Figuring out what's going on in Halothane is quite a task. At the outset, you're an author who, it seems, decides to dispose of a half-completed novel; from there, the game forces you to interact with the characters and events depicted in your own novel and draws you into a "parallel dimension" (in a way that reminded me of Neverending Story), where you confront the consequences of your actions. That's a bare-bones analysis, mind you, and it disregards quite a few scenes that don't fit into the scheme in any obvious way. There are also some optional scenes with some optional puzzles, and it's quite likely you'll finish the game with fewer than the possible number of points, and without figuring out who all the characters are and how or whether their various stories are resolved. In short, it's a bit of a mess.

There's nothing wrong with complicated games; games that require the player to think in order to pull the pieces together after the fact are welcome, and somewhat unusual for IF. But the structure of Halothane--the player marches through the various linear segments, and more than likely has no idea what is going on initially--means that most of the piecing together is done by memory, since the fragments whose true significance might be apparent later on are no longer available when the game makes them understandable. (I.e., the player has to replay to fully understand most of the first half of the game, which doesn't win Halothane any points from me.) There is a character who appears early on and attempts to explain the various connections, but she only recognizes a few conversation topics, sadly. The game also tends to do information dumps--the player doesn't make discoveries so much as do elementary things that lead, in unforeseeable ways, to long, complicated revelations, and the effect is akin to wandering around and picking up pages of a story. (It's appropriate that the game at one point has you tied up in the back of a car listening to people in the front seat talk, since it's not a bad description of the course of the game as a whole--the story goes on, at a rapid pace, and the player mostly goes along for the ride.)

To be fair, the story is a pretty good one, and the writing is terrific, good enough that the player can easily forgive the linear structure; the plot may be getting shouted at him, but at least it's a fun plot, and well told. There are numerous IF references scattered around, many of them very funny (including a hilarious dig at Muse), and even those parts of the story that are insufficiently developed are intriguing enough that the player (at least, this player) wishes that the author had given them more space. Perhaps the best example of this comes late in the game, in a peculiar scene involving a mayor who has apparently seized power through unscrupulous means. You set things right, but in a way that leaves so many questions unanswered that the player is unlikely to understand how he or she solved the relevant puzzle. It's a shame, because the setting is disturbing and evocative, enough that a good-sized game could easily have been built on that premise alone--but here's it's just one out of eleven or more chapters, and the player blows through it too quickly to really catch on.

Halothane, as noted, is more story IF than puzzle IF, which makes the incursions of puzzle-oriented moments rather jarring; it takes the player a while to figure out that puzzle mode rather than story mode is on, and it doesn't help that some of the puzzles are a bit obscure and require some major intuitive leaps. More importantly, they're about as artificial as puzzles can be-- they feel like they're there to slow down the pace of the game a bit--which is unfortunate, because Halothane tells its story reasonably well, and the pace doesn't particularly need a chance. Even if the story flows by so quickly that it's not all that personally involving, in the way that good IF can be, it's a good mind-bender--and the puzzles don't do anything to draw the player into the story; they simply break up the flow. In short, Halothane would have been better served to diminish its few puzzle elements and play up the story more--for one thing, by giving the player more time in the various scenes to poke around and explore, rather than getting whisked to somewhere else as soon as the obvious task is done.

Hmmm--this review seems to have become rather negative. Halothane does, in the end, work passably well, due mostly to the quality of the writing--and while the plot is rather underdeveloped, and throws in references to things that have supposedly happened in the past in lieu of actually developing the story (there I go again), the plot devices are quite effective in science-fictiony kinds of ways. The author has an eye for arresting images--a corpse in a wardrobe, a lake of blood--which makes the settings vivid even when the plot is fuzzy. And it's always nice to find a game that's technically well enough put together that bugs aren't a distraction, not at all a given in Comp '99--and Halothane succeeds admirably in that respect. (It even implements most of its scenery.)

The lesson here, then, is that it's possible to have a player enjoy a story even when he or she doesn't identify in any meaningful way with the PC; a work of IF can still be enjoyable even when the interactivity aspect is minimal. Such a story needs to have a plot that is interesting enough that the player wants to see more of it, and is willing to put up with the lack of interactivity because guiding the story to its conclusion is enough. Plots that call for emotional identification with the PC or another character are not good candidates, in other words, because empathy isn't fostered when the player can't interact much with the story; stories that turn on ingenious authorial inventions or breaking down the wall between author and creation--like Halothane--have a better chance of involving the player even without benefit of interactivity. There are some works, of course, where different people perceive the level of interactivity differently; witness Photopia. But if the player is unlikely to get drawn into interacting with the environment (and instead is more likely just to look at it), the story produced needs to be a certain kind of story.

Halothane is an imperfect effort, in short, but it's thoroughly done with plenty of wit sprinkled in. I wouldn't call it the most memorable game of the competition, but I did give it an 8.