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Marika The Offering Reviews
Author: James Webb
Date: 2007
ADRIFT 4.0
Reviewed by George Oliver
Evocative and well written, "Marika" weaves its
narrative into its one
room puzzle better than many games of its class. The eponymous
heroine, "purest and most beautiful" of the village's young women, is
locked away in a high tower as an offering to the vampyre that so far
has kept an uneasy peace. No heroine, no peace, but of course it's
your job to muck up that arrangement by keeping the vampyre out of
Marika's room for the night.
"Marika" is a fun and solid game with I think two structural and
technical problems.
At any point in the game you have the option of reading the back story
of events that led up to Marika's night in the tower, and I wish this
weren't so. In the opening of the game things couldn't be more clear.
You are placed within Marika's point-of-view with a marvellous first-person narrative voice. The tower room is old and musty, it feels
dangerous. You think to yourself you have little time to act to save
your life. And there is a mirror! For anyone with even a passing
familiarity with the vampire genre everything couldn't be more
obvious, and without explicitly saying what is going on the game has
wonderfully set up its premise. However, the back story hobbles this set up by making what is mysterious and interactive instead plain and
expository.
You might be saying to yourself that choosing to read the story is
entirely optional, and technically that's true. But I think an IF game
is kind of like a toy where you are apt to twist every knob and push
every button. If the author chooses to structure their game where it
is possible to read something or make some action, this is a
deliberate artistic choice, and given the nature of the medium where
the whole interface is exposed at the command line, there is no
functional difference between say, examining the mirror and reading
the back story. I think the game could have kept just the last few
paragraphs of the back story and made that choice work, but a better
choice would have been to eliminate the story entirely. Barring that,
at the worst include it as a flashback at some key point in the game,
or at the best integrate it into the narrative.
The second problem is in the puzzles. Unfortunately many of the
puzzles in "Marika" rely on executing them in a specific order and
with a narrow range of verbs. For example, you can 'lift' the
flagstone but not 'pry' it. You must 'sit on chair', and not simply
'break chair' to accomplish the same thing. If you try to do the
puzzles out of order, on a second play through for example, the game is
not forgiving. Luckily this simply is a technical issue and with more
polish many of these problems go away.
I'm looking forward to revgiblet's next game -- starting with the
IFComp 2006 "The Sisters" and now with "Marika" his work gets better
and better.
Reviewed by Emily Short
Since I enjoyed A Fine Day for Reaping but had problems with the parser, I was
interested to try this game, in which the author says he deliberately set out to
write a less ambitious piece with tighter parsing.
Does it work? Well — it’s not as headbangingly frustrating as AFDFR, in part
because the scope of the game keeps there from being too many different options,
and most of your activity is focused on the same few props. There’s less
opportunity to get distracted by irrelevancies and red herrings. But I still ran
into quite a few places where the ADRIFTiness of the parser let the game down a
bit. For instance, LOCK DOOR WITH ROD produced the surprising
I grab the iron rod from the floor and charge at the door.
Screaming with rage I bring the rod round in an arc and into contact with the
door with as much power as I can muster. There is a deafening clang and the rod
is jarred from my hands and thrown across the room, just missing my head. I
stumble back, hands shaking and ears ringing
That was plainly not what I wanted to do; perhaps the game was matching against
[anything] DOOR WITH ROD, intending to catch all variations of hit, smash,
break, destroy, etc. I admit that what I was trying to do was odd and a bit
unintuitive, but the game did not cope with it gracefully.
And there were also just some missing synonyms or places where I was clearly
trying to indicate an appropriate action but the game didn’t pick up on it: PRY
FLAGSTONE or PRY FLAGSTONE WITH ROD for LIFT FLAGSTONE; PUT PARCHMENT IN
FIREPLACE when I wanted to burn the parchment; etc.
I also felt that Marika didn’t play to Webb’s writing strengths: instead of the
wry understatement and humorous imagery of AFDFR, he goes here for high-flown
language and melodramatic emotional effects, and the results are sometimes not
as compelling as one might hope.
Still, I enjoyed the game. Webb did achieve his goal to some degree: though some
parsing problems did exist, they did not get in my way nearly as much as the
ones in AFDFR did. The goal was straightforward and easily to understand; the
puzzles mostly seemed fair; I sympathized with the protagonist and came to like
the guard who was on her side. (I assume they get married and live happily ever
after. It seems only fair. I was a little sad that there wasn’t a turn or two at
the end in which I could express my gratitude myself — KISS ENRIC seemed like an
obvious final move — but probably I am now just being a sap.)
Reviewed by Fra Enrico (Torino, Italy)
Although easy, beautiful history, written well and with the just number of
enigmas sufficiently engaged to you is one. The style simple nevertheless
variegato, adapted to the atmosphere very created and very cured. These are the
things that me piacciono in an interactive story, and this is an optimal example
of Interactive Fiction - even if perhaps can think the introduction little
prolissa.
The enigmas are simple as ideazione, but sufficiently engaged to you. The
indications sometimes render the life too much easy, therefore like some too
much explicit indications. The game forces to proceed little for attempted to
you, recommencing from every head time; in this way it loses longevity, because
once understood the way to arrive to the end does not have more sense rigiocarlo.
Reviewed by Nitku
Contrary to almost all other one-room games, the goal is not to escape but to
secure the room so that the bad guy doesn't get in. This is a refreshing new
look at the genre and the game handles the setting quite well.
There's a time limit but it serves a purpose: every time when the time runs out
and the room is not secure enough the game tells what part of the room you
missed. This is infinitely better than getting a general "you died"-message
without a clue how to improve the next time. It's not even annoying to die
several times because each time you are making progress.
Some minor design and parser problems keep this from being a five-star game.
Objects can be examined exactly once, then you get the generic "nothing
special"-message. At least in one point the story suggests that an item is
essential to solve the game (it is not) but recovering it is not possible and
there's no indication later that it's not necessary.
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
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