE] 109cb
109cb:  JZ            .F [TRUE] RTRUE
109ce:  GET_SIBLING   .F -> .N [TRUE] 109d2
109d2:  JE            .F, G70 [FALSE] 109d9
109d6:  JUMP          10a02
109d9:  TEST_ATTR     .F, #0f [FALSE] 10a02
109dd:  LOADW         .TBL, .CNT -> -(SP)
109e1:  JZ            (SP)+ [FALSE] 109fb
109e4:  STOREW        .TBL, .CNT, .SLOC
109e9:  ADD           .CNT, #01 -> -(SP)
109ed:  STOREW        .TBL, (SP)+, .F
109f2:  ADD           .CNT, #02 -> .CNT
109f6:  REMOVE_OBJ    .F
109f8:  JUMP          10a02
109fb:  ADD           .CNT, #02 -> .CNT
109ff:  JUMP          109dd
10a02:  STORE         .F, .N
10a05:  JUMP          109cb

(If you're looking at the 1983 release, this routine is at address 1051a but is otherwise identical.)

I'm using the txd disassembly tool from ztools, but I've edited the output to show variable names. Note that the opcode names do not match ZIL terminology. txd dates from the early 1990s. We had no ZIL manuals so we had to make up our own opcode names.

The first line sets the initial value of F to the first object in the room (<FIRST? ,ENDLESS-DESERT>). The second line tests whether F is zero, which is the condition of the function's REPEAT loop. The loop continues from there.

Notice anything missing? Where do we initialize TBL to its default value of DESERT-TABLE (11129)? That seems like an obvious hole.

Aha, says ZIL, we've got you covered. A Z-machine function has slots to initialize its local variables (or optional arguments) to constants. That's shown in the header lines:

Routine 109bc, 5 locals (0000, 001e, 0000, 0000, 0000)

CNT is initialized to zero, as is N, implicitly. F is not initialized from a slot because it's calculated, not a constant. ZIL generates that FIRST? (GET_CHILD) line at the top of the function. DESERT-TABLE is a constant, so...

...Whoops. No it isn't. DESERT-TABLE is a global variable. Its value will never vary -- it will be 11129 through the whole game -- but ZIL doesn't know that! TBL is initialized to the constant value 30 (hex 1e), which is the index number of DESERT-TABLE.

(Global variables are numbered from 16 to 255 for boring reasons. DESERT-TABLE is the 15th global, so it's number 30.)

It seems clear that nobody thought about this case (an argument defaulting to a global variable value). If they had, ZIL would either display a compiler error ("Default value is not a constant!") or generate a STORE instruction at the top of the function (same as how F is initialized). 30 is simply wrong.

The upshot is that when DESERT-TO-TABLE start writing object numbers to memory, it doesn't write to address 11129. It overwrites memory addresses 30 and up. Oh dear.

The TABLE-TO-DESERT routine uses a default global argument in exactly the same way. So it pulls the object list back from address 30, producing apparently correct results. But memory has been stomped.

So what's at that address?

The first 64 bytes of memory are header data, but not all of the header is used. By sheer luck, only addresses 0-29 are meaningful in Z-machine version 3. If DESERT-TABLE had been the third global, index 18, this bug would have corrupted the game's serial number! Which would be a lot more obvious.

So addresses 30-63 are unused, but address 64 is the beginning of the abbreviations data. This is part of the Z-machine text compression scheme: a list of 96 words which occur frequently and can therefore be pulled out and replaced by a few bits.

Prediction: if we drop nine objects in the desert (and then walk away), the last one will overwrite the start of the abbreviations table.

This is a bit of a nuisance to arrange. Remember that dropped objects have a one-in-three chance of simply disappearing. I had to drag a lot of stuff out there and try it a few times. But I succeeded, and the next text the game printed looked like this:

Desert You are in the desert, a vast wasteland of sand and heat. A small lizard pokes its head up from You sands and asks You shortest route to Times Square. You scratch your head for a moment and when you remember You proper subway line to recommend to it, you notice it's disappeared.

This is of course a heat-driven hallucination, but notice that the word "the" (the first abbreviation) has been replaced by "You" (the second). This indicates that the early string data has been overwritten by junk which happens to have no terminator, so the print routine continues to the next valid string.

In another test I managed to crash the interpreter. I suspect that it overwrote the first abbreviation with the bits representing the first abbreviation, so the print routine went into an infinite loop. You know. As one does.

Okay! Bug demonstrated! What have we learned?

This bug shipped and absolutely nobody noticed. When I played Infidel as a kid and explored the desert, my game was corrupting memory. Same with every other player, including Infocom's playtesters.

It's very likely that nobody tried dropping more than eight objects out in the Endless Desert. Why would you? There's nothing out there! It's not on the way to anywhere. The entire mechanism exists only to occupy players who have not yet discovered the pyramid. The attention to detail is typical of Infocom, but that area can't have been playtested very hard.

(I would love to peruse an Infocom testing log to see if any trace of the bug appeared. The Infocom Cabinet doesn't seem to have anything relevant. Let know if you come across such a thing.)

The 1984 revision of the game did nothing to address the bug. Infocom did not have anything like the Visible Zorker. They might have had debugging tools to inspect memory, but nobody thought to apply them to these routines and their storage.

I have not surveyed later games to see if a similar bug exists -- or is correctly handled by the compiler. I'll keep an eye out.

How would one fix the bug? Simple: remove the argument default for TBL, and instead start the routine with <SET TBL ,DESERT-TABLE>. Or else pass in DESERT-TABLE as a second argument to the routine. Either would work.

There's another pair of routines PROP-TO-TBL, TBL-TO-PROP which have a similar bug with the PROP-TBL table (address 11329, global number 22). I am honestly a bit baffled by these routines. They look like they're doing a similar shuffle-job with the holes you can dig in the sand. (These are stored in desert rooms as the CAPACITY property.) But the game doesn't let you dig in ENDLESS-DESERT; it says "The ground is too hard here." So the routines appear to be useless. They may be a remnant of an earlier feature which was removed during development. Perhaps because it corrupted the serial number!

If I were updating Infidel (as opposed to riffing it), I would definitely restore the ability to dig useless holes out in the desert. That kind of pointless detail is one of the great joys of IF.

Visible Planetfall is now available to all

2026-10-01T04:04:15+00:00

October's offering is Planetfall, Steve Meretzky's first title.

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license. In addition, I've posted high-resolution scans of the original folio manual and feelies.

The package promises space comedy. Notice that the Infidel package refers to Planetfall as "Infocom's nuu SF laf klasic". And yes, Meretzky is a dab hand with a tension-breaking joke.

The mutants lap up the chemical, howling with delight. One immediately grows three new mouths.

But I'm not sure Planetfall can be described as a comedy. The mutants are about to tear you apart, after all.

The overall story is a carefully-graded arc. Tedium, then a shocking disaster (although the game doesn't narrate your shock or fear in any way); then the reveal of the abandoned, decaying facility that will be your new world. A lonely struggle to sustain yourself. The slow realization of the catastrophe which engulfed Resida and is now advancing through your body. Then hope and another tragedy -- this time acknowledged by the game! -- followed by a bang-up chase-scene ending.

The opening scene and the deliberately-saccharine final paragraph are played for laughs, but absolutely nothing else about Planetfall is. Even Floyd's reliable role as comic relief is background foil for those moments when he exhibits human grief and determination.

This month's Visible app doesn't have too many fancy features. The big one is a Translation tab for Residan text. It's not necessary to play; the whole point is that Resida uses "logical" phonetic spelling, so you can read it with only a little bit of effort. Except that little bit adds up to a lot of annoyance, especially when you reach the library and its rapid-fire infodumps. Every time I've come back to Planetfall, I've said "Oh, sigh, the spelling." And so I offer you this handy alternative! Every time a Residan text scrolls by in the main pane, it's added to the Translation tab in standard English.

(No deep magic here. I just retyped them all by hand. It's under a hundred lines, only about 1200 words total.)

I have not attempted to provide cheat codes for the hunger, sleep, and disease timers in the game. I'm with Drew Cook on that issue: the survival elements of the game, and their increasing difficulty, provide the embodied grounding for the game's intensity.

(Yes, you have to take several runs and a deliberately optimization-minded approach to have any hope of winning. But that's every Infocom game. If that kind of mindset killed immersion, we wouldn't have gotten this far.)

Speaking of optimization, this is Infocom's first attempt to make action duration a meaningful game element. In most of the previous games, a turn was a turn. Deadline said that a turn was a minute, and gave you exactly 720 of them; but only a few "careful" actions took more than one minute.

Planetfall measures everything in millichrons. A Galactic day runs ten chrons; the status line thus shows the time of day from 0000 to 9999. Basic actions take seven millichrons -- roughly one minute, indeed. But many verbs set a longer duration: a WAIT is 40 millichrons. Furthermore (literally), the game map marks particular exits as taking specific amounts of time to traverse. A really long hall might take 160.

You might shrug this off as the same kind of fussy simulationism as the hunger timer. But, as far as I can tell, the durations are set for game balance rather than strict realism. For example, an elevator ride runs 50 or 100 millichrons, which is seven to fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes in an elevator is nonsensical. But it is a meaningful fraction of a game day. Two or three WAIT commands is enough to remind you that time's a-wastin'; better have all your chemicals in order before heading up that tower.

Really, the game day is highly compressed for gameplay purposes, just as it is in most modern graphical RPGs. "Ten chrons" is meant to express a certain amount of game experience, not 24 literal hours. And that's too many millichrons spent on that subject. I'll leave it there.

Upcoming work:

Visible Enchanter will be the next public release on November 1st. Magic! Terrible evils from the dawn of history! More magic!

Patreon supporters got access to Visible Enchanter a month ago, and Visible Infidel today. Please remember that the Visible Zorker is a Patreon-supported project! Your donation is immensely appreciated. (And credited in each game's "About" page, of course.)

Speaking of Infidel, I've discovered the most egregious memory bug in the game file. I bet you can't wait to hear about that. Details coming in a couple of days.

Twenty years without a Christmas card

2026-09-25T04:02:05+00:00

I wasn't blogging in 2006, but I was a regular commenter on the Nielsen Haydens' blog Making Light in the year and on the morning that I read "Mike Ford is gone."

I found the comment which I posted twenty years ago today:

I saw him just one or two times, at conventions. I never spoke with him. I admired him desperately and furiously.

I started with reading Just the Planet in a Crown Books, because I couldn’t justify spending my allowance on it. After a while, I started to worry they’d throw me out — not for finishing a book in the store; for laughing too loudly.

I finish, as a lot of us have, by waiting for Aspects.

-- me, that thread, Sept 25, 2006.

Aspects is available, such as it is. The Dragon Waiting and The Scholars of Night and Growing Up Weightless have been reprinted. Web of Angels has been reprinted, just a couple years ago -- ancient time; I forgot that edition was on my shelf. The Trek novels have remained in print, ironically, because they were work-for-hire and not subject to the long weird story of Ford's publication rights.

I also own The Last Hot Time and The Princes of the Air and The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues (a Paranoia module). I have the Tor Double that includes "Fugue State". I have the two short story collections and the Bordertown story collection. I hope those get reprinted. I have a tiny small-press collection of Ford's poetry. It includes "Winter Solstice, Camelot Station", which Ford legendarily wrote as a Christmas card and subsequently won a stack of awards.

(Camelot Station, under its Mittel-modern barrel-vaulted glass roof, comes 'round again as the Grand Terminus of Aspects.)

I need to reread the lesser-known stuff. I've been rereading Aspects recently, piecewise out of order, as I have now and then since 2021. "Comfort reading," my spouse diagnosed correctly. I can't spend all my time in the comfort zone, though.

A few years ago I wrote an essay about language in Aspects. I thought about writing another essay, as a twenty-years' memorial, but I don't have enough pieces. Or too many, incomplete. What did happen to the Moon? How does the book's Book (its Tarot deck) echo the plot? The rules of Battleboard? Goddess, her aspects and consorts? The way Silvern and Edaire's telepathic conversations are always perfectly transparent to the reader? The omnipresent and unspoken theme of "Every story can be told two ways"?

All of that is in there, but none of it is finished and I don't see how it works. Teresa Nielsen Hayden (the book's editor) described it as having "(was going to have) (damn it) a fiendishly complicated plot." I don't even know what the plot was! I don't know if she does!

I have figured out a few things about Aspects, and since I'm not writing an essay, I'll just list them.

Varic is certainly the one who doesn't care about the circumstances of his death. He disclaims caring whether he lives.
Gaily, the cook at Strange House, is described as "frighteningly animated"; she "seem[s] to be floating" or "dancing" whenever she moves. Now go read the description of Gelly, the Klingon gladiator introduced in Chapter One of The Final Reflection.
Winterhill the ex-street-kid orders a whole bowl of bacon for breakfast because he can.
Lescoray suffered a Great Famine once. In legend, it also suffered a volcano when sorcerers (or gods) did... something... to the Moon. The same event? A volcanic winter?
"The Coron of the Grange" can be sung to "Oh Susannah," seamlessly. ("It rained all night the day he left / the weather it was dry / the sun so hot he froze to death / oh Coron, don't you cry.")

Beyond that, I've been humming the chorus of "Summer's Gone to Cavalry" since last week. I have a shadowy notion how the rest of it goes. I'll keep listening.

Late summer mysteries

2026-09-15T01:53:13+00:00

Three mysteries... or games which are mystery-shaped, at least. Plus one which doesn't fit the theme but does fit the symmetry group.

The Mermaid Mask
This Bed We Made
Cognition Method
He Who Watches

The Mermaid Mask

by SFB Games -- game site

The piratical Captain Mortuga lies dead in a locked room. On his piratical submarine. Luckily, the young substitute captain has summoned the dynamic duo of Grimoire and Sally to solve the crime!

This gets mentioned in "static deduction" genre lists, but it's actually not. It's a traditional mystery game. You interrogate suspects, search the mansion for clues, unlock a few locked doors, show every clue to every suspect, and eventually call everybody together in the Dining Room to Explain All. I mean, the mansion is a submarine and everybody was arguing in the Mess Hall before you barged in, but it's the same genre as Deadline or any millionth Sherlock Holmes game.

Which is not surprising, because The Mermaid Mask is third in a series that dates back to 2014. The second game shipped after Obra Dinn, but not by enough to redesign the whole game model, even if the designers had wanted to. And why would they? Nothing wrong with an old-fashioned locked-room mystery.

The game leans hard on its cast of characters. The ship has nine residents, counting the captain and the, er, ex-captain. All are involved in a tangled web of secrets and awkwardly concealed motives. You'll have to dig down through the layers to reach the one that got Mortuga's throat slit.

The voice-acting and animation are top-notch. The writing is... uneven. I liked the story; there's a lot of knotty and interesting stuff going on. But the writers seem to have gotten stuck in banter mode. Every little aside between Grimoire and Sally is mugging for a chuckle, and a 50% hit rate is not good enough for that sort of thing. Really, even if it were 100%, it would get samey.

An interesting side note: the game does a great job of having you play Grimoire-and-Sally. The truly dual protagonist is a bit of a rarity in videogames. Aside from one tutorial scene where Sally naps, you are never playing one character with the other as sidekick. It's always both.

(Or maybe neither? The gameplay isn't really about solving mysteries in the Holmesian sense. The game mostly asks you questions like "What piece of evidence shows X?" Then Grimoire-and-Sally narrate X. They're running the show; you manage the evidence files.)

(Oh jeez, you're playing the notebook. That's hilarious.)

