Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.adventure (More info?)
REVIEW: Sentinel: Descendants in Time
(Review copyright 2005, Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@eblong.com>)
Graphics: good
Atmosphere: pretty good
Story: good
Writing and dialogue: not bad
Puzzles: very good
Difficulty: not very hard
Forgiveness rating: you cannot die or make a fatal mistake.
I open the _Sentinel_ manual and the second thing I see (after the cursor
explanation, same as every other adventure cursor in history) is "Story by
Terry Dowling -- based on his short story "'The Dormeuse and the
Ichneumon'". Huh, I say. Dowling is not well-known in the US; he's an
Australian science fiction writer, who typically deals in far-future human
civilizations. I have a couple of collections of his stories, but they don't
include this one.
Since most adventure games are "based on a thin idea which the designer came
up with, not that he's a writer or anything, it's science fiction, how hard
can it be?" I was prepared for something interesting.
_Sentinel_ is pretty interesting. I don't think it's a great adventure-game
translation of a short story. The story is a bit murky and hard to get into.
But then, I'm judging it by short-story standards, not adventure standards.
Which means _Sentinel_ has crossed some kind of watershed line: I'm playing
it *as* literate science fiction, written by an actual author, and how many
games can provoke that?
The scenario (just to describe the game's opening) has you entering Tomb 35,
one of the famous tombs of the lost Tastan civilization. You've been into
Tastan tombs before, but 35 is apparently one of the most dangerous. You're
only going in because some thug has your little sister hostage. He wants
tomb treasure; you're going to have to get past the Tastan defense program,
the Dormeuse ("Sleeper"), to find some.
So here's why it doesn't work: not enough text. (I bet you knew I'd say
that.)
There's a lot of text. The designers are doing the right thing: the
storyline is presented through a series of dialogue snippets, scattered
thickly throughout the game. Some of them are voice-overs; some are full
cut-scenes, in which you can see Dormeuse moving around and interacting with
scenery. None of the snippets are too long, and the voice acting is quite
good. (Okay, Dormeuse is quite good. You are played by an annoying whiner
who never manages to get his head out of the script. But Dormeuse is the
interesting one.)
Despite this, I never quite had a sense of what was going on. Or rather, I
never had a sense of how the story *began*. The opening monologue is highly
compressed. Yes, it presents everything the story needs. When I finished the
game, I went back and realized that the opening provides foreshadowing as
well. It's a very well-done bit of prose. But it's still too squished. The
background material needs to be reinforced a couple of times, early in the
game, or the player just winds up feeling lost.
Note that I'm not talking about the story which emerges through the course
of the game. That develops over many dialogue interludes; the pacing works.
I'm talking about the protagonist's *context* -- his initial state of mind,
within which you must begin for the story to hold together.
For example: the game is obviously going to involve learning about the
ancient Tastans. Just by showing a tomb, and saying that you're going to
explore it, the designers set up that much. What they *don't* set up
(clearly enough) is how much you know *initially* -- what you *expect* the
tombs to contain. What kind of ancient tombs are guarded by a holographic
defense program? Are artificial intelligences normal where you come from?
Are your people even more advanced than the Tastans? Have you grown up
hearing stories about the Tastan sentinels, or did you just learn about this
one?
Again, it's not that the designers *omit* this stuff. The first time you
meet the defense program, you're walking into the tomb entrance calling out
"Dormeuse! Dormeuse!" So you can deduce that the protagonist *does* expect
to encounter her.
But that goes by very quickly. Everything does. In a printed story, every
line of description and narrative would convey tiny clues about the the
protagonist, his background, his expectations and understanding of the
world. It's the basic trick of science fiction. In _Sentinel_, this material
is compressed into the opening and the first few pieces of dialogue, and it
just doesn't quite fit.
Enough of that disgression. How does the game play out? Well, a Tastan tomb
apparently contains a set of virtual worlds, which represent places the
owner loved. Unsurprisingly, these worlds are full of puzzles.
(The game takes pains to stress that they're only *snapshots* of real
worlds. This, I assume, is meant to explain the Great Adventure Convention
-- that any real place would have so many perfectly-designed and arranged
puzzles. Personally I recommend that designers leave the subject alone. The
more you point, the more irritating the question becomes -- no matter how
good your explanation. Like a Star Trek episode trying to seriously explain
the Klingon forehead thing. Which, I hear, they're about to do. Sigh.)
The puzzles are a weird bunch. They are uniformly, and unashamedly, abstract
puzzles. *All* of them. Pattern-matching, pattern analysis, combination
locks; colors and symbols and sounds. (Many audio puzzles -- you don't need
perfect pitch, but you'd better be good at distinguishing sounds.)
You will find *no* puzzles based on physical reality. No heating things with
fire; no chilling with ice; no objects pushing or bumping or leaning on
other objects. No levers. Certainly no chemical or biological properties.
