Babel review In the realm of science fiction, very trodden ground indeed, Ian Finley's Babel does not seem profoundly original; you have an experiment in an isolated lab that goes wrong, an unscrupulous scientist, dramatic confrontations, even a countdown of sorts. But the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts, and there is more to Babel than might appear from a thumbnail sketch. The puzzles are few and not particularly remarkable, but for simple storytelling power, this one ranks among the best in the competition.

That, unfortunately, means that it's difficult to review effectively without breaking the spell for future players, so this may be somewhat unrevealing. The initial premise is set out before the first room description: 

One by one, your senses speak to you.  There is one absolute: cold.  The
hard surface you're lying on is cold, the thin gown thrown over your body 
is cold, the disinfectant-tinged air is cold, the darkness around you is 
cold. Even your mind is cold and empty.  Where are you?  Who are you? You 
feel the warm edge of a memory, but it fades as you approach.  Slowly, your 
joints bulging with ache, you get to your feet and look around.
Where you are and who you are become clear through a series of discoveries that begin as cryptic vignettes and only gradually begin to make sense; though the game exercises only limited control over the sequence of your discoveries, the control is sufficient to make your reconstruction of the storyline reasonably predictable. Moreover, the manner of those discoveries amplifies the uneasy feel: relevant facts come out first as offhand references and are only explained much later. A computer that you discover early on supplies some background information, but no more than that; you learn about the course of events that led to your awakening alone on the floor through other means. Helpful in that respect (and for keeping things straight) is a calendar that you find, and in which you note the sequence of events; even if it feels like a device to keep the player from being confused, it's a welcome one.

One of the best parts of Babel's story is the believability of the characters it depicts: though you never interact with them over the course of the game, your discoveries about them make them as real as NPCs that are actually present. Mr. Finley's writing deserves the credit for that; the dialogue is good enough to supplement rather than drag down the story (not at all a given these days), and what you see of the way the characters interact both fills out the plot and gives them some life. Admittedly, the scenes you encounter are heavily steeped in science fiction conventions, and perhaps those who read more science fiction than I do will find the whole thing too old to be interesting. But for my part, I found a genuine interest in the characters, as opposed to nifty gadgetry or wondrous discovery, that made the story much more compelling than much of the science fiction I've read. If anything, I was hoping for more development, more plot to discover, though I recognize that Mr. Finley was limited by the two-hour format. The strength and complexity of the story line makes Babel feel more like fiction than puzzle-based IF.

As noted, Babel's puzzles are secondary to the story, and what we do get is not especially memorable (though neither are they very hard). One puzzle involving a cabinet strains belief a bit, as does another involving security mechanisms that you defeat, and the beginning presents a bottleneck of sorts that requires both close reading and something of an intuitive leap--but once a certain barrier is passed, most of the game will come easily to the experienced IF player. But that factor works well here: more difficult or time-consuming would slow down the plot and take away the realism of the premise. As it is, there is almost no need to save and restore: there is a time limit, but it is loose enough to afford plenty of room for wandering around and making mistakes, and all of the ways to die or make the game unwinnable can easily be foreseen. But there is a nice puzzle involving a locked door, and many of the puzzles draw on the development of the plot--you need knowledge that you discover along the way, for example--in a way that is all too rare even in good IF.

Particularly notable about Babel is that it tells its story in a way that conventional fiction could not--at least, not as well or as powerfully. Though a short story or novel could in theory be written in the second person, it couldn't put the reader in command of events, and leave the unveiling of the plot to the reader's discretion. A storyline in which discovering your own identity is central works well in a medium where your persona is rarely fixed; in conventional fiction, where using the second person is uncommon, the device just wouldn't work. In an odd way, the usual limits of IF work to the advantage of this game, as the player's expectation of a series of puzzles rather than an identity problem makes the resolution to the problem genuinely surprising; the twists in the plot are effective precisely because of the questions the player doesn't ask of the game. The strength of the writing also helps; to quote much of it would give the plot away, but room descriptions like the following convey the frigidity of the setting: 

Grey light drips in from an octagonal skylight in the ceiling of this
room, making the room look as cold as it feels.  To the north, east, and
south, doorways lead into unlit halls.  The metal door frame of the east
hall glows faintly with an eerie blue light.

The dominating element of this small cube is the color white.  The walls
are white, the stiff bed by the east wall is covered in white sheets, the
counter sticking out of the wall in the corner looks as though it were
carved from snow.  Set into the counter is a pale, porcelain sink.  Even
the air smells as if it has been scoured bare.
The atmosphere is effective throughout; the countdown messages, when they come, heighten the tension, and stray details--shattered mirrors, dead mice--work to the same effect.

There are some gameplay problems that complicate matters now and again. "Search" is never useful, as far as I can tell, and "examine" does what might be expected of "search" in more than one case. One sequence involving a radiation chamber, though put together with admirable realism, feels rather tedious to work out--and some related actions require rather exact wording. At one point, the game asked me if I wanted to open the east door when it meant the west door, and there are some events and feelings embedded in room descriptions that accordingly recur a bit too often. These are minor glitches, though; bugs are relatively few.

There are similarities between Babel and C.E. Forman's Delusions--in the premise and in some of the plot devices, notably. But Babel works on a much different level; the story is more central to the game here, and is hence better developed and more compelling--and, naturally, the puzzles are far fewer and less involving. (For my part, I found that the plot of Babel made more sense than that of Delusions, but perhaps that's just me.) There is no reason why playing Delusions should spoil the experience of playing Babel (nor vice versa). I enjoyed Babel, in short--I gave it a rating of 9--and I consider the storytelling equal to that of any recent work of IF.