The other problem is pacing. Post that tutorial chapter, you spend a huge chunk of the game walking around and collecting evidence. Oh, they throw in a few research questions and a sequence of puzzle boxes to tide you over, but mostly it's click everything and lawnmower the topic lists. Eight times over. (For the eight living characters.)

Once you've got most of the evidence, the game starts unlocking "suspicion" topics. That's how you pin down each suspect and solve their sub-case. This is where the game actually starts. But it takes you half the game to get there, and that first half is essentially all static dialogue. I seriously came close to uninstalling before I got to the mystery part.

The mystery part is more satisfactory. (Albeit in a police-procedural way, as I said.) It's not a difficult game. It's not trying to be; the game is generous with clues, and the UI is easy to brute-force if that's the way you want to tackle it. I'll be honest: I did a lot of brute-forcing. It was easier than trawling one half-rememebered snippet from the archived ocean of clue responses. But it's a perfectly good mystery yarn. Interwoven collection of mini-character-mysteries, I should say. With a big eerie mystery at the end.

I'm glad I gave it a try, but the format doesn't do it for me.

This Bed We Made

by Lowbirth Games -- game site

A narrative game about investigation, but not police investigation or even private investigation. You are Sophie Roy, an overworked underpaid hotel maid. Thank heavens for social invisibility, though, because you are the most dedicated snoop in 1950s Montreal. Journals? Photos? Letters in locked jewelry cases? If it's in your hotel, it's fair game.

Today, however, something has Gone Wrong. The frame story doesn't hint at what, but the police are keen to hear everything you've learned. Time to flash back through your day on the fifth floor. But... maybe don't tell the police everything.

This reminded me a lot of Disappearance at Dahlia View. Poking around is the whole game. There are some light puzzles. Suitcase combination locks, torn-up notes, an extremely simple cipher. (Diegetically simple: it was invented by schoolkids.) If you're not sure of your current story goal, hit a key and Sophie will muse revealingly to herself. Really the biggest obstacle I faced was convincing myself that reading private mail isn't scary. Nobody will catch you in the act, at least not in real itme.

Your snooping isn't police-shaped like Ex-Detective Conway's, mind you. You will not be setting up card-and-string boards or fill-in-the-blanking crime reports. The game doesn't even reveal what the crime is until quite late. You're just putting together details of people's lives, aided by your co-conspirators behind the hotel desk.

This makes for a good comparison with Mermaid Mask. Both games are all about the gathering of info. But Mermaid Mask thinks it's a detective game. Secretly it wants you to rush through the gathering phase so you can get to the important crime-solving. This Bed knows it's a snoop game, so it concentrates on making the gathering phase a delightful and engaging story. I much prefer that approach.

That said, I did not solve the crime. That is, I got to the end of the story and I still don't know how <spoiler> got <spoiler>ed! I also got a rotten ending, although, to be fair, this is because I didn't pick up on the other core mechanic.

See, in addition to peeking at evidence, you have the option to destroy any piece of evidence. This isn't meaningful for most of the game. But after you leave the fifth floor for the last time, the police will arrive and tromp through all your carefully cleaned hotel rooms. Have you discovered anything that 1950s asshole cops might misread, or read in bad faith? Consider well before you push that elevator button.

I reloaded before that "won't have a chance to return" warning, did some prudent additional cleaning, and got a better story outcome. But still not a perfect one. And I still don't know how the crime got crimed.

Maybe this is just the way of choice-based games. This Bed does a fair amount of your-choices-matter (aka "Beth will remember that"). I could have just screwed myself early on. And then, as I freely admit, I'm bad at detective games which don't hold my hand.

But I'm not going to replay more than that last ending scene. I got happy endings for <spoiler>, <spoiler>, and <spoiler>. The last few puzzle pieces will just have to take care of themselves.

Cognition Method

by Team Cognition -- game site

A mysterious geometric object has been found near Jupiter. The astronauts exploring it found mysterious geometric puzzles. Then they disappeared. One of them is your son.

This is a very enthusiastic puzzle game which is handicapped by being enthusiastic about things that we have seen an awful lot of. Gravity-shifting puzzles. Crates on plates. Brutalist archicture. Noneuclidean nightmare corridors created from your trauma. Sad Dad Astronaut.

None of these are bad schticks. I have loved all of these schticks individually, and they fit together no problem. But the result feels very by-the-numbers in narrative, environment, and puzzle design. You can pretty much call every Silent-Hillian door gimmick and every line of dialogue as they come out.

The only really new combination is "gravity puzzles" plus "massive brutalist spaces". There's fun moments when you enter a brain-meltingly vast space that makes you feel like a bug in a cathedral, and then you figure out how to send yourself flying to the top of the cathedral.

On the down side, some annoying platforming. Not difficult, but annoying.

For a puzzle game, it's not all that densely packed with puzzles. We've gotten used to the test-chamber pacing where every puzzle flings you straight into the next one. This isn't that. The world is spaced out with architecture and memory bubbles. Cognition Method wants you to absorb its monologues and its monolithic silence as you move through.

And, let's be fair, this is some high-quality monolithic silence. The game doesn't just slap one brut-concrete texture on giant cubes and call it a day. Every one of these spaces is different. Lighting, atmosphere, enclosure. Little decorative features of water or ivy. Some spaces are oppressive; others are liberating. Indoors, outdoors. Elements are echoed and rearranged. It's poetically done.

Overall, a nice architecture tour paced with weak dialogue and a modest number of modestly fun but not mindblowing puzzles. Cognition Method is successful at what it does, but it's got a lot of competition.

He Who Watches

by Bobby Vanden -- game site

I haven't finished this one. In fact I've barely gotten to the meat of the game. But I mention it because it's running the same notional dogpark as Cognition Method. You got your crates, your plates, and your gravity shifts. But it's a very different set of design choices.

He Who Watches runs firmly on the test chamber model. You literally teleport from one puzzle to the next. The spaces are functional, and some of them are imposing, but there's no pretense of atmosphere or architectural beauty.

(Not in the main body of the game, I should say. A very brief opening scene lets you traverse an outdoor mountain path. That's good setup. I wouldn't be surprised if the late game goes somewhere mind-expandingly cool. But for now, I'm looking at acres of test-chamber tiles.)

As for narrative, I've gotten about one line so far. Solve puzzles for the puzzle god to become the puzzle god. Probably. Again, we might get more later on.

No, this is a puzzle game pure and simple, and it goes hard on them. I am definitely getting a workout.

Some of this is the mechanics, which are really not intuitive at all. Your tool is a bow-and-chain-arrow with a peculiarly rigid chain. The gravity rules let you shift around any inside angle, but no outside angle. No jumps either, not even hopping down off a cube. This makes for extremely persnickety navigation.

But I can't deny that these mechanics are productive as heck. Every puzzle has a distinct Neat Idea, all built on the basic mechanics. Just to show off (and to provide oft-needed boosts), the game uses the "insight" hint model: every room lets you peek at an easier puzzle using the same trick. (I think Can of Wormholes did this first?) So you know the designer had something specific in mind. I'm dozens of puzzles in and there's no sign that they're running out of ideas.

The puzzles alternate between self-contained rooms (the aim is always to reach the exit) and larger complex chambers, which offer more entangled multi-step challenges. The steps are unlocked by solving the small puzzles, but then you have to figure out how to get around. Everything is organized around a rather alchemical-looking symbolic map. I look forward to finding out more about that.

You want secrets? You got secrets. I don't got secrets -- yet! I can definitely see where some secrets must be hiding. I look forward to getting into more of those, too.

Anyway, this is just to say that I am eating the plums that are locked in the gravity-shifting puzzle box. Cognition Method had the visual and environmental juice, but He Who Watches is sweet and delicious.

Hugo Award stats, 2026

2026-09-04T00:21:40+00:00

Back in April I took a look at the Hugo Award finalists, with an eye to seeing how the votes might divide up. I did this because the 2025 Best Game voting showed an interesting split between "indie" and "big company" voters (in some sense of those very subjective terms).

Well, the 2026 Hugo Awards were announced this weekend, and the results are... boring. No! I don't mean boring; we got a great lineup of new works across SF media, and I was excited to see them. But as statistics, there's not much to say.

(The 2026 Hugo Full Statistics report can be found on the LACon Hugo Award site.)

Best Game

The winner for Best Game was Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a game which has already won so many award slates that the developers have run out of champagne and are now toasting with Grape Nehi. If we look at the (still very cool) Sankey diagram:

Best Game 2026 runoff. Click for larger version.

...we learn that the voters were heavily in favor of Clair Obscur from the kick. After each other candidate was eliminated, its partisans leaned towards Clair Obscur. So Clair Obscur won. Indie vs AAA? Narrative vs combat? Sorry, people just liked the game. That is all there is to say.

Okay, Hollow Knight voters had a thing for Hades 2, which is mildly interesting.

I was of course rooting for Blue Prince, which made a respectable second-place showing. (BP has also won a metric ton of awards, so don't take my snarking above too seriously.)

It's worth noting that when Blue Prince was eliminated in the last round, almost half its votes dropped out. That is: a large fraction of the people who listed Blue Prince did not rank Clair Obscur on their ballot at all. This indicates a strong voter split between fans of cryptic puzzlefests and hair-trigger combat mechanics... But you didn't need me to tell you that.

As for me, I still can't parry for crap so Clair Obscur is not going on my wishlist.

Since the report provides it, let me add the list of nominees that didn't make the finalist cut:

Split Fiction
Tiny Bookshop
The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship
Strange Antiquities
Type Help
The Alters
Blue Planet
The Séance of Blake Manor
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
Daggerheart

Yay for Type Help and Strange Antiquities! Blake Manor was also worth playing but didn't really work for me. I am sort of interested in The Alters but thinking about survival games makes me tired.

This shall not be the last you hear of Type Help. I expect to be a Hugo voter next year, and I absolutely intend to nominate The Incident at Galley House.

Best Related Work

I also paid attention to Best Related Work, because I am a fan of both Ada Palmer and Elizabeth Sandifer. (I support Sandifer's Patreon.) Here again the fans had a favorite and stuck with it, although the challengers were closer.

Best Related Work 2026 runoff. Click for larger version.

"Last War in Albion" (the Gaiman essay) was a hell of a piece, but it just didn't have a strong constituency.

Back in April I said "I want to read Inventing the Renaissance but I have not yet dug in and done it." Guess what, I still haven't. This time for sure. As soon as I finish the books I picked up at NecronomiCon, and the fourth Heaven's Vault book which has been making sad eyes at me for months...

Nominees that did not make the finalist cut:

We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories About Political Protest, Resistance, and Hope (Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older)
Enshittification (Cory Doctorow)
When People Giggle at Your Name, or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident (Grigory Lukin)
Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles (Jaroslav Olša, Jr.)
Nigerian Speculative Fiction: The Evolution (Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke)
r/fantasy 2025 Book Bingo (r/fantasy Bingo Team)
The Outspoken and the Incendiary (Terry Bisson)
Mark as Read Column (Molly Templeton)
The Martian Trilogy (John P. Moore, et al)
Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling (Henry Lien)

(I have not read any of these. Wait, I must have read some of the original "Enshittification" essay, but the nomination went to the book. Anyhow the word "enshittification" immediately outgrew Doctorow and that's the part I now remember.)

In conclusion

Blogging about Hugo statistics is boring. I should read/play/watch more works and blog about them instead. Onward to Montreal in 2027!

The Visible Witness is now available to all

2026-09-01T04:10:39+00:00

September is upon us, and with it that least regarded of the early Infocom games: The Witness.

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license. In addition, I've posted high-resolution scans of the original folio manual and feelies.

I wouldn't say The Witness is unfairly disregarded. It's Infocom's second mystery game, a followup to Deadline. Deadline was groundbreaking interactive narrative; it presented a huge New England mansion and a cast of dynamic characters with their own plans and schedules. (Until you, the detective, barge in to upend them.) The Witness was... more of the same, except with fewer characters, a smaller house, and a shallower mystery to solve.

The Witness is mostly remembered in the IF community for three things:

First, it's the Infocom game which can be solved in the fewest commands. People got competitive about finding minimal paths to the winning outcome. (See this comment by eriktorbjorn, for example.)

Second, the 1938 period atmosphere. It's really the game's best quality. You start out schlumfing up those mean streets (or a mean driveway) on a chilly Los Angeles night with a storm moving in. Thunder crashes, Monica's grey eyes flash, and the language never lets up. The packaging and the text glitter with love for the noir era.

I wrote a whole other post about this matchbook from the game package.

(Okay, not noir exactly. You're still a police detective rather than a down-at-heels private eye. Still, it's a scene you can get your teeth into.)

Third, the flip side: the weirdly toothless portrayal of Freeman Linder's weirdly Orientalist household. As Drew Cook points out, The Witness is a double period piece: 1930s California as depicted by 1980s Boston tech guys. The result is Phong the butler, described as "obviously Asian, but no definite nationality". Nor does he have a definite first name, or any definite motivation or personality other than sniffy resentment of his boss. The player is apparently expected to accept this and never inquire more deeply than Linder does.

At least Phong's dialogue is pointedly free of comedy Asian dialect. This is a step up from Deadline's panto Scots gardener and Black-unless-she-isn't housekeeper.

Actually, there's a bit more to note about Phong. The game never gives him another name, but we have an archived design document which refers to him as "Hui Phong". (Design doc is SPOILERS if you haven't yet solved the mystery!) Indeed the game accepts HUI as a synonym for PHONG.

But this raises a question. By the time I graduated college, "Phong" didn't come off as an ambiguously Asian name at all. It was immediately recognizable as the given name of Bùi Tường Phong, a Vietnamese scientist in the brand-new field of computer graphics. (I hope I copied the right diacriticals.) Anybody who studied CGI around 1990 would know what "Phong shading" was.

But would game developers in 1983 have known? Bùi Tường's paper was published in 1975, shortly before the man died of cancer. (Shockingly young, and very possibly as a consequence of US defoliants in the Vietnam war.) Had "Phong shading" made the rounds at MIT by 1983? Did the Infocom crew select "Phong" as a generically Eastern name, or was it intended to read as Vietnamese -- or a reference to a specific person -- to the knowledgeable eye?

I honestly have no idea. But I wanted to add that context to the discussion.

One more quirk of the month. The Witness is the first Visible Zorker game I've tackled with no source code for a released version.

We have source code, yes. But it's not the source code for The Witness release 22, the version on the Masterpieces CD and the last official release of the game. The source code is for release 23 -- a dev version which was in progress (and apparently abandoned) in late 1984.

In fact, the source code doesn't even match release 23 perfectly. In a few places, the source code was clearly updated, but never recompiled. (There is no "r24".) The most obvious example is the game banner:

The WITNESS: An INTERLOGIC Mystery
Copyright (c) 1983 Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
WITNESS and INTERLOGIC are trademarks of Infocom, Inc.

The r23 and r22 game files have the same banner, as does every known earlier version. But if you look at the source file, it's quite different:

    <TELL
"The WITNESS
Infocom interactive fiction - a mystery story|
Copyright (c) 1983 by Infocom, Inc.  All rights reserved.|
">

Someone went through and rubbed out the "INTERLOGIC" trademark, which Infocom was discarding around 1984. They also commented out the TANDY bit check. Neither of these changes are visible in the playable r23 game file, nor in the intermediate compile stages verbs.zap or verbs.xzap.

This left me with a problem. I always prefer to use the Masterpieces release of each Infocom game for the Visible Zorker. That's the version which almost everybody sees these days, whether on an archive site, GOG, or a dusty CD off Ebay. But I had no r22 source to work from.

