A New Day review Jonathan Fry's A New Day is another in a fairly long list of games that were nice in theory but not a real joy to play. Though the premise is interesting and though the plot is well-designed, mostly, the challenges of A New Day felt more like annoyances, and I never really got into the game.

The plot, in all its self-referential glory: you are venturing into/playing a partially completed text adventure whose author, one Jonathan Fry, has died mysteriously; you confront a sentient being named Winston who seems to be running the show inside Jonathan's computer. The "incomplete" element means that objects are there but not mentioned, and some room descriptions are entirely absent or very terse. Even if you understand what you're doing in the game--not all that likely--it's still hard to make any sense of what you, the player, are supposed to do next, since you don't get much direction; as is typical, you are tossed into settings and given things to do. (As has been pointed out, there is a built-in excuse here for flaws in the game--"it's an unfinished game, dummy"--but I assume that Mr. Fry won't take refuge in that.) There are some problems that can't be put down to the unfinished-game element, though, like a location requiring that the player SEARCH three times--finding something on the first and third times but not on the second. Syntax for getting a cat across a street is rather unlikely, and the solution to a puzzle involving a guard assumes considerable stupidity on the guard's part. And try as I might, I could _not_ visualize the last puzzle, nor figure out why the solution suggested by the hints was correct.

One of the more interesting decisions that Mr. Fry made was to make one of the sections of the game simulate a software crash of sorts, so that the text comes out garbled--or, I should say, @#$^ s@#$ft@#@e cr@#!sh s} th8723 the t523xt c&*@es @%@#$t ga^%23482@(*bled. I exaggerate only slightly--a sample sentence: 



Spli0LAS99x
Broken gla31s and dsi8 wiring de76f746t the deca##] wo_)2den49053en walls of 
this room.

There are very few moments in IF that I have wanted to be over as quickly as I wanted this one to be over, and, unfortunately, it took a while to end, since there's a not-all-that-intuitive puzzle to solve that assumes you have VERY sharp eyes. All this gets points for verisimilitude, I guess, but giving the player a headache is not the sort of verisimilitude we're striving for, nor even the k2342nd of veris27@#^@^@#de we're str][;,ving for.

A New Day is, for the most part, technically proficient; other than the unfairnesses mentioned above, there aren't many design problems, and no bugs at all as far as I could tell. Somehow, though, I didn't enjoy it; I didn't feel like the plot went anywhere, and the story felt uninvolving. Well, the plot did go somewhere, true, but it didn't precisely progress there; you're given a situation at the beginning, you do a bunch of things that don't relate directly to the situation, and then the situation changes suddenly at the end. Perhaps some hints at the final revelation--perhaps things that you discover along the way that point to it, rather than having it all dumped on you without warning--might help in that respect; for me, that development was a sort of "oh, really?" bit. I hadn't really been thinking about it, to be honest, as I'd been busy trying to solve unrelated puzzles. If the idea is to figure out how Fry died, it might be good to have some of the puzzles actually concern him or the setting of his death, lest the whole thing feel disconnected. (I recognize that the behavior of a certain character may be intended to point to that, but it didn't really work for me.)

My, I do seem to be complaining, don't I? There are plenty of well-done things about A New Day as well. The ending feels genuinely suspenseful--though a little mysterious, since you have very little idea of what's going on. There are multiple solutions to several puzzles, a welcome touch, though I admit I only found a few. At one point, you get bad advice from an NPC, and though normally it would feel unfair to do something like this--when there's no obvious reason not to trust the NPC--it works well here, I think. (At least, I was sufficiently unsure about the NPC not to take the advice.) One puzzle involving crossing a street breaks IF conventions in a thoroughly welcome way; it does something that seems like common sense but is almost never actually implemented, and I was glad that this game rewarded common sense (though, for those who have been playing IF for a while, it's actually not common sense anymore). More generally, the idea is well-thought-out and intriguing, even if I never got into the plot, and there's potential for a much longer and more-involved game where the plot might move along better. At least, it seems so to me; it seems like there's much that can be done with exploring a computer. (Find a file directory tree and chop it down. Hee hee hee.) Though this particular effort is a little short (though I shouldn't fault Mr. Fry for obeying the two-hour limit, I know), it has ideas that could make a longer game quite intriguing.

Even so, there are difficulties in A New Day that, while not fatal to its playability, made it less than enjoyable for me; perhaps it's a matter of taste, but I don't claim to be sufficiently objective to transcend these things. Though this is a good effort, and Mr. Fry is clearly a good programmer, I gave this one a 6 on the competition scale.