What's going on in Fallacy of Dawn? Well, it seems you live in a dystopian city gone even worse and work in a retro video arcade -- your life's passion appears to be '80s video games -- but you've been the victim of a mugging that's left you with brain damage of sorts, and you really need to scrape up cash for surgery. From there, the story careers wildly here and there for a while, without much intervention from you; your character has a habit of making important decisions during noninteractive sequences. The upshot, however, is that you eventually find yourself with two companions and a weapon, ready to accumulate some money by any means necessary...

...and that's where things pretty much stop, plot-wise, for most of the game. As in, you wander around performing random tasks that give you money, and eventually you have enough, and the plot picks up again. The middle section is more than half of the game, however, and it amounts to a long meander. Worse, it's easy to run out of things to do and end up wandering hither and yon asking for spare change. Not literally, but close enough; it's not exactly interesting stuff. In that respect, Fallacy of Dawn is a step back from Crimson Spring -- there's more to the plot here than there was there, but there at least the plot kept moving rather than going nowhere for most of the game. It's not even accurate to call the digression a segue into puzzle IF rather than plot IF, as there aren't really any puzzles to speak of; the gameplay usually amounts to doing something extremely obvious, or following someone's instructions very closely, in order to earn money (or, alternatively, engaging in randomized combat, which hasn't been anyone's idea of a good IF puzzle since 1982). Nor, even, is there character development to speak of in this section -- your two companions tag along and say very little. The raison d'etre, as far as I can tell, is to force you to experience the setting in all its grimy glory, and that it does, ad nauseam. But as gameplay, this is roughly on the level of a Towers of Hanoi puzzle.

There are more problems. I mentioned above that Fallacy of Dawn devotes more attention to puzzles than did Robb's previous games, but by that I mean "has more of them," not "has more creative ones." There's the puzzle where a vital item is under one of a whole bunch of objects, but of course you have no way of knowing which one, nor even that anything is under anything. (There's one thoroughly oblique hint, as far as I can tell, but that's it.) There's the puzzle that you solve by doing something over and over again, causing a certain NPC to (for reasons that aren't wholly clear) act like a loon. There's the puzzle that you solve when you're entirely incapacitated because the game, for no particular reason, lets you do one thing. There are the "puzzles" that amount to "try randomized combat, then try it again until you happen to kill the bad guy." And don't even get me started on the ending sequence, which requires insanely exact syntax under a tight time limit.

Nor are the problems only design-related. There's more unimplemented scenery in Fallacy of Dawn than you can shake a stick at, and fewer synonyms than you can, um, fail to shake a stick at. The graphics regularly encroach on the text, and the gauges that are supposed to represent your health and your need for a drug fix (really) are represented by some strange high-ASCII characters. Toward the end, the game appears to forget about compass directions and require an awful lot of ENTER DOOR and such, for no discernible reason. And it's pretty easy to run out of things to say (via conversation menus) to the various NPCs, even when they really should have more on their minds; to some extent, I suppose, that's par for the course with menus, but when, for example, you have a romantic interlude -- at least, I think that's what it was supposed to be -- you really should be able to say more than one or two things.

But the writing -- ah, the writing. It's probably fair to say that Robb's writing is an acquired taste, and it's not one that I've wholly acquired -- the gore, for example, is just a tad too lovingly described -- but I like it enough that I stick around to the end of a game that doesn't have much more to offer than good writing. (Well, okay, there's a plot, and outside sources had given me reason to believe that the story would start up again eventually, but I doubt that would have been enough.) Bizarre digressions abound -- this one, for instance, from the opening text, in the middle of the description of the attack:

It wasn't a very good showing for either my face or my TLA, in fact
it brought my knowledge of Vegas handicapping factoids up to two: you
always bet against the Bills in the Super Bowl, and you always take a
vapourizer and a pair of fists against my face and my personal
property. Even if you're getting the points, natch.

As it is, well, it's worth experiencing, though I found myself wishing for a text-dump utility more than once. The plot is second-rate sci-fi at best, but even second-rate sci-fi is worth playing along with if it's memorably written. I can't imagine what sort of IF Robb would write if he turned his attention to some of the basic principles of game design, and I wouldn't say that his writing makes up for every sin -- I wouldn't recommend Chicks Dig Jerks to anyone. As much as Fallacy of Dawn does wrong, however, I can't in good conscience refuse to give it a chuckle and a thumbs-up.