(I tried comparing r23 to r22 but the differences were too great to paper over. Mostly having to do with rearranged code, rather than changes to game behavior. Still: too much to account for.)

My only option was the r23 game file. Again, this is an in-development version and may have bugs. Okay, sure, every Infocom release has bugs. But this version may have bugs that would have been caught during QA! Keep an eye out.

Then there's the differences between the archived r23 source and the r23 game file. Fortunately, these were minor. The banner trademark and a couple of tweaked messages seem to be most of it. I have done my best to revert the source code to the exact state it was in when the r23 game file was generated. I may have missed a spot; I apologize if so.

Upcoming work:

Visible Planetfall will be the next public release on October 1st. Enjoy your visit to Resida, land of foonetik speleeng.

Patreon supporters got access to Visible Planetfall a month ago, and Visible Enchanter today. Please remember that the Visible Zorker is a Patreon-supported project! Your donation is immensely appreciated. (And credited in each game's "About" page, of course.)

And finally, no September 1st IF post would be complete without a link to the Interactive Fiction Competition! It's not quite open, but it will pop sometime on Tuesday. Scores of newly-hatched IF games for you to play and (I hope) rate. Enjoy.

EDIT-ADD: In fact, 71 new games, available now.

Rusty Lake and Hidden Town

2026-08-22T00:14:41+00:00

I am always happy to see another Rusty Lake game. It's not a high-velocity studio, but they're reliably high-quality and enjoy experimenting with their chosen form. (Co-op gameplay! Short film!)

I am also always happy to see another Rusty Lake knockoff. These are pretty common; creepy-haunted is not a complicated vibe. I've got a whole folder on these on my iPad. The Strange Case series; Hotel Orpheus; Forgotten Hill...

...My folder is labelled "Submechanical", because when I first played a Rusty Lake game -- or "Cube Escape", as it was titled back then -- I decided it was a Submachine knockoff. It turned out to be a speciation event instead; but of course that's hindsight. My point is that there's nothing wrong with being a knockoff, especially at three bucks on the mobile store.

Now I have played both the new Rusty Lake and a new batch of "if you enjoyed that, why not try...?"

Servant of the Lake
Hidden Town (series)

Servant of the Lake

by Rusty Lake -- game site

This year's Rusty Lake experiment is... realism? Okay, not really. But Servant of the Lake is distinctively not set in a hallucinatory dream-box. It's populated by living (if Gorey-esque) Vanderbooms, not corrupted souls. And you are almost certainly not dead.

Not to say that the Rusty Lake crew has never taken this tack. But Servant of the Lake has a more grounded storyline than most of the series. You arrive at the manor house as an extra hand, helping Aldous Vanderboom and his housemaid with a weekend family gathering. You will clean, cook, and serve dinner for three days. Then you will depart.

The game is framed around that schedule and your task list. Also the manor, which opens up as you progress through the weekend. It's a steadier basis than we usually get. And while there are plenty of puzzles mixed in, you're generally after some straightforward goal like "porridge". ...Until you're not, of course.

It's a pretty substantial game overall. The individual tasks are bite-sized, but there's a lot of them. Then there's a big list of side tasks which you can go back to if optional-bonus-stars are your thing. They're generally not my thing, but there's also a hint of extra storyline which I have not yet investigated. Hm.

I know it sounds weird to say that linear time and a mappable world are delightful innovations. For once, they are. Expectations, ya know? I'm sure that the next venture to Rusty Lake will be off-beat in a different direction.

By the by, I name-dropped "Vanderbooms" as if we all knew the Rusty Lake continuity by heart. In fact I cheerfully disregard it. There's a family tree in one of the games, isn't there? No clue how Servant fits in. It has a 19th-century vibe (you arrive in a horse-drawn carriage) but nothing is definitive. If there's some kind of over-arching plotline, the developers have never tried to sell me on remembering it.

EDIT-ADD: Whoops, forgot a document at the start that specifies the year 1839.

Hidden Town (series)

by Dark Dome -- game site

As I said, I occasionally browse the App Store for this kind of game. A couple of weeks ago one popped up with the title Hidden Memories. This was, in fact, a series of nine games that launched on iOS all at once. No, it's not somebody turning a vibe-coding crank. It's a studio called Dark Dome which has been releasing games on Android for years; then they got ported to iOS en masse. Also coming to Steam at the end of this month! I don't know if they'll break out, but the devs are giving it their best shot.

So what are the Hidden Town games like? You've already gotten the idea. You're locked in a room, or a few rooms. Something Creepy Happened. There's locked doors and drawers and cabinets. Each one requires either a key or a four-symbol combination. Combinations are hidden in modestly clever clues or environmental puzzles. Repeat until shocking conclusion.

I'm making it sound rather formulaic, but really that's just because I binged several years' worth of games in a week. I did that because they're pleasant and diverting and when you finish one you're happy to jump into another one.

The games are on the narrative side, like Servant. But Hidden Town doesn't have the hard edge of Rusty Lake. It doesn't go for body-fluid humor, and the characters are all cuties. (As opposed to the haunt-raddled wrecks who populate Rusty Lake.) Then again, the cute art only adds to the sting when somebody turns out to be evil or possessed or whatever's on this week. Hidden Town isn't a happy place.

One minor confusion: each game ends with an epilogue chapter labelled "Premium Content". On iOS, this is not a separate add-on; it's part of the base game, which you pay for up front. (I guess the iOS versions are all "premium content".) I assume it worked differently in Android-land. My guess is that Steam will work like iOS, but we'll see.

As with Rusty Lake, the games are lightly tied together. The epilogue chapters generally feature characters from other stories dropping in or getting caught up. As with Rusty Lake, this is flavor, not crucial. You can play the games in any order, and you definitely don't have to make a crazy-string wall to keep track of the connections.

The Dark Dome developers are based in Peru. The English localization (or writing, I don't know their process) is sometimes shaky. On the up side, they can mix a bit of authentic Inca mythology into the general cult-creepy setting. They don't go overboard it with; only a couple of of the games really delve into that aspect. But it's a nice change of pace from "witches".

An enjoyable binge, anyhow.

Visible Zorker search feature

2026-08-20T23:22:36+00:00

Apparently today is the worst possible day to post about Zork the text adventure? See articles about Duskbloods if you don't follow FromSoftware news, which, to be clear, I don't. Spoiler: everybody's hot for a playable goon named "Zork".

But I shall defy the Trending News gods! I have deployed a new Visible Zorker feature: a search box in the Source pane.

The source pane of Zork 1, showing a search for "axe".

You can search for the name of any object, routine, global variable, or constant. The search will also find printable strings containing your search term.

Clicking on a search result will jump to where that symbol is defined. Note that it doesn't find every location where the symbol is used. It's not really a full-text source search. But it's handy for poking around and seeing how things work -- which is what the Visible Zorker is all about.

Naturally, the search box is available on all current and future Visible Zorker pages.

The source pane of Starcross, showing a search for "spider".

In other news, Visible Enchanter is now in progress. It will be available to Patreon supporters on September 1st. I've also posted (with no paywall) my scans of the Enchanter folio package.

This is not the copy I played when I was young. I snarfed this package off Ebay. Actually, two packages; the Infotator I found came with a mix of Enchanter and Sorcerer feelies. I wound up with two spell lists. That turns out to be a win, because one of them was stained by the degrading "red wax" (plastic) seal. Adds to the air of authenticity, I say.

I'll see you in September with the open-source release of The Visible Witness.

GDC status updates

2026-08-20T02:12:50+00:00

Back in March I made a lot of hay about the decline of GDC. I didn't confidently predict that GDC'27 would be cancelled, but cancellation wouldn't have surprised me.

Well, GDC'27 isn't cancelled. Which we knew. They would have had to announce a cancellation at or immediately after GDC '26. Turning a ship of that size takes a year of lead time, minimum.

Instead, as Cmdr. Takashima almost once said, GDC '27 is open for business. There's a shiny "What's New" page. To quote a couple of lines:

Introducing a new Business Hall at Moscone West, built specifically for meetings, networking, partnerships, pitches, and getting business done.

Opening the Festival Hall Tuesday through Thursday (previously Wednesday through Friday).

Making several pass and pricing changes designed to provide more accessible ways into GDC.

Oh, and I was right about Ball-Park Monday being a flop. That's off the list.

The important part is the new price list. $500 standard; $300 for student/indie; $150 for the expo hall alone; $100 for the "business hall" alone.

In some sense, this completely contradicts GDC's new mission statement:

The GDC Festival of Gaming is where the entire B2B games industry comes together.

That's from an og:description metadata tag on their front page, which is surely the most official possible source. It used to say "the game industry's premier professional event", but this "B2B" language came in last year. Similarly, their 2025 rebrand announcement talked about "the world's premier B2B gaming industry event".

But look, $150 for the expo hall is not a B2B pitch. It's a "get some foot traffic" pitch. It's aimed at curious passers-by and the Yerba Buena Park crowd, who might be willing to pay a small sum to go inside and check out the fun stuff. (Meaning the IGF and alt.ctrl.gdc.) (And hopefully Twine....)

In some sense this is an admission that GDC is not a premier event for the entire game industry. It's a bunch of unrelated ungulates in a trenchcoat.

What about the business hall? ("Designed around how business gets done at GDC.") I read that as an attempt to bring back all the offsite meetings. Last year, companies were renting GDC-adjacent spaces (and, indeed, entire GDC-adjacent hotels) to avoid the GDC booth tax. GDC will surely still charge three arms and a leg for a big fancy booth. But if you're just there to schmooze, they're willing to pare that revenue stream back to zero (almost zero; zero by corporate standards) in order to fill Moscone up again.

This fits well with the idea that GDC has a multi-year Moscone contract; they have to keep running the show. (Not a confirmed fact, but widely understood.) If so, the next couple of GDCs are effectively loss leaders for a more dominant future event.

So total attendance is the metric to keep an eye on. 30k in 2025; 20k in 2026. If it rebounds in 2027, GDC will keep going more or less as it has been. If it keeps dropping...

Don't look at me; I don't know.

As for me, I feel less connected to GDC than ever. Yes, I had a lovely time last year. But I no longer have any ambitions -- or even wild hopes -- connected to the game industry. Showing off the Visible Zorker to a large audience was the last of that, and it's done.

As far as I know, IFTF will be back on the show floor in 2027. (Not a confirmed fact but I'm pretty sure.) GDC is still willing to bring in the indie and nonprofit groups for free. That's all good. I haven't decided whether I will be there working the booth. I'd really like to hit all of Worldcon, Mysterium, and NarraScope in 2027. That may consume my travel budget for the year.

More details on Cyan's Project Anglerfish

2026-08-09T16:54:16+00:00

Two articles have popped up in the wake of Cyan's fandom-rattling pitch reel for Anglerfish.

To recap from last week: Anglerfish was the Myst-universe project that Cyan started prototyping in 2024. They teased it as "PREFALL" because it was set in the golden age (and Age) of the cryptic D'ni civilization, centuries before Atrus and his family.

Damreus's desk has the shape of his Guild symbol, a Writer's pen nib.

Cyan spent four months building a fully playable prototype of Anglerfish. They pitched it to publishers. They did not get funding. They shelved the game and laid off half the company. Phooey.

Last week, Wired published an article with more details. What we learn here is that Cyan pitched the game in early 2025, at DICE Summit and GDC.

Cyan hoped it would come away from the conferences with a funding agreement between $1 million and $10 million to finish building Anglerfish. But even though the demo was positively received by most publishers, Cyan went home empty-handed, put Anglerfish on ice, and soon laid off 12 people, roughly half of its staff.

-- from "No One Can Afford to Make Myst Games Anymore", Adam Morgan via Wired, 05-Aug-2026

I was at that GDC! I had no idea this was going on, of course. I'm not in on private publisher pitch meetings; I just hang out in the park. What I remember is that Cyan surprise-launched the Age of Rime that weekend, which made me scream because I had to download Myst 2020 over hotel wifi to play it.

...And then, a week later, the news about layoffs at Cyan. So yeah. Not a lot of slack between "we didn't get funding" and "we gotta put the company in low-burn hibernation mode."

One more quote from Eric Anderson. This confirms something I knew but didn't have a direct reference for. To wit, the word "partially":

EAA: "I don't think people realize the true cost of developing games," Anderson says, having used Kickstarter to partially fund two of Cyan's past titles. "A million dollars seems like a ton of money, but it doesn't even come close to covering the full cost of a production like Anglerfish."

Hannah Gamiel closes by saying that Cyan is self-sustaining at its present small size.

HG: We’re going to see a lot more studio closures in the future as a result of this funding issue, but Cyan won’t be one of them.

They're working on a smaller-scale Myst-universe game codenamed Mudfish. The "MUD" calls back to "MUDPIE", the circa-2000 multi-user-Myst proposal that became Myst Online. What does that mean? We don't know...

...But wait, we know more!

In the course of writing that Wired article, Adam Morgan got a hands-on tour of the Anglerfish demo itself. He just posted about the experience:

Since most of my reporting was left on the cutting room floor, with Cyan’s permission I wanted to give fans of the Myst franchise a closer look at Anglerfish—as well as some exclusive new details about Mudfish, the new game Cyan is currently working on.

-- from "I've seen the lost 'Myst' game—and we're all losers (for now)", Adam Morgan, 06-Aug-2026

I'll resist the temptation to quote the whole article. The high points:

The actor behind Guildmaster Damreus is Noshir Dalal. He's been in a bunch of high-end games that I haven't played (not my genre). Notably he voiced the title character in the English localization of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.
You play a member of the Guild of Surveyors doing Damreus a favor. He sends you to the Age containing his family pied-à-livre, a mansion built on an old mining site. You're apparently looking for a Prison Book.
But you can't advance very far in the mansion. So you return to D'ni, where Damreus says that he'll help you by modifying the Linking Book. (Really the Descriptive Book, don't get on me.)
You return to the vacation Age, which is now stormy and somewhat messed-up.
As we know from the trailer, you eventually find Damreus's lost book -- and then lose it, which makes him very cranky. The implication is that he starts using his alteration powers in increasingly scary ways.
The demo was about two hours of playtime, and what was there was fully playable.
The whole Riven team worked on it except Richard Vander Wende. "So the headcount was in the neighborhood of 30."

More quotes:

"People are asking if we're going release the demo to the public, and the answer is no for a variety of reasons," Anderson says. "We didn't tune it for puzzle density, so there's not a ton here in terms of puzzles. And then another reason is that it reveals things that would spoil the core idea of the game. We're keeping those things very close because we would love to rekindle the project one day. The core idea is what made us so passionate about it, and that core idea is still alive and well."

HG: "A Kickstarter, based on our experience of having run and successfully completed Kickstarters, would not have covered the amount we needed to make this game come to life. The quality bar for our games continues to increase over time, so the cost does, too."

EAA: "It's definitely not canceled. It's not like we chose to walk away from it. We simply couldn't secure the financing we needed. But this iteration of Anglerfish is gone because the the team that made it is not at Cyan right now. Some still are, but a lot of key individuals that contributed to this are not currently here. If we were to revisit this in the future, which I would absolutely love to do, it will probably shift and morph and become something that looks a lot different."

-- ibid

The context here is that Cyan never cancels a game. They cancel development on a game. The game concept goes back on the shelf. As Eric implies, any idea can be revisited in a new form. (Remember, the first pitch for Obduction was a narrative shooter game!)

And Mudfish? Again, read the post. The descriptive quote:

EAA: "With Mudfish, the focus is on interactions. How does it feel to touch things in the game world -- to interact with objects that you find around you?"