Not even any pipes or wires to trace from location A to location B. A couple
of the puzzles touch on the geometry of the locations, but only in the most
abstract way. There's a floating bridge at one point, whose height varies
with the height of the water; but you could just as well think of it as a
three-position switch.
In short, _Sentinel_ has scenery and puzzles, and the two have practically
nothing to do with each other. The game worlds are pretty, but you don't
have to *inhabit* them to understand the puzzles. They're just a tray to
serve forth the symbolic information you need.
The puzzles don't relate to the storyline, either. They're built into the
domains of Tomb 35, and at the end of each domain you get a crystal which
advances the game state. But there's no thematic relation between the
puzzles and the domains (or the Dormeuse, or the plot). Your actions do not
tie into the storytelling. Not until the very last puzzle, and even there
the thematic relation is optional -- you can simply solve it as a pattern
puzzle.
I'd compare it to _Jewels of the Oracle_, except that _Sentinel_ does *have*
a story.
Also, now that I think about it, _Jewels_ had some very complex puzzles --
ornate slider variations which required multiple levels of manipulation. The
puzzles in _Sentinel_ never get that fiendish. Some of them are
*complicated*, in the sense of requiring you to discover and organize a lot
of information; but once you have it all written down, the puzzle mechanism
itself is usually simplistic.
This is not exactly a complaint. I like abstract puzzles. I enjoyed
_Sentinel_ as a puzzle collection -- with some high spots and low spots, of
course. I just prefer games in which the challenges are inextricably tied to
the world. The pattern-matching is not the reason I keep going back to the
adventure wellhead.
(The worst puzzle in _Sentinel_ is a blinky-lights affair in which
thirty-two switches control twenty lights. You have to pick the four correct
switches. As far as I can tell, there's *no* way to solve this except to
write down *all 32* switch patterns, and *then* start combining them by
brute force. I wound up writing a program to solve it for me, which at least
saved the brute-force step.)
_Sentinel_ has a fully 3D environment. This is a recent trick which I expect
to see more of in adventure games, and _Sentinel_ does it very well,
although not brilliantly. The necessary comparison is to _Uru_, and -- well
-- _Uru_ looks better. _Sentinel_ has a lot of excellent scenery, and
there's plenty of model detail. But the designers rarely added that one
extra layer of dirt, gloss, wear, or glow which made _Uru_ so stunning. The
surfaces look just a bit flat and repetitive.
Navigation is no problem; you run around in the usual first-person 3D
manner. Mouse to turn, arrow keys to move or sidestep, left-click to trigger
whatever's directly in front of you. (The cursor is locked to the center of
the screen.) My only problem was that the mouse was very jittery; I had to
turn the sensitivity all the way down. Oh, and there is a jump key -- but
it's a tiny hop, not any part of the gameplay. I think jumping is only there
in case you get wedged against a floor polygon in a funny way. (Which you
can probably also solve by backing up and trying again from a different
angle.)
One odd interface addition is a "directional hint" -- a translucent arrow
which floats near your cursor and points at the nearest interactable
hotspot. (Or several arrows, if you're near several machines.) I'm not sure
I like it. It's *effective*, in that it's usually easy to follow it to a
nearby clue or puzzle. But it's also somewhat distracting. And if the
"nearest" hotspot is on the other side of a wall, it can become
frustratingly useless -- you're on your own as far as *reaching* the item,
if it's even reachable at that point in the game.
I'm not necessarily opposed to out-of-game interface mechanisms like this.
But I worry that they can become substitutes for exploring, rather than
helpful additions. The directional arrows in _Sentinel_ rarely told me
anything useful, because the game design was generally good enough to make
important objects stand out. And the arrows may have added to my sense of
disconnection with the game world. On the other hand, I didn't *need* to
feel connected to the game world, since _Sentinel_ is all about the puzzles.
So maybe I'm playing the game correctly, and just unloading my discomfort on
the directional arrows.
*Overall:* A mixed report. _Sentinel_ has an interesting story, which is
imperfectly presented. It has a lot of enjoyable puzzles, but it doesn't
even try to integrate them into the story or the world. Exploring it is
cool, but the scenery is just background art, and it didn't knock my socks
very far off. _Sentinel_ is very well done for what it is: a pretty puzzle
collection with a bonus story included. You should play it if that's what
you like. But I wish it had been more.
(This review, and my reviews of other adventure games, are at
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/index.html)
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
I'm still thinking about what to put in this space.
REVIEW: Sentinel: Descendants in Time
(Review copyright 2005, Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@eblong.com>)
Graphics: good
Atmosphere: pretty good
Story: good
Writing and dialogue: not bad
Puzzles: very good
Difficulty: not very hard
Forgiveness rating: you cannot die or make a fatal mistake.
