From: Adam Thornton NAME: Spider and Web AUTHOR: Andrew Plotkin E-MAIL: erkyrath@netcom.com DATE: 1997-8 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/Tangle.z5 VERSION: Release 4 This review necessarily contains spoilers for _Spider And Web_. If you haven't played it, I recommend you stop reading here, go out and get a copy (ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/Tangle.z5), and play it. It is certainly worth your time. After you've played it, continue. It's an excellent game. If I have to give it a rating, uhhhh, let's see. 9.0 out of 10. Now go play it. _Spider And Web_ is the latest IF effort by Andrew Plotkin. It represents a radical departure from his earlier works in that it is neither an impossibly unfair series of timing puzzles (e.g. "A Change In the Weather"), nor is it a lyrical allegorical journey (e.g. "So Far"), nor is it an arcade favorite reborn (e.g. "Freefall"), nor is it an Interactive Unbelievably Painful Breakup (e.g. "The Space Under The Window"), nor is it even a Computer Science homework set (e.g. "Lists and Lists"). Instead, it's a Cold War spy story, and a fairly straightforward one at that. When stripped to its essentials, the plot is: break into a research center, elude the guards, steal the Secret Plans, and escape. Nothing we haven't seen a hundred times before, right? Well, no. This is, after all, a Zarf game. For starters, the game begins with the player outside a closed door in a grimy alley, with no means of opening the door. It's only after giving up and walking away that we find the real setting of the game: the player has been captured and is being interrogated. The player, it turns out, was a spy breaking into this facility. He, or possibly she--Zarf doesn't specify, and it's made quite clear that at least the captors' forces include both men and women; I'm going to refer to the protagonist as "he," since that's how I imagined the game--was captured. His captors have a memory-extraction McGuffin that allows them to see the scene through his eyes. The challenge of the first part of the game is to replay each scene in such a way that it matches the evidence found by your captors. It's an awful lot like the movie _Groundhog Day_ in that you do everything over and over until you get it right. Except that, after you're comfortable with that paradigm, about two thirds of the way through the game, there's a huge shift. You escape and are suddenly playing for real. And that's when you find out that there were certain things you lied to your interrogator about, and figuring out what you told him vs. what you really did becomes the major challenge of the game. The escaping puzzle has to be one of the best ever seen in IF. It's incredibly subtle, incredibly elegant, and extremely satisfying. But aside from that, finding out that you were an unwitting Unreliable Narrator is an amazing rhetorical gimmick, and works beautifully. It completely subverts what you thought you were doing; the first part of the game becomes _Groundhog Day_ except that you're repeating everything until you get it convincingly and consistently *wrong*. The remainder of the game, alas, falls a little short. Most of it concerns figuring out what you really *were* doing in the earlier part, and realizing how to use it to get into the Lab. Once there it's pretty obvious what you need to do to get enough time to operate, and what to do. However, at this point, it *is* pretty much a Cold War spy story, albeit an exciting one. The metaphysically neat parts of the game are behind you. One object, which you have to use twice, is the hardest part of the game, because it appears in no room descriptions, and unless you examine the walls or listen very carefully, there's no indication that such things exist. This is, in fact, precisely the point. They're ubiquitous and never noticed. Annoying, but it can hardly be said to be unfair. The mechanics and prose are, as in every Zarf game, excellent. The one fleshed-out NPC is convincingly drawn, and Zarf's choice to limit conversation with him to "yes" or "no" works well both in the context of the game and as a tool so that the amount of coding is kept to a minimum. The spy gadgets work intuitively and the interface seems very believable. And they're fun to play with. It's interesting and very refreshing to have an exciting spy story as the basic premise, and have no one get killed or even seriously hurt in the game's main action. The total body count is seven, plus or minus, unconscious guards, most of them simply stun-gunned, one poisoned with a temporary neurotoxin, and one interrogator with a bad headache. Plus whatever happens to the player's character. There are some nice incidental touches: words like "night-clumps," the twin moons seen in the sketch in the interrogator's office, the marvellously evocative phrase "dawn-tales." All of these give a feeling of a fleshed-out background world with a charmingly minimalist sketch. They also make the game feel like a sequel of sorts to "So Far"; if the world of "So Far" was late Victorian (well, the beginning world, where _Rito and Imita_ is playing), then this is near-future, maybe a century and a half down the road. The "web" of the title also plays a nice recurring role. "Scan-web" is apparently a metal-detecting metallic woven fiber. Indeed, maybe that's all it is: metal passing through it would set up an inductive current, which could then trigger an alarm somewhere. It's also used as some sort of conductive field-generating device in the lab, and, of course, the whole issue of the game is "Who's the spider, and who's the fly?" The interrogator is an interesting character. He's a thinking man with a hell of a job. Zarf says that he tried to create an NPC and ended up once again writing himself, but with a dirty job. That's possible. But I found he rang very true to the one intellectual career military man I know, who once described himself to me as "your basic liberal arts colonel." He's someone with an artistic side, and his art reveals a great deal about his personality. So do his bookshelves. I, alas, don't believe Zarf's explanations that I can see the contents of his shelves from the door--more on this later. The political setting of the game is interesting. This would have been an amazingly affecting game in 1986, the year of Trinity's release. It is set in a nasty Cold War, and the Device in the Lab is, as the interrogator points out, at least the equivalent of the Bomb in terms of destructive potential. These days, it's a nice spy thriller. Back when Balance of Power and Detente actually *meant* something, it would have been much more relevant. Half the fun of the game is figuring out what really happened. The basic plot (not the one you tell the interrogator) goes something like this: Distract the guards at the entrance, use the lockpick to get in, jump up and hide the gun, go plant the blast-tab, go to the lab, try to set off the blast, realize the radio module is broken, lose the lockpick (either accidentally or deliberately), go to Security (maybe looking for the pick), get the pen, enter the interrogation room and plant the pack, go back to the cabinet, stab the guard, stash the stuff, get captured. This brings you to the interrogation. From then on what you see is real. Now, clearly your character has an intimate knowledge of the inside of the complex. I suspect you had a confederate inside that photographed damn near everything inside there, except in the lab, where he or she couldn't get. This provides an explanation for how you know not only the complex layout but also what books the interrogator likes to read. And it sets up the *real* story, or at least my guess at the real story: Could this confederate be the interrogator himself? We know he's a man who no longer believes in the war he's fighting. He doesn't believe in the other side either. Which is why he didn't just smuggle out the pictures in the lab. He wants no one to get the device. The only way you can Make a Difference is to either burn the papers or "escape"; if we assume that the escape is, in fact, an obliteration--the changed Destination Waveform in fact sends the player someplace horribly inhospitable---and since the lab is trashed by blasting the door, both of those Differences amount to the same thing. The research is destroyed, the plans are gone, and no one has the knowledge. The interrogator wins; the world is safe from the new weapon for a few more years, anyway. And thus it turns out that he was the spider, and you were, all along, the fly.