Leaves review I must say that there were plenty of things about Leaves that I did like, or at least didn't mind. The puzzles weren't extraordinarily clever, but they weren't dreadful either, the prose was largely competent, and the story reasonably compelling though minimalist. There were some plot holes, naturally, but they weren't too outrageous, and generally this was on course for perhaps a 4, perhaps a 5. And then, well, a certain moment happened, and I revised everything downward several notches.

First, though: ALAN came off reasonably well here. One important object was hidden effectively--the game didn't recognize the noun until you'd actually found the object--and though some logical commands weren't coded and some verbs were a bit clumsy, I doubt that actually had much to do with ALAN. The most glaring flaw was the lack of a scripting command--there was no way, as far as I could tell, to keep a transcript, and no documentation either within or outside the game that provided advice about such things. (Meaning that all those ALAN advocates shouldn't bombard me with angry messages saying that, yes, there's a command, it's "transcriptify." I'm sure there is. No one actually mentioned it to me, though.) That aside, everything seemed fairly solid, though there weren't a lot of complicated things going on either.

The author is a native of Finland, and I'm not sure what his familiarity with English is, but this is, by and large, well-written; there are some ungrammatical moments here and there (a tree is "no more different" from other trees, pointless actions are sometimes rewarded with "Now that would be the trick"), but on the whole the writing is competent, and sometimes even wryly funny. (If you try to chop up a tree with the wrong tool: "Cut a tree with a knife? Marvellous idea." And kicking most objects elicits "This is not a football game." ) Though plenty of familiar verbs weren't implemented, notably "touch" and "climb" and "move", the writing here is adequate for the purposes--the game isn't long enough, nor are actions complex enough, for it to feel deficient.

The plot is sorta rudimentary. You're escaping from, er, something--a prison, a concentration camp? Dunno. But you get out--hence the "leave" aspect, which actually makes this one of the cleverest titles of the competition-- and just keep going. You don't seem to have a direction in mind besides away from the camp, perhaps understandable; you just light out and do whatever comes naturally. Incongruities along the way include a _very_ dense guard (you're told he's "looking extremely alert," but he doesn't exactly act that way--and a bunch of other guards who all sit outside one exit and let you walk out the other. Hmmm. There's also one of the silliest characters you'll ever see, associated with one of the silliest puzzles, and there are more cutting tools and puzzles in which to apply them than you can shake a proverbial stick at. Still, if you can live with a little absurdity, the story of Leaves is passable. The puzzles are quite weak--one conditions your finding an object on a completely unrelated (and fairly stupid) action, and one, a maze, is sheer guess-what-the-author's-thinking. Still, they're not so bad that the game's unplayable; they fit with the absurdist plot fairly well, I suppose, if that's a compliment. Truth to tell, I had accepted the game's absurdities early on and wasn't particularly troubled when I hit on illogical solutions; one thing one doesn't do with Leaves is take it seriously. (One of the odder bits, actually, is that certain directions are given but the game prevents you from using them, sometimes for no obvious reason-- e.g., "You really don't want to go there." It did give the game a certain tension--what's more frightening than the unknown and unmentionable?--but it was a strange touch.

And then...for the uninitiated, there's a puzzle toward the end of the game that is possibly the most blatant instance on record of an author assuming that the player is a straight male. (Well, okay, I suspect that things like Softporn Adventure do more in that respect, but at least there the title is a warning.) Now, Mr. Vuorinen was 14 when he wrote that puzzle, or so he suggests in the notes, and 14-year-old boys are not known for their maturity regarding matters of sexuality, and though I doubt I'd look kindly on the 14-year-old Mr. Vuorinen submitting that puzzle, I might be less annoyed. But 10 years have passed since then, it seems, and including it in its current form goes well beyond bad taste. Quite apart from the sheer perversity of the concept--those are ROCKS you're so excited about--the author insists on putting everything in schoolboy language and on giving the player a sort of juvenile fascination about it all. (Plus, well, solving the puzzle in the first place requires entering the mind of a 14-year-old boy, since the solution doesn't really jump out at the rest of us.) This is not the place for a discussion of sex in IF, but I _know_ it can be done better than this. (The author's preoccupations don't only come out in this, actually; reading through the source code for this is not particularly edifying.) As I indicated, this little sequence brought down the game several notches in my estimation. Sex is one thing; sex handled in juvenile fashion is another.

Most of Leaves is competently put together, I found, though not always with much of an ear for logic; there are few glaring flaws. If Mr. Vuorinen can refrain from severe lapses of judgment, he might help make ALAN a presence in the IF community; this effort, though, gets a 3 from me.