Literary adaptation is an underpopulated IF genre, and Nate Cull's Nevermore is a thoughtful and well-intentioned attempt at bringing Poe's "The Raven" to the world of IF. While what emerges isn't a bad game, it's less the poem than a series of events in a similar setting with a somewhat similar mood, In other words, if you're a particular fan of the poem, you might not well not be a fan of this game.

As it happens, I committed "The Raven" to memory when I was in seventh grade or so, and I still like the poem even though I've somewhat belatedly realized that it's not a very good poem. (It's been said that the popularity of Poe's poems varies inversely with their quality, and while that's not strictly true--he wrote some lousy poems that remain thoroughly obscure--the three Poe poems that are probably the best known, "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," and "The Bells", are far from his best.) That is, I like it despite its repetitiveness and its tendency to use 20 words when two or three would do, simply because I like the drama of it. No one would ever call "The Highwayman" a great poem, but it's definitely a good ghost story in verse form that's well suited for being read aloud; ditto, I think, for "The Raven," and I still enjoy being able to recite it--and "The Highwayman" and others--from memory. So when I saw the initial premise of Nevermore, my first reaction was something between "Cool!" and disappointment that I hadn't gotten there first, because it was an idea I'd been kicking around (very casually). And when I saw that the game was using snippets from the poem but not binding the player to the text, I said, aha, perfect--use the poem's story, its strong point, but don't bind us to the text, which isn't its strong point. Just use the text for echo effect.

It was about five moves into the game that the author's vision of the poem diverged from mine, however, and it continued to diverge more and more over the course of the game. This, in a sense, is good: had the author felt constrained not to offend fellow fans of the poem and slavishly followed the text, the result wouldn't have been much different from reading the text itself. But I had such a hard time squaring the author's vision with mine that before long I simply forgot the origin of the game and no longer associated it with my mental images of the setting as portrayed in the poem; it was just, in other words, another comp entry. This is partly because the plot of Nevermore involves elements like alchemy, pagan rituals, and lots of drugs, and it would have been an odd coincidence if both the author and I had imagined those things as part of a more fleshed-out story--but it's more that the mood differed from the mood as I imagined it. To take one among many examples, the protagonist of Nevermore takes cocaine approximately every 20 moves; if you don't, you're told that "a dull, dark weariness drifts over you," which leads to death in a few moves if not corrected with cocaine (at which point "a sense of raw alertness rushes through your nerves, setting them all on edge"). It's certainly not implausible to view the mood of the poem's subject as more generally consistent with "a dull, dark weariness" than a cocaine-fueled "raw alertness," though--I mean, it's a pretty melancholy poem--and I simply couldn't fit the protagonist of Nevermore into my preconceived image. (Well, okay, the poem's subject summons up some energy toward the end, but there's an obvious cause that isn't cocaine.) In short, the author has his own rather distinctive vision of who the protagonist is and what the poem's about, and Your Mileage May Vary.

All that aside, the game works reasonably well, though it's not flawless. The cocaine habit mentioned about doesn't add much to the game, and it recurs frequently enough to be irritating after a while. The puzzles also depend on a set of books that you're required to read, while is fine except that (a) the snippets in the books are randomized, so it's possible to miss one even if you've seen all the other snippets twice or more, and (b) the snippets are written in a sort of pseudo-medieval English that takes an awful lot of work to make sense of. (Impenetrable poetry I can deal with; impenetrable puzzle-solving instructions are more of a problem.) It's also easy to push the game into unwinnable states, and though there's a WINNABLE command (which informs you whether the game is presently in such a state), I would have preferred game design that simply makes it a little harder to screw up (or, better, is more forgiving when you do screw up). The opacity of the instructions also had me stumped for a while toward the end--it turned out that I'd left out a key step in the puzzle-solving and hadn't realized it (and there aren't really contextual hints that could suggest what you might have done wrong).

This is sounding more negative than I mean to be, because there were parts of Nevermore that I genuinely enjoyed. The ending, for one thing, is terrific--dark and dripping with irony. (In that respect, quite faithful to Poe himself.) Some of the action turns on flashbacks, which also struck me as genuinely Poeish--a protagonist for whom the past is more real than the present absolutely belongs in this game. The writing is strong--economical and atmospheric--and the box quotes from Edgar are nicely placed (though, curiously, the last and most dramatic part of the poem is largely absent). The personality of the protagonist even felt right--an odd mix of sentimentality and obsessiveness.

Nevermore does a lot of things right, and you could argue that it did as well as any work of IF could do in adapting this particular poem; it's certainly a worthy attempt. Through no fault of the game, however, it didn't really connect with me, and I gave it a 7 in the competition.