The aforementioned NPCs are your grandparents, and you (you're a small child) have been sent off to stay with them for a few days, and you find them in the middle of an argument--and your objective becomes smoothing things over. Now, admittedly, the way you end up going about this is a little clumsy; what might have been a complex psychological puzzle ends up more like a locked door that's opened with a certain key. In other words, what appears to be a rather subtle objective eventually becomes less subtle when the game turns out to be a series of object-based puzzles that lead to one final object, not unlike IF that takes no notice of relationships at all. Still, On the Farm deserves some credit for the attempt, even if the result is only moderately successful.

It should also be stressed that there's more to the game than the obvious goal--there are some incidental facts that flesh out the story but don't help you get to the end. This approach--separating the backstory from the puzzles that lead to the end of the game--worked well for me (much better than making the puzzles turn on some fact you discover somewhere, which often feels rather artificial), but it also raised a problem, namely that gathering the facts was much more interesting than solving the puzzles. That is, the various details you pick up, and ask your grandparents about, bring the story to life, whereas the other puzzles you solve just feel like puzzles. Of course, if On the Farm had consisted only of information-gathering, it probably would have felt distancing, uninvolving; the player needs some sort of objective. But here the objective was so disconnected from the information-gathering that the two parts to the game felt rather unrelated, and the one was markedly more interesting than the other.

Part of the reason the backstory and its development is interesting is that the facts you learn help flesh out the NPCs, your grandparents. These are not at all sentimentalized figures--they both come across as stubborn, cantankerous, and thoroughly set in their ways--but they also feel like real grandparents; they're presented warts and all. Your grandfather spits tobacco juice and leaves his dentures lying around, and your grandmother snipes at him behind his back. They both respond to a variety of ASK/TELL prompts, they react to several other cues, and they have responses for most things they should respond to--which is all that can be expected of good NPCs, really. The realism is not complete--they don't comment on your picking up everything that isn't nailed down, for instance--but it's still a good effort.

The implementation of On the Farm is a bit clumsy in a few respects, however. For one thing, it is not initially apparent that the backstory is not useful for the main objective of the game, meaning that there are a few puzzles that ultimately end up being red herrings, somewhat confusingly so. One part of a puzzle involving a rope is just flat-out silly, and another relies on your grandparents being rather stupid. The game also can't seem to decide whether it's keeping score--"score" elicits "There is no score in this game," but you'll be told your score anyway (it'll always be 0, as far as I can tell) if you die along the way. There's a cumbersome hint system (each "topic" has only one hint) that provides only the vaguest of nudges for one rather nonintuitive puzzle (though there's also a walkthrough provided), and one key feature of the landscape is rather misleadingly described, so that it's possible to get the wrong idea about what to do with it. (I.e., it initially seems that you need to repair it, but 'tain't so.) More generally, the whole thing initially feels a little directionless, and it takes a good deal of wandering around before you have any idea about what to do.

The setting is likewise a mixed bag. The farm is supposed to be abandoned, nonworking, and there are plenty of nicely done stray details that convey decay and neglect, such as a barn door hanging by a hinge, a rusted-out tractor with a dead battery, a groundhog-eaten garden, and a mildewed haystack. In that respect, it's a vivid setting--it's a specific rather than a generic farm. There are also lots of unexplained details, however (notably a huge ball of twine and a metal hook whose presence and function remain mysterious), and the writing is uneven at best--punctuation errors and unfortunate phrasings. For example, a sign says "Ventilation fan must be running to safely enter pit," making the alert reader wonder what will happen to the fan if it enters the pit while not running. More generally, some pieces of the backstory come across well, but some do not--how have your grandparents been supporting themselves on this nonworking farm?--and it feels like there could have been much more to the story than there is had the game suggested that your objectives include helping the farm start working again. The introduction, moreover, suggests that the game will be telling you what you think or feel--it registers that you find the prospect of hanging around the farm terribly boring--but nothing else in the game mentions what you think about anything.

Nevertheless, there's a lot of charm in On the Farm--it's not the character study it initially appears to be, but it's an interesting effort nonetheless, particularly for the vividness of the NPCs and the farm setting. It's not the best game of this year's competition, but I did give it a 6.