Four in One review If competition entries got individual awards, Four in One would have to be recognized as the Greatest Sheer Effort. The game is simply littered with NPCs--24 by my count, and considering the way the characters wander in and out, I'm sure I missed at least a few. Some of them essentially stand still (though all have some dialogue potential), others have painfully complicated movement daemons, and just thinking about what it took to code all of them made me want to cry. (The source code is now available, but I haven't looked at it yet. Perhaps some day when I'm feeling especially brave.) Unfortunately, all that elaborate coding doesn't necessarily add up to a rewarding game--though given how much time the author obviously put into this, I certainly wish I could say it did.

The premise: you're "Sam Wood," trying to put the finishing touches on the latest Marx Brothers movie, and you're charged with the task of assembling everyone on the set so that the last scene can be filmed. Your clout as director only goes so far, however, and trying to keep the brothers on the set long enough to film is, even for you, is like building a house out of Jello. You have a trusty sidekick who, frankly, isn't much use, and the set is filled with extras and techies and other actors. Egos being what they are, however, you don't seem to be able to delegate the task of rounding up the brothers, and so you scurry around the studio as if you were a lowly assistant.

Since the end of the competition, the cry regarding Four in One has been fairly uniform: cute but too frustrating. The cry isn't wrong, as such, but let's be clear about why it's frustrating: it's not because there are a lot of NPCs to understand and manipulate. It's that so much of the NPCs' behavior is random, as far as I can tell, that a given game can be impossible to win if certain random events go against you often enough. If two certain characters get in a fight, for instance, another would leave, slowing down the rounding-up process. Too many fights and you'd lose your power to gather people together, for various reasons. I don't know whether the fights happened at random or were related to some other factor, controllable or not; if there was another factor, it was obscure enough that I never caught on. Likewise, another character gets bored after a certain amount of moves and wanders away--and if you don't get him to do what he's supposed to do before that happens, you've wasted a chance, and you don't have a lot to spare. To be sure, part of what makes the game realistic is that the NPCs are not entirely malleable; to that end, Four in One gets lots of realism points. Getting the brothers to do what you want is, as someone said, like herding cats. But all the realism points seem to come out of the fun column.

However, there's an upside to all this: there's lots of replayability in Four in One, partly to find Easter eggs and partly because there's lots of extraneous detail to sift through. Most of the characters respond to a variety of questions--about the movie, other characters, life, etc. Because a winning game can vary so much--two different games can present different challenges: solving the game once doesn't guarantee that you'll be able to solve it on the next try. (Then again, the random events might just not be on your side the next time, as noted.) The game is consistently funny--Groucho has lots of good one- liners, and Harpo has plenty of amusing antics, even if they usually impede your progress. The thoroughness of the coding is not limited to the NPC daemons--different characters have distinct reactions when they enter certain rooms, for instance, and putting certain characters in rooms together has unexpected results. In short, so much of Four in One works so well that it seems rude to point out that the game itself isn't always a lot of fun, at least if the player is interested in achieving the goal the game presents. Most of the fun to be had is extraneous to that goal.

In summary, Four in One reminded me of Tempest from the previous year's competition--a brilliant idea, thoroughly and intelligently done, that I wanted to like more than I did. And just as Four in One arguably worked better as the transcript submitted to the IF Fan Fest, so Tempest works better as, well, the play, and the literacy of the attempt to translate it can't hide that. Four in One is quite a testament to the author's skills; as a game, however, it's flawed, and I gave it a 7.