It's occasionally been said that the diversity of latter-day IF makes it difficult to compare games--when puzzles are downplayed and setting, story, characterization, etc. are stressed, different games often have very few common measures (other than technical smoothness and writing skill) by which to rate them. Instead, games are judged more and more by how well they were trying to do whatever they were trying to do, and as measuring the success of, say, a horror-oriented game is very different from measuring the success of a sci-fi game, it becomes harder to say in a useful way that any given game is better than another. (Was it always thus? Maybe, but I seem to recall some fairly lively debates, a few years back in r*if, over which Infocom games were the best and worst--despite Infocom's attempts to explore a broad range of genres.) I bring this up not because I have any idea where Jon Ingold's All Roads stands in the IF pantheon; to the contrary, I have no idea, because while it's certainly an enjoyable game in many respects, I cannot divine what the author was setting out to do.

The premise is that--well, that's the problem. The initial text suggests that you're lying in your bed, then abruptly you're standing on a scaffold, about to be hanged, and a few turns later, just as abruptly, you're tied up in a cellar. From there, things slow down a little, but the general "huh?" aura persists throughout--you jump around in time and space enough that you' re unlikely to follow what's going on until the very end. It doesn't, however, matter much that you don't know what's going on, as the game shepherds you along quite firmly--you can't get very far off the track at any point, nor is there a way, as far as I can tell, to derail the express by dying or making the game unwinnable. (Well, okay, there's one puzzle, and it's a fairly subtle puzzle, sufficiently so that it's not impossible to bog down--but other than that things more or less roll along.) The plot itself involves political machinations in a sort of alternate-universe medieval Venice, certainly a good setting for not knowing what's going on, and the game plays that aspect to the hilt--most of the salient facts, such as who's on what side, remain mysterious throughout, adding to the general bewilderment. At a few points, if you don't supply the needed action, the game gives you progressively less subtle hints, so the course of the story is unlikely to stop very often. The result, at the end of the game, is essentially a very odd short story where you supply much of the protagonist' s action but very little of the brainpower.

Give All Roads some credit, though--the player does *do* almost everything in the story, as opposed to watching his friend the player character do things in long chunks of text between prompts (a common failing in story-oriented games). Some of the actions are attributable to unsubtle hints, and there's a little bit of unreliable-narrator trickery, but most of the time the game gets the player sufficiently on the story's wavelength that outright prodding is unnecessary, which is nothing to sneeze at. Simple weirdness or absurdity is fairly trodden IF ground, but this isn't that, exactly--the point is not, as far as I can tell, simply to be strange and confusing. The underlying logic of it all is obscure, but the actions themselves are reasonably apparent.

In a sense, though, that's the problem; there are (at least) two narratives in All Roads, one the ostensible course through the game and another the player's progress toward deciphering the game's central puzzle, namely Why The Whole World's Acting So Weird. The game appears to have decided quite firmly that you will begin to get hints on the latter only toward the end of the game; detective work during most of the story is not only not encouraged, it's pretty much impossible. Some common commands are disabled or even given misleading responses. Yes, there are stray clues here and there, but they don't seem to be in places where the inquiring player would tend to look--they're more like Easter eggs. The most blatant aspect of this is the conversation system, namely TALK TO, which certainly avoids complications but doesn't leave much freedom. It's not, exactly, that the game will break if your strange time-space-jumping tendencies are aired, because you do air them (after a fashion) in your TALK TO conversations, but the game appears to have made a choice--rather than letting you, the player, screw things up and get some *** You have died *** equivalent, the game simply prevents you from screwing things up.

Does this all matter? Yes and no, in my book. It doesn't make the underlying puzzle any less interesting--and it is a good puzzle, well worth some thought and some poring over the transcript. For my part, though, the railroaded nature of the game took away some of the satisfaction of figuring out the puzzle, since there was no possibility that I'd make a clever guess and be rewarded, and the giveaways at the end really were outright giveaways. (I might have found the process a bit more rewarding if the solution lay more in going back through the game and trying new stuff, thereby to learn more, and less in the exposition at the end.) Accordingly, it's difficult to judge the game--as pure story, once understood, it's impressive, and the various pieces come together well. The meta-puzzle of the story isn't quite as successful, though, due to the feeling that the player doesn't really have much of a shot at solving the puzzle, and accordingly the extent to which the game succeeds depends on one's assumptions about what the game sets out to do.

Those reservations noted, I should add that I did enjoy All Roads; the complexity and depth of the story it wove landed it the top spot in the comp, and deservedly so. For my part, I gave it a 9.