Purple review Not many works of IF are spellbinding or even compelling from beginning to end; a game with a few memorable moments or some good puzzles may be remembered fondly and replayed often, even if the rest of the game is undistinguished. A notable example, to my mind, is Sorcerer, the bulk of which is rather ho-hum but which features two brilliant puzzles that most consider among Infocom's best ever. This is not to suggest that Purple, Stefan Blixt's entry in the 1998 competition, is in Sorcerer's league; it's not. But as with that game and others, an otherwise undistinguished entry is redeemed by a few compelling moments and some intriguing ideas.

Nuclear holocaust is imminent, but your brother Karl is planning to evade the blast and start over in the postapocalyptic world. To reveal precisely what you do would, I think, spoil the best moments of Purple: at its best, it has some of the austerity of well-imagined post-holocaust science fiction, such as Walter Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz; the way that remnants from the "before" turn up in the "after" is sometimes rather chilling. Purple is, to be sure, not even as well written as most average sci-fi, and certain moments go underdescribed--but the spareness of the prose serves the author well in spots. Descriptions are concise enough that they convey what happens and let the player mentally fill in the details. There is one moment at a turning point in the story that gave me a real chill--the author handles a certain transition particularly well--and I was disposed to like the game from that point on, I think. There are other things that are done well: a certain hidden object is nicely clued, and the behavior of a certain NPC is well described. Disturbing details are scattered here and there, rather than filling every room description, suggesting a measure of restraint.

As indicated, however, the general quality of Purple is uneven at best. The writing hits several potholes, particularly in certain events toward the end of the game, where it becomes difficult to tell exactly what's going on. There are plenty of typos and spelling problems, and a few places where the brevity of the descriptions becomes confusing. Technical problems abound as well: there are a few crashes, a major disambiguation problem, and one character who consistently asks you for something no matter how often you give it to him. More generally, several plot angles go unresolved--it would be nice to see Purple extended or followed up to make some more sense of the story. As it is, it's a little like a trailer: lots of intriguing things happen, but it would be worth knowing more about them.

There are other problems. After a certain point, Purple's pacing suffers: there aren't any time limits or even anything encouraging haste for most of the game, which is a shame because a sense of urgency might have made the plot more compelling. There are some points where wander-around-and-explore is a good mood to set, but after a while the exploratory feel needs to stop. Karl simply doesn't have enough to say--he has a few interesting responses, but too many things elicit no response, and his stable of comments is annoyingly small. (His one major task receives so little description that the effect is almost comic.) More generally, it's hard to escape the feeling that the author needed another month to fill in the details of Purple and clean up the bugs: if you deviate too much from the author's storyline, the seams start to show. (Particularly toward the end, if you do things out of sequence.) Given that the game provides minimal direction about what to do when, the effect can be a bit confusing. The author provides plenty of interesting details in his world, but never manages to make it seem coherent.

But Purple, I think, is greater than the sum of its parts, and the few compelling moments made up for the many bugs and slip-ups. If lack of polish bothers you, avoid this one; if you're so used to rough edges that you've learned to look past them, and you haven't tried Purple, you might appreciate the pieces of an interesting story that occasionally appear amid the bugs. Though far from a resounding success, Purple is a nice effort with some effective moments (and a huge improvement over the author's Pintown from the previous year), and I gave it a 7 in the competition.