[...] "Imagine a game that doesn't take place over a sprawling landscape, but maybe takes place in a library that has additional wings you can unlock. Or maybe little jaunts into attached ages."

Again, this reminds me intensely of The Room series, which took the Myst formula and focused it down to a puzzle-box on the table in front of you. Moving levers, turning keys, prodding for secret panels. But this is my speculation, not news.

Further notes:

Mudfish is also set in pre-Fall D'ni.
They didn't say a word about multi-player. That too is pure speculation. All we know is that a Mysterium attendee asked Eric if the name connection to "MUDPIE" was intentional; Eric said yes.
Clearly, Mudfish is scoped for Cyan's current reduced state. They are actively working on it, but no dates or promises.

EAA: "It’s very early, so we’re mostly focused on systems building right now, and the narrative and character details are still very much in flux. We would love to share more about Mudfish at Mysterium next summer, but we’ll see how the year goes."

I hope Cyan's year goes well. As I hope for all of us. And I will see you at Mysterium 2027.

Visible Suspended is now available to all

2026-08-01T04:01:00+00:00

August brings us Suspended, Michael Berlyn's cryogenic nightmare.

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license.

Suspended surely had the most inspired package concept of Infocom's early years. The Starcross flying saucer was more eye-catching; the Witness newspaper was more detailed. But Suspended's serene cryo-death-mask was a genuine shock when you brought it home and eagerly tore off the shrink-wrap.

Mask photo courtesy of MoCAGH. Manual from my own collection.

The gameplay was a shock as well. No bold explorer or diligent detective this time! You play a silent corpsicle controlling six quirky repair robots in a devastated underground complex. No single robot is capable of much. You have to coordinate their movements to get a handle on the problems facing you.

Or, I should say, facing the entire planet. The Complex is the nerve center for Contra's weather control, transit system, and other vital functions. Your "score" measures thousands of deaths on the surface as conditions deteriorate. Better get those repairs queued up, or an irate delegation will swap you out for a clone.

The game is a mix of Infocom's usual story-world with a simulationist time-management challenge. First, figure out how to complete the repairs. Then figure out how to do that and monitor and minimize the surface death total. Once you've got that nailed down, there's an ADVANCED mode which worsens the initial damage to the Complex.

(Then there's IMPOSSIBLE mode, which is a joke. My game The Dreamhold has an IMPOSSIBLE mode which was directly inspired by Suspended.)

The package included a map and tokens to help you track your bots' locations. I loved fantasy maps as a kid; I can still reach that sense of awe when I look at the bold, colorful layout. Naturally, I've integrated the original map and robot markers into Visible Suspended. No boxes and lines this month...

My recreation of the Contra Underground Complex map. (High-resolution source archived here.)

The in-game map is arranged slightly differently but it's the same art. Bonus feature: if a robot is moving, you can see its current destination (grey marker) as well as its current location (black marker).

If you want to see photographs of the original map and packaging, visit the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History or my high-resolution scans at the Internet Archive.

Other goodies:

I've been on a scanning binge. New high-res scans now available at the Internet Archive:

Planetfall (folio edition)
Infidel (folio edition)
Sorcerer (folio edition) (includes Infotator!)

Planetfall is my original copy that I played when I was a kid. The Infidel and Sorcerer feelies were scrounged off Ebay, but they're in good condition.

However, I kept my original copy of the Sorcerer manual. Which means I now have two copies. Guess what? They're slightly different. Yes, they're both folio-edition, but at some point Infocom changed the color treatment of the pages.

My guess is that they adjusted the "old parchment" color layer to make the text more legible. Also dropped this lightning doodle.

As for the Infotator, this may be the first 600dpi scan that shows all twelve monsters. Although someone uploaded a nice interactive version a few years ago.

Upcoming work:

The Visible Witness will be the next public release on September 1st. Enjoy your visit to 1938.

Patreon supporters got access to The Visible Witness a month ago, and Visible Planetfall today. Please remember that the Visible Zorker is a Patreon-supported project! Your donation is immensely appreciated. (And credited in each game's "About" page, of course.)

Mysterium 2026: The Cyan-adjacent news

2026-07-28T15:41:11+00:00

The rest of my 2026 Mysterium report. (See part 1 for the Cyan news.)

All the videos are currently available on Mysterium's Twitch channel. They will be archived on their Youtube channel pretty soon.

Documentary Update

Philip Shane gave his usual progress report on the Myst documentary. It moves forward.

We have been in serious conversations with some pretty influential people in the entertainment world. And I am not allowed to say more than that.

"Serious conversations" are cheap coin in the business, but we'll take it.

Philip introduced collaborators Randy Woods (writer), David Van Taylor (consulting producer), Joshua Reinstein (editing, history cataloging), Ben Reichman (editing), John Clark, Hollister Starrett (music), Elana Bogdan (web design), and Khatie Postma (community manager).

He showed several completed and edited scenes:

"The House that Myst Built": Footage of the original construction of the Cyan office.
"Riven: Behind the Scenes": Assembled from outtakes from behind-the-scenes "Making of Riven" footage.
"The Origin of Myst": Puzzle design discussions between Rand and Robyn, back at the beginning.
"Launching Obduction": In-office footage from 2016 leading up to Obduction's release.

John Clark talked about tagging and cataloging all the VHS footage that was extracted by the VGHF. Apparently there was a plan for a Coke-Myst-Online co-branded ad? It was never released, but there's footage.

Joshua Reinstein talked about digging through acres of ads and articles that were released.

Myst Online news

Jalargura

A new fan Age was released a couple of weeks ago: Jalargura, created by Semjay. It was originally created for an Age-writing jam in early 2025 and then polished for public release. It's an observation-pod Age in a ruined desert city. No puzzles, no interactivity, but you can get out of the pod and poke around the city square. I thought the audio cues were particularly well done.

Descent

Robert Murry introduced a presentation on the Restoration of the Great Shaft. That is: progress on the "Descent" areas that lead from the desert caldera down to the D'ni city. Myst 5 had a version of this sequence, but the Uru fan community is in the process of completely revamping it for Myst Online. A long-running process, to be sure, but it continues.

(Previous Mysterium reports on Descent progress: 2021, 2023, 2024.)

Doobes, the original fan developer of Descent, is no longer involved in the Myst community; see 2025. The project is now run by Harley, Ametist, and Tweek, with many other contributors chipping in.

Harley gave a remote demo of an up-to-the-minute dev build. They explained that the Descent has been through a lot of iterations, from Cyan's original DIRT prototype (2000) to the Myst 5 version (2005) to the tiny glimpses visible in Myst Online. The sequence is also described in the novels. Those books are somewhat out of continuity these days, but the current version of Descent is closer to them than it is to Myst 5.

(Note: this area is not yet available in Myst Online. Harley was playing on a test shard.)

You arrive in the familiar Caldera area, with brand-new music by Semjay and Maurus. The area looks almost the same as in Myst 5; the new feature is a rough wooden elevator platform. It looks like it's intended to take you up (not down!) to the lip of the volcano, but the cables are broken.

As in Myst 5, a crack in the ground and a rope ladder allows you to climb down into a natural tunnel. (Or you can just jump down, since the Uru engine doesn't have falling damage as such.) The descending passages have been greatly extended since the Myst 5 version. This is both to match the books better, and to ensure that the top of the Shaft doesn't technically protrude above ground level -- a mapping flaw of earlier versions.

The tunnels run along an underground stream down to a cave, which is Ti'ana's cave from the books. The cave areas are fully modelled, but not fully textured, and the lighting work is still in progress.

You then break out into the D'ni passages and chambers that lead to the top of the Great Shaft. The spiral staircase running down the Shaft is now fully connected, and you could run all the way down on foot. That takes about two hours, real-time. Or you could take the elevator, which is rigged with excellent music and camera animations as you zoom down and down and down.

In the lower regions, you will find the Tomahn (rest chamber) which is already visitable in MOUL, the one with Watson's journal. This has been moved around the shaft; but it will be replaced with a second Tomahn, for an interesting reason. MOUL supports player-made marker-hunting games, and people have made many marker sets which use the original Tomahn coordinates! If that volume was replaced with solid stone, those markers would be unreachable. So it will remain open; but that area is still under construction.

Then of course there's the big elevator puzzle at the bottom of the Shaft. This is fully functional. The areas beyond are still preliminary, but Harley showed a teaser of a "bug cave". (Semjay is reworking this from the original DIRT demo. I could make out distant fireflies.)

When will this be available? No planned date. They talked about several "phases": phase 1 and 2 are the tunnels and the shaft, phase 3 is the "bug cave", then perhaps more. This collides somewhat confusingly with the older DRC terminology (see the Archivists page), where Ages go through five phases of modelling, testing, and release. So I'm not sure what the exact plan is. But clearly things are moving forward.

The intent is to release Descent as a public shared area on MOUL. As a shared area, presumably everything would be unlocked from the start.

In the future, you might also be able to reach Descent at the end of Uru's "Journey" storyline. You'd complete the Journey, reach the Rainy Cleft, and then climb up the volcano to the crater. You'd find an elevator platform; but when you step on it, it breaks. You black out for a moment (covering the level load!) and then wake up in the caldera. Thus the broken elevator mentioned above. You could then explore a private instance of Descent and solve the puzzles yourself.

However, this is very hypothetical and wouldn't be tackled until after the public release. Whenever that is.

Next year

Spokane in 2027! It's an anniversary year. Riven will be thirty years old; Cyan as a company will be forty years old. It's had a few different names, but the original Rand-and-Robyn basement team-up began in 1987.

So they're bringing the con back home. Furthermore:

Hannah: We were recently approached by a local cultural institution about a possible exhibition...

Spokane's Museum of Art and Culture? That's just a guess. I visited there in 2019; good museum. Regardless of which institution they're talking about, the idea is to have the exhibition live for Mysterium time.

I will certainly be there -- despite all uncertainty. Not like 2023, when I slept through my flight-change announcement and showed up at the airport three hours late! Whoops.

See you there.

Mysterium 2026: The news from Cyan

2026-07-28T01:47:04+00:00

Another Mysterium has arrived and then faded silently away. Or, I suppose, faded away with its characteristic reverb-y "vrrrwww-WONK-wonk-wonk" noise.

This year's event was in Portland, Oregon. I did not attend in person; cross-country travel feels like too much of a stretch right now. (And I visited Portland just a couple of years ago for XOXO.) But of course I watched all the streamed talks and presentations. Now I bring you the annual report -- in two parts.

Part 1 is the stuff about Cyan itself and what they're doing. Part 2 will be fan activity and community contributions, including the Myst documentary.

All the videos are currently available on Mysterium's Twitch channel. They will be archived on their Youtube channel pretty soon.

EDIT-ADD: The State-of-Cyan video is now up on Cyan's Youtube channel.

State of Cyan

I'll start with the big finale wrap-up event of the conference. Cyan has posted their own news post. This went up simultaneously with the Mysterium talk. But I have more detail, mwah hah hah.

Hannah Gamiel and Eric A. Anderson, the studio co-heads, attended in person! This may be the first time Cyan head honchos have travelled to a non-Spokane Mysterium.

They apologized for not giving a State-of-Cyan talk last year. Here's the two-year news catch-up:

Lots of awards for Riven.
Released the age of Rime in March 2025.
Two rounds of layoffs. Suck.
Firmament on PS4/PS5/PSVR2 in July 2025.
Console ports of Myst and Riven.
Myst novel trilogy re-released as an ebook.
Updates for classic titles, plus Steam Deck verification: Myst Masterpiece Edition, Riven (1997), Myst 3. ("We are not officially the people maintaining the source code for Myst 3", but they were able to make the update happen.)
Obduction updates and ports are sadly roadblocked by being on a very early version of UE4. Updating to a modern engine release will take more work. No announcements there.
Set up Steam promo bundles with Blue Prince, Outer Wilds, and other cool games.
Office cleanout drive! There was thirty years of cruft behind some of those tantalizing locked office doors. Junk junk, not historic junk. "Think chili pepper flakes from 25 years ago." They had a dumpster party and cleared it all out.

Also, an account named "spyder" posted recently on the #riven channel of Cyan's Discord, hinting about a link to an ARG teaser page. Cyan does this now and again. I'll be honest: I don't follow these discussions. I prefer to wait for actual announcements. But you can catch up on the #cipher discussion channel if you like.

So what's next?

Cyan never announces anything big at Mysterium; it's too small a crowd. In fact -- remember my 2019 report? When Rand gave a whole planned timeline for the next five years? Promises that got rearranged and overturned within a year?

EAA: [In 2019] Hannah and I had just stepped into our new roles... you can see me standing off to the side with my jaw open, like, "Rand, what are you doing?"

So Eric and Hannah didn't try to make any promises this year. Instead, they gave a presentation called "Paths Not (yet) Taken: Scraps from Cyan's Development Past." Or, as Eric joked, "You guys wanna see a dead body?" They showed concept art and prototype shots from all sorts of projects that never saw the light of day.

The two boxes in the bottom right corner were "Minnow" and "Mudfish". Eric is into fish codenames.

This was fascinating. I enjoy trying to guess what's behind Cyan's curtain, but they really don't let much of hard info slip out. This was a first glimpse at many, many things that I had no idea existed.

They were very clear that none of this stuff was in active development. (With small exceptions which I'll get to.) But of course Cyan never cancels a project. As you'll see, even the most moribund proposal goes on the shelf. That which is shelved shall eternal lie. Who knows what form it might reappear in someday.

Latus (2004): (Pronounced "lattice", btw.) An experiment by Rand and Ryan Miller in linear narrative. An episodic spy series. The concept sounds like a mosaic story; you could browse many woven-together storylines about many characters, but it wasn't interactive in the game sense. Only got as far as storyboards.

Obduction v.1 (2005): Pitched as "Myst meets Halo". Concept art is a creepy alien and a guy in a storm-trooper breath mask. "Rand really wanted to take a swing at a shooter-style game with a Cyan twist." The point was to sneak narrative twists into a shooter game. Something about the player's breath being toxic to the aliens...?

EAA: Over time, the idea morphed into a more light-hearted game about a farmer named Lemon rescuing his dog (named Jake) who was abducted by aliens.

From there it morphed even further into a scenario where the whole thing was a televised intergalactic game show where aliens would kidnap humans and make them compete for prizes.

All of this was just pitch documents; there was never a playable prototype. The Obduction Kickstarter, of course, reworked the concept from scratch.

DiSC v1 (2006): Apparently the Cyan crew were big into disc golf. (Apparently all the back windows of the office have scrape marks from stray Frisbees.) They started planning a disc golf game for the Wii, with powerups and wacky Cyan-style environments. Again, no prototype.

Lift / Lyft (2007): Ambitious adventure game about flight and exploration. A huge game world with massive floating islands. You'd switch between third-person exploration on the ground and first-person flying combat. Customizable characters and customizable vehicles.

EAA: This actually did get very far along in discussions with a publisher, but thankfully the deal never closed, because in 2008 the financial crisis happened. Had [the deal] gone forward it would have been disastrous.

Origami (2007): This was a much smaller scope. Top-down action game about fighting paper monsters. Screenshot is subtitled "The Seven Daughters of Origami".

Both Lift and Origami were built in a Plasma 3.0 engine. At this point Cyan still saw Plasma as a strategic asset. (Later they dropped Plasma and pivoted to Unity, then settled on Unreal.)

Latus v.2 (2010): Reworked the Latus story into a timeline game in a 3D world. You move up and down the timeline, making small changes and seeing their ripple effects.

EAA: The idea was to build a literal exploration game inside of a short-form branching narrative. New locations would open up as you progressed through the game, and new options would combine with previous ones, forming a super-complex possibility space... I did some light prototyping for this around 2016 as a VR game.

