The combination of good writing and good programming that IF requires doesn't simply mean that authors need to both be able to put sentences together and write and debug code; an author needs to be able to both tell a good story and design the game so that the story comes across to the player effectively. Rans, by Bob Reeves, illustrates how important both elements are: it's an interesting story that, suitably designed, might have been highly involving, but it's told in such a confusing way that the player has a hard time getting as involved as he or she might.

It seems you're an author trying to complete a novel, and as the writing progresses, you're repeatedly transported into the world of the novel for inspiration. That is, when you're in the novel, you act to propel events forward, and you later record the way those events happened. It's an interesting spin on the fantasy-coexists-with reality genre, and the novel itself, while conventional fantasy, is reasonably interesting-there's certainly enough to it that it doesn't feel generic. The problem is that there are so many characters that are never, how shall I say, formally introduced that it's awfully hard to follow what's going on in the novel's world, and readers are likely to end up consulting the hints a lot. Likewise, the game seems to assume that you understand the significance of various events and connections when you don't necessarily; at least, if there was some bit of text earlier on that would have explained them, it's all too possible to miss that bit of text. The problem, in other words, is not that it's a bad story--it's just not developed in a way that introduces the player to it at the proper pace.

Exacerbating the confusion is the difficulty of the puzzles, which is extreme. Some of them simply involve major intuitive leaps, one calls for some highly tedious mapping and trial and error (along with more intuitive leaps), and a few are simply guess-the-verb puzzles. True, some of them are difficult simply because they require that you've been following along with the story, hardly a given, but many are just obscure or gratuitously annoying. (The first puzzle in the game--you're drunk, so you need to make coffee to sober yourself up--is particularly irritating and doesn't contribute much to the game.) They're not bad puzzles (with the exception of the guess-the-verb problems)--some of them are clever and use multiple objects in creative ways. There just isn't enough there to clue the player into what's going on.

The way that fantasy and reality interact gives rise to another problem, namely that it's never really clear what you're supposed to be doing when you flip back to reality (besides adding to the story), so you're reduced to wandering around until you find whatever it is that will send you back to the novel, to which there's no apparent rhyme or reason. Whereas the plot in the novel segments sort of drives itself--at least, there are obvious challenges to face or problems to solve--the real-life portions just feel aimless, and the course of wandering hither and yon trying to figure out what to do next can be frustrating, to say the least.

And yet Rans is still a very good story, assuming that you can find your way through it. The endgame ties together the loose ends in a surprisingly creative way (at least, it was more creative than I was expecting). The unfinished-novel conceit--often, when exploring the fantasy sequences, you're told that you haven't fully fleshed out some element of the book--is a brilliant device; in a sense, you see the story come together as you play the game, and you see what shaped the author's choices. There are some howlingly funny moments as well, this one in particular, when you encounter a lantern: "It's a battery-powered brass lantern. You can't conceive how it wound up in a fantasy story." In short, there are more than enough good ideas here to make a first-rate game-it's just that the game design details aren't all worked out as well as they should be. Were the game design at the same level as the writing and world-building, this would be a first-rate game.

Rans is a little too uneven to be a truly successful game, sadly, though it certainly has its moments; if you can overlook the frustrating parts, it might be worth a try.