(Eternal Threads tried a similar timeline concept in 2022, although not that complex. I thought it was pretty good.)

Goldfish (2011): An adventure game in the D'ni setting, but not about Atrus and his family. "A love letter to the D'ni cavern." Some of the Age concepts (the "Chain Age" and "Caustic Age") were later reworked into Obduction and Firmament areas.

DiSC v2 (2016): Revived the disc-golf concept for VR! This did start turning into a prototype, but it didn't go anywhere.

Goldfish v.2 (2023-4): Revived the concept, made lots of design progress. This one is not entirely inactive but there's nothing to announce either.

EAA: I'm not letting go of this one. While it might not be in full-blown development, it's smoldering. Someday.

Adjacent to that, Eric said he'd been trying to construct a full-scale Unreal model of the entire D'ni cavern, including both Ae'gura and the main city. There's been lots of conflicting game maps, and then "reams" of further maps and designs that never got built in Uru. Reconciling them is a fun project. ("Backburner side project", he emphasizes. "Because it might come in handy someday.") This is only about layout, not texturing or visuals. He showed a few brief fly-mode clips.

Minnow: DarkPath (2025): A micro-prototype of a puzzle game under time pressure. You're on a runaway tunneling machine blasting through the earth at high speed. "Kind of like a high-energy escape room."

Minnow: WhoD'nit (2025): Another micro-prototype, a murder mystery visual novel. Screenshot shows a seven-day timeline. "Phoenix Wright crossed with Myst." Kadish appears (at least as a prototype character).

Anglerfish (2024-2025): This is the big one. You may already have seen the trailer which was posted this weekend. This was a D'ni-era game with a darker tone. Cyan was heavily developing it towards the end of Riven production. (It was teased as "PREFALL" in early 2025, before the layoffs hit.)

EAA: I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it a horror game, but it's certainly a Myst thriller.

The concept is that you're sent to fetch a Linking Book by an untrustworthy and possibly unstable Guildmaster (named Damreus in the pitch). As the plot progresses, he tries to manipulate you by editing the Age you're exploring. So you're trapped in a world that's being turned against you.

The trailer features both exploration and motion-captured acting. Damreus is a scary person.

They spent four months building a fully playable prototype. Note that the trailer above is a publisher pitch trailer. It has more storyline and gameplay spoilers than you'd expect from a Steam game trailer.

Anglerfish is not currently in production; they could not get it funded. But obviously everybody wants to see it someday. (The enthusiasm in the Mysterium event room was palpable, even over stream.)

Mudfish (2026): This is the project that is in current development, albeit in a very early stage and with a small team. They didn't give any specifics; they just said it was a first-person adventure in the Myst setting. Eric's description made me think of The Room:

EAA: Expect denser, more intricate game spaces... We're really trying to focus on the tactility of things.

Is that "Mudfish" codename intentionally connected to "Mudpie"? (As in "multi-user...") Yes, says EAA, yes it is.

They noted that they're not focusing on VR for the moment. Just not enough of a team to target all the VR platforms. (I always got the impression that Rand was the VR booster. Now he's retired so maybe that changes the balance.)

So that brings us to the present. What is coming? (These are promises, or at least announced products.)

Boxed editions of Myst and Riven for PS5, Xbox, and Mac/PC. The PS5 and Xbox boxes will have actual spinny disks. The PC box will just have a Steam code, or a "digital code" anyhow.
Myst novel trilogy reprints. Boutique hardcover editions of the three books. More information to come this fall.

Harrison Pink (who has been working on the book re-releases) answered a question about the Book of Marrim, a fourth novel which has been a running joke at Mysteriums for decades.

HP: So the reality of it was that we had found the manuscript for The Book of Marrim, and we were real excited! Wow, we have it! It turns out that it was very incomplete [maybe two-thirds missing]. It was a first draft written in 1999, and the lore and story just didn't match the lore of the past twenty years. [...] So that particular Book of Marrim is a dead end at this point.

The other notable audience question was about going back to Kickstarter. Hannah said "TBD". Eric said "TBA". Which is a nice distinction!

The truth is, I think Kickstarter would be a rough road for Cyan at this point. As I understand it, they've never gotten enough funding out of a Kickstarter to do a complete game. It's always been a way to get into pre-production and then pitch publishers by pointing to a ready audience.

Now, publishers know what the audience is. Firmament and Riven sales figures are a better guide than Kickstarter results. Cyan is, like it or not, back on the board.

Plus, everybody's on the rocks at this point. I mean not everybody. A few rich people are rich. But not me. In 2013, I was thrilled to throw a few hundred dollars into a new Cyan Kickstarter. 2019? Sure, no problem. 2026? Um...

Look. I have a steady contracting gig. (Not just the Patreon, although I'm happy about the Patreon too.) I am not hurting right now. But in no way do I feel secure. Any spare dollar needs to be saved up for possible future catastrophes, and we believe in future catastrophes in a way that was unimaginable ten years ago.

(Which is one reason I started the Patreon. And one reason I decided not to fly to Portland this year.)

I don't mean to end this on a downer. I want to see Cyan succeed. I want there to be sources of funding for a forty-year-old creator-owned studio which has been doing genre-defining work that whole time. I just don't think that the fans can make it happen this time.

But look you, this isn't the end of the report. More tomorrow.

Good luck, everybody

2026-07-25T01:31:56+00:00

I'm embarrassed about this one.

The Witness will be September's release for the Visible Zorker project, but it's already done for Patreon supporters. So I've scanned my Witness feelies for the app already. (You can see the high-res scans here at the Internet Archive.) It's a classic package. The 1938 newspaper is probably Infocom's high point for pure immersive scene-setting.

But the matchbook caught my attention.

My original matchbook feelie from The Witness.

That's a curious symbol. It's sort of a generic "look at this Chinese symbol" symbol. But is it actually Chinese? The Witness has this uncomfortable schtick of "obviously Asian, but no definite nationality". The Linder house is full of Orientalist tat; some of it is Japanese style, but only the "small Shinto shrine" in the entry betrays an actual tradition.

If you know Chinese: just hold off. I'll get there.

So I immediately suspected that the symbol is a fake. After all, everything else on the matchbook is some variety of joke. "Brass Lantern", come on. The street names are Joel Berez and Al Vezza, two Infocom execs. The phone number "Chandler-1729" refers not only to Raymond Chandler, but to the best-known anecdote about the mathematical prodigy Ramanujan.

I did a quick image search to try to verify (or disprove) my theory. There are certainly a lot of symbols like that one:

But they all seem to be bilaterally symmetric, or nearly so. None of them have those squiggly bottom inserts.

Well, what about those inserts? They look awfully suspicious, especially upside down:

Surely the right side is the Latin letter A. The left side is less obvious, but maybe an S? Or an E, or... this isn't really coming together. If it were SG, for "Stu Galley", then I'd buy it; but I can't make that work.

Maybe more context would help. Infocom's delightful packages were designed by G/R Copy, aka Giardini/Russell, aka the demon Jeearr. Did they have an "SA" on staff? ...How would I know?

At this point I started asking around, hoping someone would be smarter than me.

You know what happened next. Someone replied that it was an actual Chinese symbol. The character 壽 (shòu) really does mean "long life". I was barking up the wrong tree entirely.

(Two people, in fact. Thank to David Goldfarb and BoysenberryCider.)

壽

If your browser doesn't render that Unicode character, here's a image version, with serifs:

(Apparently there's a Unicode character specifically for the rounded version, but I don't have a font that displays it.)

Wikipedia has a whole page of examples of shòu used in art. And guess what? Nearly all of them are bilaterally symmetrical!

From Examples of Chinese Ornament, Owen Jones, 1867.

Except for the ones that just go to town...

A peach-tree shòu and one by Hai Rui which, at least according to the caption, is an ambigram.

I would be hard pressed to describe these symbols as having anything in common, beyond "a lot of horizontal lines around a vertical axis". Which just goes to show that I'm not looking at them right. This is decorative lettering (ideographing?). It's meant to convey the basic idea to someone who's familiar with the symbol. Someone who's already seen it zillions of times in different decorative forms already.

Someone must have done shòu in heavy-metal, but I couldn't find it, so here's LOVE instead.

For laughs, I spent some time trawling Ebay for "vintage Chinese matchbooks". Quite a few listings, but none in the style of the Witness one. One did have the shòu character:

This photo indicates that the Cathay Restaurant was open from 1941 to 1966.

Of course, the designers at G/R didn't have Ebay to trawl. They must have had some design source but I have no idea what. Not that 1867 Chinese Ornament book, certainly.

Arguably they fell into a trap of making the Chinese character look too much like itself. They should have gone for decorative rather than readable! Live and learn.

The Fool and his Money returns

2026-07-20T00:48:12+00:00

Here's an interesting bit of game-historic preservation: someone has posted a browser-playable version of Cliff Johnson's epic (and epically-slow-to-release) 2012 puzzle game, The Fool and his Money. Here's the new web site: www.the-fool-and-his-money.com.

I dunno who did this. Cliff Johnson's original web site, www.thefoolandhismoney.com, stopped working a couple of years ago. I have no leads on what happpened to the man himself. I hope he's okay.

That's the announcement. I'm about to go into one of my rambles through game history, but I figured you'd want the hot link up front.

So, rambling. Way back in my college years, I played a Mac game called The Fool's Errand. It was awesome. Changed my life. (As you know if you played System's Twilight.)

Long after that -- but still a long time ago -- Cliff Johnson announced the sequel, to be titled The Fool and his Money. I immediately pre-ordered it. That was December 2002. After Shade but before The Dreamhold, as S. Morgenstern might have put it.

The game went through, let's say, a few delays. (And I gave it some guff on my blog for that.) But it shipped in 2012 and it was pretty darn good. I said that on my blog. My blog review is cited on Wikipedia, which I guess tells you how big a splash the game didn't make.

Sadly, playing The Fool and his Money has become its own sort of puzzle. The original Fool's Errand was a Mac puzzle game, which means it was released as Mac floppy disks. The Internet Archive is great at Mac floppy disks. You can play it right now! (Also play 3 in Three!)

The Fool and his Money, in contrast, was written in Adobe Director / Shockwave. (A different tech than Flash, despite Flash's "SWF" file suffix.) The "modern" Mac and Windows binaries were essentially launchers for an embedded Shockwave player and DCR media file.

This did not turn out to be a long-term solution. Director was end-of-lifed in 2013; Shockwave didn't last a lot longer. Mac dropped the hammer on Intel 32-bit apps in 2019, and started the switch to ARM in 2020. So running the Mac app at all became a problem.

I don't know what the story was on the Windows side -- better than Apple, to be sure. But even if you could run the app, you couldn't buy it any more. Cliff Johnson used some kind of hand-rolled license key framework. You buy the game, Johnson emails you a license key file.

I can't laugh at this, because it's exactly how I handled System's Twilight registrations for the first couple of years. In fact I would mail back a printed code sheet. I still have a big manila envelope full of registration forms.

But that was 1994. October of 2012 was into the era of Steam Greenlight, if barely; Itch.IO launched six months later. Either would have accepted gamerbucks and handed out The Fool and his Money forever. Cliff Johnson did not choose to avail himself of these services. Instead, he kept hand-crafting license key files... until he got tired of it, or Director broke, or the app ran into compatibility issues, or something. I don't know what straw broke the Tower's back, but you couldn't buy it any more.

A 2023 post by Renzo Pigliacampo cites this response to an inquiry (from TangoBunny, see comment below):

From: cliff@thefoolandhismoney.com Alas, the boat has sailed, hit an iceberg, and sunk. Unlike the 1987 The Fool's Errand, which is still operational, the 2012 sequel is not. Irony, my old friend, we meet again. Cliff

A few months after that, the game's web site (and Johnson's) turned into a fly-buzz banner:

www.thefoolandhismoney.com snapshot circa November 2023

It didn't. The site disappeared entirely in late 2024.

The good news, or interesting news anyhow, is that Renzo Pigliacampo dug into that license key framework. His post describes the process of installing Adobe Director, opening up the game file, and porting the script that handles license keys.

You can access to the encoder, decoder and keygen on GitHub together with the cast decompilation, or online from the extras section here.

We are not done yet, as there's a little detail we overlooked. Back over the game's website, in the installation instructions there are two sections: current orders and true believer pre-orders. The only difference is that the latter doesn't come with a PassKey.txt file, only the PassWord. So this means that there has to be a way to enter the game with just a password...

-- "Making a keygen for a commercial Shockwave game", 5 May 2023

In other words, the pre-order keylist was hard-coded into the app. And indeed Pigliacampo dug it out! Take a look.

There's me at #10. I recognize quite a few other names on the list, from my on-line and in-person social circles. Also some more famous puzzle fans. Check out #297.

(Special shout-out for Christina Schulman, #134, a friend from Pittsburgh. Christina was the very first person to register System's Twilight in 1994. She passed away a year ago.)

And that brings us around to where we started: the web port of The Fool and his Money.

In the year 2026, I still aspire to finish this damn game, so I ended up porting the original Adobe Director game content to the web.

I’ve made every effort to contact Cliff about this project, but I haven’t been able to reach him. If you know how to reach Cliff — or ARE Cliff — I’d appreciate hearing from you.

I’m sharing this web port in the spirit of software preservation for a game that is no longer commercially available or runnable on the platform that many purchased it on — but especially in appreciation of Cliff’s puzzling genius.

-- from "About this site", www.the-fool-and-his-money.com

I don't know who put it up. It wasn't me. The web site is unsigned. It claims to be someone on the True Believers list, so that cuts it down to 1600 names or so.

I can say that I did finish the damn game, back in 2012. It was worth playing. I could probably take another stab at it; it's not like I remember any of the puzzles.

So what happened to Cliff Johnson? I don't know. I don't know anybody who knows.

The last news I heard was 2017, when Johnson designed a puzzle for a book on the architecture of Kazakhstan. I realize how that sentence sounds but it entirely happened. I bought the book but I did not try to solve the puzzle.

From my copy of Astana: Architecture, Myth, and Destiny, Frank Albo, 2017.

Puzzle-tastic page footers.

I didn't try to read the book, either. It seems to be either pure crackpot woo or a serious monograph aimed at the crackpot woo market. These are the sort of questions which, if the answer were "yes", would not be phrased as questions:

Is Astana the sun-worshipping capital of Zionist Freemasons? Is there an energetic grid linking its major buildings with the pyramids of Egypt? Is the city’s Master Plan a coded magical talisman devised by the New World Order? Separate fact from fiction and find out how an underground stream of design principles and ideas permeates the layout and construction of the most extraordinary city ever conceived.

-- from the Astana web site

Great photos, though.

The book's puzzle page is still up. The original "Closing Date" was supposed to be the end of 2018. I guess nobody solved it, because on the web page, that's extended to May of 2020. There's no indication of any sort of conclusion since then. The people running the contest might have been a wee bit distracted by the end of the world.

Only that's not the last footprint left by Mr Johnson upon the puzzle world. Check out this article from the ancient eldritch time of the blockchain:

Looking for a different type of puzzle game? Quantum Noesis is a game that’s part graphic novel, part puzzle game, unlocks episodically over the weeks and features prizes for those who are fast enough to solve them first and – of course – it’s powered by NFTs and has its own unique token economics and behind-the-scenes AI enterprise.

Are the puzzles number puzzles? Word games?

Almost all of them are word-based puzzles and they were designed by legendary puzzle master Cliff Johnson. Cliff comes up with indescribable, category defying word puzzles, the likes of which you’ve never seen.

-- from "Quantum Noesis: Redefining the puzzle game with a little NFT magic", BlockchainGamer.Biz, 20 May 2022

(Credit to zaratustra on the thinky-puzzle-games discord for uncovering this treasure.)

The Quantum Noesis website lasted a bare two years, from a coming soon page in January 2022 to this snapshot in October 2023. There's some nice art in the middle. The aesthetic is sort of Tron crossed with Poser models, which, okay, I might have gone for that. Except for the NFT stuff. And except for the story, which is exactly the sort of weak-tea five-years-ago "decentralized AI utopia" hype which got stomped flat and incinerated by the corporate dystopian AI of the current hype cycle.

But, indeed, Cliff Johnson is listed as the game's Puzzle Designer. This interview remains live:

Cliff has come on board with Synesis One as our puzzle designer, after connecting with Tracy Spaight. He was drawn to the opportunity to create new conundrums and puzzles against the background of AI singularity and NFT word tokens.

-- from "Meet Cliff Johnson, Puzzle Game Designer", Medium, 23 March 2022

The article mostly just reiterates Johnson's history for folks too young to have experienced it first-hand. His comments about the Quantum Noesis game feel pro-forma. Well, I don't want to project my assumptions. Paying work is paying work.

I guess we can compare Cliff Johnson with Chris Manson, another cult puzzle-master of that era. (Maze and The Fool's Errand were just two years apart!) Manson did another couple of puzzle books after Maze; I spent a summer banging my head against The Practical Alchemist. But then he disappeared from puzzle-dom, preferring to work on illustrated storybooks... until Tonda Ros showed up with Blue Prince and asked him to guest-star.

The difference is that Blue Prince is a genre-defining triumphant hit. The Astana book and David Blaine's Mysterious Stranger were, um, not. I don't think that's Cliff Johnson's fault. Then again, I don't think the success of Blue Prince can be laid at Chris Manson's feet either. I don't know where I'm going with this comparison, sorry. "Riding coattails is a crapshoot"; well, working on your own stuff is a crapshoot too.

Of course the remixes and inspirations echo on forever, but that may be tepid comfort to the original artist.

Let's try a different comparison. People preserve, remake, and reinvent old games. Sometimes it's the original creators taking another run at their old work. Sometimes it's licensed and aligned with the corporate legal framework. And sometimes, as with the Johnson's games, it's samizdat. Under the covers. Puzzle sickos in trenchcoats handing out floppies. That last one was metaphorical.

As you know, I'm going that unaligned route with the Infocom canon. It started out as a community project, which is to say, I ignored copyright entirely. ("Fair use" is something we say to each other, not a legal ruling.) It became Officially Permitted when Microsoft open-sourced the Zork trilogy, but I'm way past that now, back into the technically-illegal.

It's nice when the business world does this work. (You can buy the Zork trilogy on GOG.) It's nice, full credit given, when the business world turns a blind eye to community work. That's the fanfic bargain; unspoken, largely projection on both sides, but real.

But we can't rely on the business world. We can't even rely on the non-profit world. (I say this as the IF Archive lead for IFTF! And a devoted admirer of the VGHF, etc.) The bigger the organization, the more legal crap it has to contend with. That's why my Visible Zorker project isn't an IFTF project; it's me going rogue.

Cliff Johnson, to his credit and his curse, refused to let The Fool and his Money get caught up in the business world. Now just plain folks have to take up where he left off.

If he did leave off. I never rule out a triumphant return, or even a modest low-key return. I'll let you know what I see.

Update with footnotes

Lot of replies to this one! Let me add more info.

First, the original download packages of The Fool and his Money remain available from the Internet Archive. You can download the Windows zip file from that link and play on a modern Windows setup, using one of the passwords in the True Believers list. Feel free to use mine: AND974VPR.

The Mac app is not viable on modern Macs, but can be made to work on sufficiently old Macs. (Looks like it will run on PowerPC or 32-bit Intel Macs.)

If you play on the web, then your progress is saved in local storage (cookies). Beware cookie-clearing.

On the UI

When you launch the game (either on the web or on Windows), you see a screen of twelve Tarot card "tokens". These are your save profiles. The card with the yellow-highlighted name is your current save slot. Since you're almost certainly playing on your own machine, just ignore the token list and hit "Play". You'll be off and running in the default slot.

If you hit "Tokens" you'll be back at the slot-selection screen. Just hit "Play" again.

The "Menus" screen shows all the available levels. Some are unlocked when the game starts; most will need to be unlocked by solving puzzles. There's a "Prologue" which introduces the story, but it doesn't autoplay -- you need to click to watch it.

On bugs

Torbjörn Andersson notes in comments that the Prologue sequence is janky in the web version. Now that I take a look, it's janky for me too.

(The first time I clicked "Prologue", the music played but no further animation started. When I clicked outside the pane and then hit "Prologue" again, the animation started too early.)

The Prologue isn't critical; it just recaps the Finale of The Fool's Errand. But this brings up the possibility of bugs in other scenes or puzzles. I've only tested a few.

Folks also note bugs in the gateway / stained-glass window code.

Games which I have been seriously waiting for

2026-07-14T00:52:18+00:00

What a wonderful time to be a puzzle fiend!

The Incident at Galley House
Dimhaven: The Lost Source

(Updated to add: I played a free review copy of Galley House.)

The Incident at Galley House

by William Rous and Evil Trout -- game site

Galley House has been abandoned since 1936. Since long before that, as far as anybody can recall; but the heap of unexplained corpses that turned up in 1936 pretty well sealed the deal. But what happened back then? Your shiny new spectronoetic console might just provide answers.

Last year I reviewed the original plain-text version of Galley House:

Type Help is smart, sharply written, intensely compelling, and a great puzzle besides. I couldn't stop thinking about it until I was done, and then I wrote this post. Yay! It's good. You should play it.

-- me on Type Help, Feb 2025

Really that's all I need to say and all you need to read. Have at it.

But you may have more questions.

What kind of game is this? It is static deduction. Indeed, Type Help rapidly became one of the inspirational touchstones of that hot new genre, to be mentioned in the same breath as Golden Idol or Roottrees. Now it's been redone with (simple static) graphics and (very excellent) voice actors, ready for its Steam debut.

Is it worth playing Galley House if you've already played Type Help? It certainly was for me. The story is the same, and I remembered the basic concept well enough. But eighteen months is enough to blur the details. I still had to play -- listen to the dialogue, take notes, and deduce who was where and when. And who died where and when.

(Sure, I could have looked at my 2025 notes file. But why spoil my own fun?)

Plus, Galley House has... let's say additional material. Extended content. The story I recalled from Type Help did not cover everything I encountered in Galley House. I shall leave the details to await your arrival.

Is the additional material consonant with the original game? Yes. And, before you ask, it was all written by William Rous, the original author.

Is Galley House still basically a text game? I would say not primarily. You listen to spoken dialogue. Yes, you get text transcripts of everything you hear, browsable and searchable. When you need to recall a detail, you'll go straight to those transcripts. But it's still a distinctly different texture from the original. (Which, as we recall, was written in Twine.)

More importantly, you're no longer typing filenames at a text prompt. You're playing with a Mysterious Machine. (Yay!) Dials, levers, switches. The Machine does the same job you might remember from Type Help. But if you're new to spectronoetics, you've got an additional layer of inscrutability to contend with. There's more bits to experiment with. It's definitely a change-up from "What do I do? Oh, I guess I'm supposed to type HELP."

I am biased (by knowing the original), but I think the new introduction works. It's not meant to be a serious hump; you are provided with reasonable (in-character) instructions. Just keep in mind that while Galley House is of the Golden Idol lineage, it's not a straightforward fill-in-the-blanks quiz. There's a bit more to it than that.

Okay, enough out of me. Galley House is delicious and not a game to spoil.

I'll just add what I've been saying all along. I've played plenty of deduction-esques since the Obra Dinn came down the ways. Not all of them, or even most! It's a delightfully productive (and still delightfully indie) subgenre.

But Type Help was the real audience breakout. For a few weeks in early 2025, my social feeds were full of non-puzzlers, non-gamers saying "Hey, have you seen this? It's amazing."

The Incident at Galley House is still amazing. It's graphical and voiced. It presents itself as more traditionally game-y. I honestly don't know whether that will net out as more viral or less. But if you haven't experienced this story, seriously, take a look. And if you have, take a fresh look.

(If graphics aren't your thing: the original game remains available for free.)

Dimhaven: The Lost Source

by Zadbox Entertainment -- game site

Quern came out in 2016. A lot of great graphical adventure/puzzle games appeared around that time, but Quern was the one that most successfully revived the spirit of Myst and Riven.

(I mean, aside from Obduction. Obviously.)

So everybody wanted to see what was next for Zadbox Games. A long delay is what. But Dimhaven Enigmas was announced in 2023. It had a bit of a bumpy road, including a failed Kickstarter followed by a surprise publisher deal and a new subtitle. But Dimhaven: The Lost Source is now up and available.

It's good! It's not a rehash of Quern. That may or may not bother you.

Dimhaven is distinctly more narrative, for a start. (Quern had a story, but even while I was playing it I couldn't have told you what it was.) Dimhaven is an odd and isolated island; your uncle disappeared there; you really want to know why. Off you go. By the way, while the island is inhabited and even a bit of a tourist trap, it's only accessible by parachute.

(I said the game was more narrative. I didn't say the narrative was serious.)

Dimhaven introduces itself by saying it "doesn't hold your hand". Then it tells you to use the in-game hint system if you get stuck. Say what? Sounds like handholding to me.

Now that I've finished, I have some sense of what they mean by "no handholding". To wit: all the puzzles lean towards the obscure end of the puzzlebow. I mean the sort of puzzles where step one is figuring out what the puzzle is. Dimhaven never, ever wants to give you a direct clue.

Let me compare the recent 7th Guest remake (which I called "a perfectly good lightweight puzzle game"). One 7G puzzle is a necklace of different-colored gems. Touching a gem changes some of the gem colors. You hunt around a bit and eventually find a diagram of what colors they're supposed to be. Now you have a puzzle. It's a bit tricky, but once you have the diagram, you're basically on track.

Dimhaven doesn't have that puzzle. But if it did, it wouldn't give you the target diagram. Instead, you'd find a parable about what colors go near what other colors, or maybe a partial family tree of colored birds. Indirect clues, always. And the information would be in a different room. Hidden behind something that you didn't realize you had to move.

See what I mean? Dimhaven is not interested in the puzzle register of "Figure out how to reach the goal." It's in the register of "Construct a theory about what the goal is; try to reach it; see if that forms a solvable puzzle." If it doesn't, throw out that theory and look for a new one. Also, if you're not sure how to look behind, under, or on top of something, you'll definitely need to.

I think of this style as "Mystery Hunt puzzles", because that's the format where I first encountered it as a core tenet. Of course many adventure games have that sort of puzzle. But Dimhaven's apparent goal is to only have that sort.

By the way, when I talk about "Hunt-style puzzles", I don't necessarily mean difficult puzzles. Puzzle Spy International is a recent game which is definitely down this alley -- but on the easy side. Indirect clues, but fairly straightforward to feel through.

Dimhaven, needless to say, is on the hard side.

Inevitably, if you get stuck on a puzzle of this sort, you get wedged. Playing with the mechanism won't help you. You need to come up with the right theory. If you're not getting it, you're just not getting it. I looked at the hints two or three times. (Including once in the original demo, back when I played that.) Sometimes I said "Yeah, I should have thought of that." Sometimes I said "Pff no way." You will get stuck in different places. Don't be shy about hints.

Or play with a buddy. If you're not coming up with the right idea, it's quite likely that your buddy will see it right away. Or vice versa. Mystery Hunt is a team sport.

Besides puzzles, what have we? The story, per se, is quite well done. Good pacing, nicely integrated with your progress. You start alone on a strange island -- cue lonely-ambient music! -- but this is not a Myst-ish solitary quest. You run into an NPC, and then another; then the NPCs start to get more actively involved until they're pushing the story towards its climax.

That ending is really the only point where the narrative gets detached from the gameplay. The story primes you for a showdown: "You must do <X> before <Y> gets it!" But when you unlock that bit, it turns into an old-fashioned cut-scene and everything wraps up on its own.

To be fair, the Big Final Puzzle is a corker. And I'm not saying that they should have added time pressure! That always sucks. But the Big Final Puzzle is over and solved before the Big Final Story Climax begins. You never have a chance to feel triumphant about it.

The story doesn't have much depth behind it, either. Everything seems to run on adventure-game logic. The island of Dimhaven isn't a place; it wobbles between enigma, theme park, and mundane resort town as the plot requires. Indigenous number symbols? Seen in one puzzle, never again. Ancient artifacts? Only when relevant to the plot. What was up with the giant wall? The lighthouse? Pure scenery. I know, every game can't be Riven; but even Myst had a sense of place and history whispering from beneath its clunky journals. I'm afraid Dimhaven is a lot more like Rhem.

The visuals are nice... until I looked closely. Dimhaven doesn't hammer you with realistic detail; it takes a more stylized route. Stylized is awesome too! But Dimhaven combines low-poly models with massively pixelated textures, and the result just comes off as blurry. Inconsistently blurry, at that. A painting on the far side of the room looks fine, but breaks up into pixelated trash when you come close. The wall behind the painting looks bad at a different distance. I felt like I was constantly on the verge of eyestrain.

The worst part is clues: placards, letters, informative bits of paper. These are always too blurry to read -- until you click on them. Only in your hand does their full resolution load in. If two pieces of paper are lying on a desk, they can't both be unblurred at the same time! Drove me nuts.

What you're supposed to do is snapshot each clue with your in-game camera, and then browse the photo album. To be fair, this works fine. Use the heck out of that camera.

The best part is the lighting and the panoramic visual design. When you look out over the landscape, everything looks terrific.

To give further credit, the low-texture style means that you always know what to ignore. If it stays blurry, it's scenery. Quern had problems with focus, but the designers neatly avoided that this time out. Also, hey, Dimhaven requires a quarter the disk space that Quern did, and the min specs are barely higher than Quern's were. (Ten years ago!) The designers made a choice, is what I'm saying. It's just not to my taste.

I still recommend Dimhaven. It's a good ride and it never feels same-y. Lots of different things to do and see and solve. Plenty of good puzzles. Lots of different kinds of puzzles, but thoughtfully; no obligatory sliders or Mastermind. (Okay, one quickie static deduction scene, but that was a pleasant change of pace.) The designers are serious about puzzles, and I'm never going to complain about that.

I hope I don't have to wait another ten years to find out what's next.

On ZIL indentation

2026-07-12T17:28:45+00:00

I tried to give this post an eye-catching title like "The Power of Indentation!" But my fingers wouldn't have it. Blame the fingers.

I don't know much about the text-editing tools used at Infocom. The Witness source directory includes a tantalizing mention of TECO, an editor used at MIT in the 1960s and 70s. Going back a couple of years, there's a map file in the 1978 MDL Zork repository which seems to about managing TECO keybindings.

TECO's editing macros later evolved into their own editor, naturally called "Emacs". Wikipedia notes:

By 1979, Emacs was the main editor used in MIT's AI lab and its Laboratory for Computer Science.

It seems certain that Infocom folks used Emacs at some point, but I don't have any evidence about when.

Whatever editor they used, we can ask: Did it auto-indent their ZIL code? The ZIL code we have is very consistently indented, so it seems like a good bet, but I don't know for sure. The only reference in the 1989 ZIL manual is:

Also note the spaces at the beginning of the TELLs in the DESCFCN. If your describers are of the indentation flavor, your DESCFCN must supply its own indentation.

"Describers" are explained as:

[...] a small package of programs which handle the descriptions for the player's environment: current room and visible objects.

...Which is interesting, not least for saying "programs" for what we (and ZIL itself!) call "routines". I think that "indentation flavor" is not about source code indentation, but rather the indented style of object listing:

Sitting on the kitchen table is: 
  A brown sack
  The brown sack contains:
    A glass bottle
    The glass bottle contains:
      A quantity of water
    A clove of garlic

Some Infocom games used a more sentence-like listing format, particular if they were less container-heavy.

But I digress. Let's go back to the source code.

This is what the Infocom devs saw as they wrote their code:

FIND-IN, from Zork 1.

(But probably in black and white. Or black and green. The syntax coloring is my addition.)

ZIL, like Lisp, is built around deeply-nested lists. Indentation is purely decorative, but it's a huge part of making ZIL/Lisp code readable. You can see that function above is indented to indicate nesting and what lines up with what:

The same function showing alignment guides.

As I said, this is very consistent through all the ZIL code I've looked at. The only exceptions are long spans of text, which are left-justified for readability:

DAM-FUNCTION, from Zork 1.

This indentation style seems to be designed specifically for ZIL game code. The ZIL compiler (which is MDL code, same idea) has similar code indentation; but multiline text spans are handled quite differently. So my guess is that someone built an indentation routine (or "program"!) specifically for Infocom game source.

That's all great. Unfortunately, when I launched the Visible Zorker, it rather mangled the indentation.

FIND-IN as shown in the original Visible Zorker. Some of the vertical alignment is wrong.

That's entirely my fault. The original source files were indented with tab characters, and assumed 8-column tab stops. A very classic format, to be sure. But I'm used to 2-col or 4-col tab stops. When I wrote my ZIL-display code, I told it to transform tabs into four-space sequences.

When I made that decision, my only thought was, "It'll take up less space that way." The Visible Zorker app is divided into two or three text columns. They can be awfully narrow. Anything that reduced horizontal whitespace seemed like a good idea. But as you see, the vertical alignment went completely flop-bott.

Someone pointed this out on the forum last week (thanks squam!) I cranked on some reindentation logic, and eventually settled on this:

FIND-IN as shown in the Visible Zorker today.

It's roughly the same as Infocom's style, except that the first level of indentation is always two columns. (Rather than trying to line up with the routine name.) This saves some space while keeping everything else aligned. It's particularly good for object definitions:

The SWORD definition in Zork 1.

For large functions it can be wider than my previous (four-space) code. But I think the improved clarity is worth it.

All the Visible Zorker games have now been updated with the new format. Let me know if you see any problems.

(This article is cross-posted to my Patreon.)

Addendum:

Hey, look -- evidence of editing software revealed! See video and comments below.

From a BBC documentary segment about Infocom.

(The video is from 1985 and shows the development of Spellbreaker. So a bit later than I've got to in my Visible Zorker timeline.)

The Red Pearls of Borneo: design ruminations

2026-07-05T01:59:39+00:00

Borneo, 1941: rich white Brits run the show for tobacco, pearls and the opium trade, while World War Two creeps up around the edges. Who is sneaking onto the Goodwill plantation and why?

The Red Pearls of Borneo (Bushmonkey Games) is an interesting take on the deductionizer format. It's patterned after Type Help; your challenge is to figure out which people were where and when. But it adds a layer of search mechanics to the logic. I don't think it's entirely successful, but it's an instructive try.

The new gimmick is that you have to identify people by name (first and last) before you can start placing them in scenes. But you can only use a name after you've heard it in a scene already found. This is unlike Golden Idol, where you have to collect the words but they're all lying around the scene free for the taking. In Red Pearls the names are a gating mechanic.

To soften this, the game lets you track objects as well as people. You have to associate the object with its owner. Then it lets you peek into still-locked scenes and see part of the dialogue -- the lines spoken by whoever is holding the object. (Not necessarily the original owner...)

The result is a search experience that feels more hand-scripted, or even on-rails. You have to find certain things in order to unlock other things. But it's also more soft-edged and tactile. You might find one name in a partial view of one scene, then another name in a different slice of a different scene, then put them together. It's more nuanced than Type Help's scene-by-scene progression.

I can see why they tried this idea. I love search tools. Nothing gets me jazzed like finding a magic lens or a UV flashlight. Point it at all the things! The partial unlocking of the search space is a great addition. The problem is that using the objects feels perfunctory and mechanical. It's just a row of icons. It's easier to click through them than to think about which one might work.

To some extent this is true for the entire timeline. When you try a combo (room / time / list of names), the game might say "right", "wrong", or "nothing happened here at that time." That third option is important; it saves you a lot of pointless clicking. But the way you get there is... pointless clicking. I'd click through an entire row or column of the grid, just to fill in the grey "nothing happened" squares. Logic doesn't start until you know where it's worth looking.

In some sense this is the element that's analogous to Golden Idol's word-collection stage. But in GI, mechanically clicking everything is when you learn the story! It's interesting in its own right; the words are just a way to check that you didn't miss something. In Red Pearls, the lawnmowering is just a chain of nopes until you hit the right spot.

I'm not saying it's a bad game. It's good! The deduction framework is solid and the historical background is dense and engaging. The characters are great, consistently surprising and human -- probably the best-drawn crew I've encountered in this shiny-new subgenre.

My design suggestion is just to drop the click-click-click phase. Grey out all the "nothing happens" squares in a row as soon as it appears. (Or perhaps the first time you select one.) When focused on a location, highlight the active objects; grey out the rest. And once you select an active object, permanently add its lines to the location's dialogue. Unlocking an object will feel like a big advancement, and you still have the fun interaction of selecting locations to see where it works. You can almost always guess which slots are likely, so that's not mechanical. (Unless you're really stuck. But you always brute-force when you're really stuck.)

The other peculiar aspect of Red Pearls is its overall shape. This goes back to my Game Narrative Kaleidoscope thesis of "the player should know how far they've gotten". (You don't have to buy the book to read my chapter; it's what I just said.) (Feel free to buy the book though.)

The game begins by showing you a two-day, hour-by-hour timeline. It is very clear that the game, and the story, consists of filling in those two days.

So you do that. Except that's not how it goes. When you reach the "Conclude your story?" option, the timeline isn't entirely unlocked. One character is still nameless. But that person only arrives at the end; they're not part of the main story. Makes sense, right? You can roll credits, or try to 100% the last few details and win your puzzle-sicko trophy.

...Except that's not how it goes. If you continue, you unlock a completely new timeline, in which some of the characters escape the plantation and try to make it to civilization. It's not a whole new puzzle chapter, mind you. It uses the same unlocking mechanic, but in a narrative mode. You track the group from place to place, learning what happens, with only a few logical hops.

And yes, the new timeline provides some clues that unlock the remaining bits of the original chapter. Which opens up a third timeline!

So really this is a puzzle game plus two short stories involving the same characters. They're excellent short stories. I was on the edge of my seat. But what a weird choice! The whole history of narrative games has been "how do we mix the storyline in with the gameplay so that players don't feel stuck behind a glass pane?" These chapters aren't non-interactive; they require active reading and selection. But switching from a puzzle-centric Type Help model to a nearly-hypertext epilogue feels unbalanced.

Actually, the comparison to Type Help is interesting. I won't get into spoilers, but Type Help features a gradual shift in modality. In the beginning, progress is slow; you're groping blindly into the story. But as you learn more and possibilities narrow down, the gameplay accelerates, until you fly into a genuinely propulsive climax.

(And then an interesting change of pace, in the upcoming Galley House remake. But that's a different post.)

So I'm not objecting to the idea of a gameplay shift. It's just that "accelerate and go whoosh!" is a classic audience-pleaser, whereas "stop gaming and read" is a much harder sell.

Do I have a design suggestion here? Man, I don't know. Release the two story chapters as DLC? I don't mean for purchase; the original game is free. But positioning them as separate experiences, rather than surprise chapters, might make sense. Or maybe it would be a complete flop. (They'd be spoilery, for a start.)

The chewy solution is the "standard" narrative design: figure out how to interleave the story sequences with the puzzle sequences. Perhaps as flashbacks. But now I'm suggesting a complete redesign, so I won't push too hard for it!

The designers are hard at work on a full-scale Cold War followup, Green Mist over Portland. We shall see how their design toolkit evolves. In the meantime, Red Pearls is worth playing.

Visible Starcross is now available to all

2026-07-01T05:37:36+00:00

As promised, the latest from the Visible Zorker project: Visible Starcross!

"The challenge was issued eons ago, from light-years away."

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license.

This was a fun one to work on. Infocom tackled the idea of epic sci-fi with verve, if not absolute originality. (Even at age 13, I thought "Huh, the author must have read Rendezvous with Rama.") The alien beings you discover are set-pieces, but each one is a cameo-sized micro-story within the spacecraft's long journey. An early example of we'd call "environmental storytelling" these days.

As it happens, I never owned a copy of Starcross. I bought a copy -- for a friend's bar mitzvah, with the shameless intention of immediately pirating it back for myself. (Don't worry, I traded him all my Zorks.) This means I do not have the treasured flying-saucer package, nor the wonderful mass detector chart (printed in un-Xeroxable purple and orange on silver paper).

But don't worry; I've redrawn that chart for your pleasure:

My recreation of the Starcross Mass Detector Chart. (High-resolution source archived here.)

If you want to see photographs of the original map and packaging, visit the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History.

As for the in-game map display, I'll leave that as a surprise. Suffice it to say that the interior of a cylindrical space station was an entertaining mapping challenge.

By the way, this is the first known release of Starcross (release 15). Normally I prefer to use the Masterpieces release of each game for the Visible Zorker project. For Starcross that would be release 17. However, we don't have source code for r17, so I had to go back to r15 for this exhibit.

I am a person who will look at the Steam Machine and cry

2026-06-23T03:22:14+00:00

I have no hot take, but I did post this last year:

Another Valve hardware announcement: the Steam Machine is back. I am immediately and predictably on board for it.

-- me, November 2025

So I owe you a followup post, which is, TLDR: "too rich for my blood."

512GB: $1049 512GB w/ Controller: $1128 2TB: $1349 2TB w/ Controller: $1428

-- Valve's Steam Machine page

I would guess that, back in the Devonian epoch of 2025, Valve was aiming this product at $600-$800, which would be an insta-buy for me. But obviously that's not the 2026 we're living in. In this 2026, I am quite sure that Valve has priced the new Steam Machine at break-even. They'll sell a tiny number and be thankful the damage wasn't any worse.

I like that they've made SteamOS available. That will be good for the hardcore hardware crowd, but I'm just not in that ecosystem. If I tried to homebrew a Steam Machine from parts, I'd undoubtedly spend $2500 and be lucky if it ever booted up.

Maybe things will ease up in 2027, in which case Valve (and Apple and a lot of other companies) will undo their price hikes. That would be nice. No bets right now.

Could I afford $1400 for a new toy? Enh. I have that much in my bank account. I have what passes for a stable job in this economy. But that's the hitch: in this economy. Nothing is safe, nothing is reliable, and I am looking at the extremely real possibility that I am already unemployable if I have to go back on the market.

Given that, big impulse purchases don't feel super-good.

(Don't worry, small impulse purchases are still on the menu.)

So what now? The short answer is that I have (a) a nice couch; (b) a big TV; (c) a Steam Deck that I never use. I even have a dock for the Deck. So I should hook them all together and try out some games.

The Steam Deck (first-gen) is not what you'd call a high-power machine. That's why I was hoping to replace it with a cube! But, hey, I play a lot of low-power games. I just finished The Red Pearls of Borneo (review coming soon!) and might work on EMUUROM some more. If the setup doesn't serve me on the next fancy-ass immersive adventure game, it'll still do plenty of puzzle games.

I tried this plan last year; it didn't work because last year's TV was antique and inadequate. I have since gotten a better TV -- not an impulse purchase; I spent two months thinking about it! -- so the plan needs another shot.

But first I need (d) a Steam Controller. That's the affordable part of Valve's current bundle and it definitely looks worthwhile.

Aeonic Nebular Character Generator

2026-06-21T14:58:58+00:00

Last month I saw a reference to the "You Cannot Play This TTRPG Jam":

This is a game jam for games that do not exist. They won't ever exist. They will never be playable. They will suggest a game, create a space in which it seems like a game could exist, but where there is none. It might make someone wish that it were an actual, real, game, and may even inspire them to create one, but will never itself be a game.

-- Jam overview, Michelle Jones

That sounds like fun! I thought. So I put together a quickie.

The Aeonic Nebular Character Generator (downloadable PDF file)

Prepare your character for sci-fi roleplaying!

In the Aeonic ruleset, it is not, strictly speaking, possible to die during character generation.

(And now you know what classic TTRPG I am riffing on. Well, one of them. The title is a nod to Æon, which I mentioned a few weeks ago.)

I hope it is amusing. And by all means take a look at the other 98 jam entries as well. People had lot of fun with this idea.

Spring surprise games

2026-06-10T02:36:20+00:00

Not a Monty Python reference (unless you really want one), but rather: it's still spring (barely) and here's some games that surprised me. They popped up suddenly out of nowhere; I hadn't heard much about them; I enjoyed 'em.

(Okay, 7th Guest was announced a couple of months ago, and in fact has existed for three years in VR. Still, in the span of 1993 to now, that's sudden.)

Have some brief commentary, plus one design rumination.

The Archives of Trevosa
Hypogea
The 7th Guest Remake (2023)

The Archives of Trevosa

by Jamwitch -- web game

A free browser-based mini-Roottrees-like. Pin down the names and titles of thirty members of the royal family of Trevosa. The gimmick: all of their documents use Trevosan terms for familial relations. (Not to mention clans, animals, and so on.) It's not a full conlang but you have to figure out the words relevant to the family tree. To the Archives!

It took me a bit to internalize the setup. You can only search the Archives for Trevosan words and names. The search shows at most three documents at a time (hey, a Her Story-like too!) so you can't just flail; you have to focus on specifically-relevant terms. On the flip side, the list of documents that you've found is not so limited. There, you can search for English words and browse any number of matching results.

The game uses the now-standard "lock three correct guesses" mechanic. With only two blanks to fill in per person, you can probably brute-force anything you get really stuck on. But the clues are all fair and reasonably findable.

This only took me a couple of hours and I enjoyed the time. As with all these database-searching games, everybody's path through will be different. But at least in my case, the pacing was really good. By the time I hit 100% of documents found, I had 90% of the names filled in, and I was cackling over my answer to the bonus question: "Who are these people and what has kept their kingdom secret?"

Hypogea

by Charlie Wagner -- game site

A sweet little nonverbal-narrative platformer. You're an acrobatic robot with a staff. You and a companion bot make your way through the ruins of an underground megastructure. Other friendly mechanical beings help you along the way.

The game is focused on the traversal puzzles rather than physical reflexes. You need some button skills. (Run towards edge, pole vault, jump, swing on hook, catch chain...) But the timing is generous and "push X to snag with staff" usually saves your ass. Mostly you're looking around to see where you can go, then deciding what moves will get you there. And feeling like a ninja while you do it.

No, not a ninja. Nonviolent game. Feeling like a robot monk, then.

The environments are rusty-industrial-ruin, which isn't my favorite genre of megastructure. But it does feature wonderfully vast depths and heights. Towers of collapsed machinery, cables trailing into misty-dark chasms. As long as I'm the robot-guy scaling the scenery, I have no complaint.

It occurs to me that the Steam page's key art uses a rough painterly style which I liked a lot more than the game's PS2-era lo-fi-lo-poly. Could the whole game have been done up with, I dunno, shaders? Well, the dev ran solo; I'm sure he scoped to what he could ship. No argument there. The lighting is excellent, regardless.

The machine-people you meet are beautifully animated and expressive. I wasn't so into the human prehistory, which you glimpse through brief recorded recollections. Those meat people looked like jerks. I would rather have had more about the robot times. Ah well.

Short, excellently designed. Well worth your time.

The 7th Guest Remake (2023)

by Vertigo Games -- game site

I never played The 7th Guest. It was a big title in the 90s when I was excited about all sorts of Mac CD-ROM games. I somehow never got to it. Did I hear through the (Usenet) grapevine that the puzzles were bad? Maybe I was just lazy. I can't remember.

The puzzles were terrible. See Jimmy Maher's writeup. One of my Usenet compatriots made this comment, which was a popular sig-file quote for a while:

I mean, what the hell kind of villain thwarts the hero's              
progress with soup cans in the kitchen pantry?                        
  --Russ Bryan

So when I heard there was a modern remake, I said: As long as they rewrite all the puzzles from scratch. And they did!

In fact I was behind the times. This 7th Guest Remake was a VR remake a few years ago. I paid no attention because I'm not interested in VR. Happily, the developers then decided to make the jump to regular flatscreen PC. I shall hope others follow suit.

(To be clear: this is the same game as the 2023 VR release. Same design, same graphics, same puzzles. Only the controls have been updated. So I'm referring to it as The 7th Guest Remake (2023), even though the Steam release is dated 2026. And even though "Reboot" or "Reimagining" would be more accurate.) (There was a literal remake in 2019, for some reason, but this isn't that.)

Really, you can tell this is a VR-native game. The core interactions are:

You walk around an awesomely detailed creepy house.
Spectral people appear and perform little scenes. You can walk around or even through them, but not interact.
You can pick up any piece of scenery and numbly rotate it in space, but you can't do anything with it. Then you drop it -- doesn't matter where; it zaps back to where it belongs.
Solve puzzles, but all the elements are selected with d-pad or arrow keys, not mouse.
Swirls of spectral energy fly impressively around the room or turn into butterflies and flutter around.

In short, everything is visual and all around you, but there's no tangible interaction. Because you're waving a pair of plastic wands! (With d-pads on them.) No fine manipulation at all. It's the exact opposite of Myst's native mouse-focus or The Room's native finger-touch interaction.

(The one exception is a theremin puzzle, which is of course the perfect "wave your clunky hand extensions in space" interface. I suspect they simplified that one for mouse control.)

None of this is a complaint! It's just a distinctly weird experience after 35 flippin' years of "normal" (mouse-centric) graphical adventures. It took me a while to peg it as "Oh, VR controls!" and then it all made sense.

I don't have much to say about the puzzles. I'm sorry about that! They're most of the game. They're competent. They are, if not completely original, at least creative takes on stock ideas. Almost every puzzle is a notch easier than it could have been. I completely understand; the hardcore puzzle nerds were never going to show up for this party. But it means that the difficulty ranges from "took a bit of thought" down to "there were only three moves and I did them and that was it".

On top of that, there's free hints and nearly-free puzzle bypass tokens. You have to hunt around for the tokens, which is of course fun, but you'll find plenty.

As for the story, they kept the bones of the original plot. (I flipped through a video walkthrough of the original game to compare.) Same setup; some of the same dialogue even. They added quite a bit of new stuff to make the story flow better. They punched up the struggle between the six guests as the backbone of the plot. They added a bunch more backstory for evil old Henry Stauf. The narrative decisions are all reasonable. Again, it's competent work. But not compelling.

You'd think that in a game called The 7th Guest, there would be a story arc where the six guests realize that there is a seventh guest -- but who? Dramatic tension! But no. Some kid wanders in, and then at some point everybody is chasing the kid around, and that's the story.

The actors are fun to watch, sure. The original 1993 game was famously shot in a two-day rush with no-name community actors. How do you play a nostalgic remake of terrible acting? You can't make it good; fans would complain! The solution seems to be to find talented actors and tell them to ham it to the nines. That way everybody is in on the joke.

It's the overall shape that's missing. Stauf tells everybody that his house is full of clues about what to do. The house is not in fact full of clues. Buddy, I have been in a house full of clues, and this is not it. This is a house full of puzzles, but there is no metapuzzle. No surprise meanings or hidden patterns. The puzzles are purely a gating mechanism: solve all the puzzles in this chapter's room, and the next chapter unlocks.

There's exactly one puzzle where you're supposed to think about the story and the clues from elsewhere in the house... and then the game doesn't make you do that. You can ignore the story clues and solve it based on mechanical feedback.

The designers added a big climactic challenge, which I gather the original game lacked. But it's not dramatic either. It's not presented as you staking your life or taking a stand. It exists so that Stauf has a way to lose and thus get his comeuppance. It's not even a puzzle; it's a board game. You play Parcheesi against the forces of darkness. Stauf says he won't explain the rules, but you get an abundance of hints, and then winning is straightforward. It's just a slog.

I think the designers took the premise of The 7th Guest for granted. They didn't do the work to sell it to players in the game.

So: a perfectly good lightweight puzzle game, and the environment is wonderfully rendered. I loved poking around in all the corners. (The obligatory magic-lens-or-lantern is used to excellent effect.) But it's not a must-play unless the original is a hallowed creepy memory of your youth.

I will put in a rec for Jonathan van den Wijngaarden's soundtrack, though. It's a sweet blend of eerie ambience and mellow jazz themes. Appropriate for a game entirely populated by Jazz Age ghosts! And of course it's headlined by the classic theme from the original soundtrack. Props for getting George "The Fat Man" Sanger back as a performer.

Effinger replies to me

2026-06-04T00:38:41+00:00

I posted a couple of weeks ago about Infocom tie-in novels, with a bit of a digression on the work of George Alec Effinger. It turns out that I have a response from Effinger to relay!

Not a response to my 2026 post, obviously. Effinger passed away in 2002. But his books were mentioned on Usenet in 1997. It was a thread about the "Groundhog Day" trope, which brought up Effinger's books The Nick of Time and The Bird of Time. (The first Effinger that I read, as it happens.)

Anyhow, someone made a rather dismissive comment to the effect of "...before Mr. Effinger ran out of ideas and was reduced to writing things like 'The Zork Chronicles'." And guess who showed up to riposte?

Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction Subject: Re: Groundhog Day as Interactive Fiction Date: Tue, 13 May 1997 14:41:42 -0600 From: g.effinger2@genie.com

I've read with a lack of amusement the opinion that I wrote THE ZORK CHRONICLES because I ran out of ideas. Generally, I don't respond to negative opinions of my work--I really don't expect everyone to like everything I write. I don't like everything I write. I'm interested to hear why some of my stories or novels don't work for particular readers; however, "Mr. Effinger ran out of ideas" doesn't convey any useful information to me. [...]

I regret to say that I had also posted to that thread -- agreeing with the original poster. Although, in my defense, I added that I was a Glorian of the Knowledge fan. Still, embarrassing. And not just because I totally forgot that this exchange happened! Thirty years ago. Yikes.

You can read Effinger's entire post here. If Google Search goes ass-up, as it keeps threatening to, you can also find the post archived in this Usenet thread collection (unzip, search the text file raif970828).

However, I need to quote more of Effinger's post. It gives valuable context for those days of 1989 or so. And, well, it trashes a lot of the assumptions I made in my earlier tie-in post. Further embarrassment! At least I tried to label all my assumptions as assumptions.

I wrote that Effinger might have written The Zork Chronicles "as an on-ramp to the videogame industry". Turns out I had it backwards:

I wanted to write the novel and this was an opportunity to do it. Also, I had worked with Infocom when I wrote a game for them, "Circuit's Edge," based on characters and locations in WHEN GRAVITY FAILS, and I liked the Infocom people. They asked if I'd be interested in doing a novelization for them, and they offered me what they called "the big one"--the Zork games. I'd played all the games enthusiastically when I got my first computer, years before, and I was glad they thought of me for the book.

(Effinger, ibid.)

That bit shows up another of my mistakes. I asserted that Effinger was not a gamer or a computer nerd. I was going off this interview, recorded in 2020. There, Mike Legg says that Effinger "...didn’t have a PC, he didn’t have a word processor; at least I don’t think he had." Oops on both of us.

Jumping back, and relevant to the topic of my original post, Byron Preiss:

First, although I've faced large medical debts for a considerable time, I didn't write ZORK for money. I was paid $5,000 for it, a flat fee from the packager, with no royalties--something I tell my writing class not to do (work-for-hire it's called). I did it, knowing I'd never see another penny and knowing that the $5,000 was probably not enough to cover my living expenses during the time it took to write the book, because it was a book I'd always wanted to write. Not THE ZORK CHRONICLES, but the third book about the character of Glorian; he was in WHAT ENTROPY MEANS TO ME and HEROICS, and this was to be his apotheosis. I was discouraged in writing such a book because my Budayeen series looked more promising, and because my earlier humorous books never did well in a commercial sense (BIRD, NICK, and HEROICS have never even been in paperback).

(Effinger, ibid.)

Preiss was referred to as a "book packager" in this 2019 article. It's good to see the use of the term validated.

I do get to correct Mr. Effinger in turn on one trivial point: The Nick of Time and The Bird of Time were published in paperback editions -- in the UK. I only know this because I picked up a second-hand copy. (Possibly at the Toronto Worldcon of 2003.)

Effinger goes on to defend the practice of writing licensed works, and to deny that they're inherently crap. He is polite but clearly annoyed that he has to do this. I won't quote because we've hopefully grown out of making such attacks.

On to more interesting details:

I am currently engaged in helping to develop a game entitled "Aeon" with White Wolf, and I'll be doing more work-for-hire books for them. A legal situation has prevented me from delivering any new books under my name using previous characters or series--especially finishing the last two books in the WHEN GRAVITY FAILS series. I may never be allowed to publish them, so I've had to turn entirely to work-for-hire until the final judgment is made later this year.

(Effinger, ibid.)

The legal situation is mentioned in Effinger's Wikipedia entry: a medical bankruptcy which could have stripped him of his ownership of his own work. Happily, that didn't happen. He went on to publish those two sequels, A Fire in the Sun (1989) and The Exile Kiss (1991), to acclaim.

But what about that game "Aeon"?

However, although I'm making the same money now that I made for the Zork book (i.e., not very much although White Wolf will pay me royalties), I'm eager about the project. Andrew Bates, the game's developer, has some wonderful SF ideas, and he's been enthusiastic about my thoughts and suggestions. I was approached originally about doing only an 8,000 word short story for the game's original book, but the novels happened only after I decided I liked the intelligence and possibilities of the setting and theme. The novels' story and most of the characters are mine, not White Wolf's, and will be incorporated in the game itself.

(Effinger, ibid.)

A bold choice of cover design.

ÆON, an ambitious sci-fi RPG, was released by White Wolf Publishing in late 1997. They promptly got slapped with a lawsuit from MTV's animated show Æon Flux. One hasty press release later, the game was retitled Trinity.

RPGs aren't my field, so I won't try to summarize the history of Trinity or Effinger's connection to it. It seems to still be in print (now from Onyx Path). Hopefully Effinger got his promised royalties.

One can peek at the original Æon/Trinity rulebook. (A true monument to the '90s trend of hyper-greeblied page layouts!) The book opens with the promised Effinger short story. It's titled "The Honored Dead"; it's literally the first twenty pages of the rulebook, before the table of contents.

...I just sat down and read it. It's a decent bit of sci-fi thriller. Tough Guy and Mysterious Lady smuggle some valuable biotech across the Alps. Which cup is the ~~Maltese Falcon~~ cryovial under? It's got character backstory and an intro to some big-shots of the Æon setting. (As promised, their names appear in the background material of the rest of the sourcebook.) What it doesn't do is give a sense of the setting as a whole. There's supposed to be aliens, space colonies, a world reshaped by psi-wars. What we see is a few miles of Switzerland. Fine for a story, questionable for an RPG intro.

Also, as I said, I prefer the whimsical Effinger. White Wolf hired the gritty one.

But what about those novels? Sadly, they never appeared. Wikis mention the titles as Æon 1: Dawn and Æon 2: Meridian -- both cancelled in 1998. Effinger says they "happened", which sounds like manuscripts got written. If so, they presumably got stuffed in a drawer and remained there until his death.

Of course, I've gotten myself into trouble with assumptions before...

I should note that the Onyx Path Æon page lists stories titled Dawn and Meridian. However, if you click through, they're shown as novellas (not novels), written in 2021 by Lauren Roy and Chris Allen respectively. Written from scratch from the original 1997 outlines? Or just borrowing the titles? I have no idea.

Well, that's all I've got on this particular path. My very belated thanks to Mr. Effinger for dropping in on our discussion, and my very belated apologies for my mostly-dismissive attitude back then.

Although... Huh. One of the designers of Trinity, after Andrew Bates, is a guy named Richard Dansky.... who's giving a talk at NarraScope in less than two weeks. Maybe I'll corner him and ask him about Effinger.

Visible Deadline is now available to all

2026-06-01T04:29:01+00:00

Welcome to June. The latest from the Visible Zorker project: Visible Deadline!

"A locked door. A dead man. And 12 hours to solve the murder."

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license.

Deadline was Infocom's first non-Zork game, and they pulled out all the stops to make it feel like a new and different thing. Which made my job a lot more interesting!

For a start, Deadline's "feelies" were absolutely integral. When I bought Zork 2 and Zork 3, back in the day, I was basically able to throw the manual aside and jump straight into the game. (I'd already learned how the parser worked, and what else was there?) But Deadline came with a full police dossier introducing the murder scene: the coroner's report, interviews with the suspects, a little envelope containing a "sample" of the pills that did for Mr. Robner.

Visible Deadline wouldn't make sense without these documents. So I've included images in the "Feelies" tab. These are scanned directly from the copy of Deadline that I played as a kid! Except that my pills have crumbled to moldy crud over the decades.

I've posted the original, high-resolution images from this scan session on the Internet Archive. I'm not the first person to do this, of course; here's a set of scans from the Atari Deadline package. However, that's missing the interviews, and also I was able to do full 600dpi scans. So now you have both.

On the technical side, Deadline made an enormous leap: all of the game's NPCs were autonomous agents. Over the game's twelve-hour timeline, each character moved around the mansion on their own schedule. They could also react to your investigation. Certain questions or revelations would send characters running off to confer, conspire, destroy evidence, or (in the worst case) commit another murder. (When will these people learn that crime never pays?)

All of this required a pile of brand-new NPC navigation code. I've exhibited this in two ways:

The "Schedule" tab shows each character's current movement goal, as well as the daily schedule for the whole crew. It's a pretty complicated system. I've included a full explanation as I understand it.
The "Map" tab shows NPC routing paths and sightlines. The blue paths are internal tables which allow a character to move to a desired destination. The pink lines allow you to see a character in adjacent rooms down the hall.

(The routing logic is referred to as the "T system" in the source code, after the transit system that serves Boston and Cambridge. Infocom will always have its home-town in-jokes.)

Other than that stuff, this game runs pretty much like the previous Visible Infocom titles. Objects, functions, global variables, verb grammar. Enjoy browsing!

I guess I should also note that Deadline has not been licensed as open source by Microsoft. So I am somewhat jumping the gun by taking the Visible Zorker to this milestone. But it's where I started, and it's what I said I would do. So we're doing it. I don't really expect problems; we're all fans here.