I open the _Sentinel_ manual and the second thing I see (after the cursor
explanation, same as every other adventure cursor in history) is "Story by
Terry Dowling -- based on his short story "'The Dormeuse and the
Ichneumon'". Huh, I say. Dowling is not well-known in the US; he's an
Australian science fiction writer, who typically deals in far-future human
civilizations. I have a couple of collections of his stories, but they don't
include this one.
Since most adventure games are "based on a thin idea which the designer came
up with, not that he's a writer or anything, it's science fiction, how hard
can it be?" I was prepared for something interesting.
_Sentinel_ is pretty interesting. I don't think it's a great adventure-game
translation of a short story. The story is a bit murky and hard to get into.
But then, I'm judging it by short-story standards, not adventure standards.
Which means _Sentinel_ has crossed some kind of watershed line: I'm playing
it *as* literate science fiction, written by an actual author, and how many
games can provoke that?
The scenario (just to describe the game's opening) has you entering Tomb 35,
one of the famous tombs of the lost Tastan civilization. You've been into
Tastan tombs before, but 35 is apparently one of the most dangerous. You're
only going in because some thug has your little sister hostage. He wants
tomb treasure; you're going to have to get past the Tastan defense program,
the Dormeuse ("Sleeper"), to find some.
So here's why it doesn't work: not enough text. (I bet you knew I'd say
that.)
There's a lot of text. The designers are doing the right thing: the
storyline is presented through a series of dialogue snippets, scattered
thickly throughout the game. Some of them are voice-overs; some are full
cut-scenes, in which you can see Dormeuse moving around and interacting with
scenery. None of the snippets are too long, and the voice acting is quite
good. (Okay, Dormeuse is quite good. You are played by an annoying whiner
who never manages to get his head out of the script. But Dormeuse is the
interesting one.)
Despite this, I never quite had a sense of what was going on. Or rather, I
never had a sense of how the story *began*. The opening monologue is highly
compressed. Yes, it presents everything the story needs. When I finished the
game, I went back and realized that the opening provides foreshadowing as
well. It's a very well-done bit of prose. But it's still too squished. The
background material needs to be reinforced a couple of times, early in the
game, or the player just winds up feeling lost.
Note that I'm not talking about the story which emerges through the course
of the game. That develops over many dialogue interludes; the pacing works.
I'm talking about the protagonist's *context* -- his initial state of mind,
within which you must begin for the story to hold together.
For example: the game is obviously going to involve learning about the
ancient Tastans. Just by showing a tomb, and saying that you're going to
explore it, the designers set up that much. What they *don't* set up
(clearly enough) is how much you know *initially* -- what you *expect* the
tombs to contain. What kind of ancient tombs are guarded by a holographic
defense program? Are artificial intelligences normal where you come from?
Are your people even more advanced than the Tastans? Have you grown up
hearing stories about the Tastan sentinels, or did you just learn about this
one?
Again, it's not that the designers *omit* this stuff. The first time you
meet the defense program, you're walking into the tomb entrance calling out
"Dormeuse! Dormeuse!" So you can deduce that the protagonist *does* expect
to encounter her.
But that goes by very quickly. Everything does. In a printed story, every
line of description and narrative would convey tiny clues about the the
protagonist, his background, his expectations and understanding of the
world. It's the basic trick of science fiction. In _Sentinel_, this material
is compressed into the opening and the first few pieces of dialogue, and it
just doesn't quite fit.
Enough of that disgression. How does the game play out? Well, a Tastan tomb
apparently contains a set of virtual worlds, which represent places the
owner loved. Unsurprisingly, these worlds are full of puzzles.
(The game takes pains to stress that they're only *snapshots* of real
worlds. This, I assume, is meant to explain the Great Adventure Convention
-- that any real place would have so many perfectly-designed and arranged
puzzles. Personally I recommend that designers leave the subject alone. The
more you point, the more irritating the question becomes -- no matter how
good your explanation. Like a Star Trek episode trying to seriously explain
the Klingon forehead thing. Which, I hear, they're about to do. Sigh.)
The puzzles are a weird bunch. They are uniformly, and unashamedly, abstract
puzzles. *All* of them. Pattern-matching, pattern analysis, combination
locks; colors and symbols and sounds. (Many audio puzzles -- you don't need
perfect pitch, but you'd better be good at distinguishing sounds.)
You will find *no* puzzles based on physical reality. No heating things with
fire; no chilling with ice; no objects pushing or bumping or leaning on
other objects. No levers. Certainly no chemical or biological properties.
Not even any pipes or wires to trace from location A to location B. A couple
of the puzzles touch on the geometry of the locations, but only in the most
abstract way. There's a floating bridge at one point, whose height varies
with the height of the water; but you could just as well think of it as a
three-position switch.
In short, _Sentinel_ has scenery and puzzles, and the two have practically
nothing to do with each other. The game worlds are pretty, but you don't
have to *inhabit* them to understand the puzzles. They're just a tray to
serve forth the symbolic information you need.
The puzzles don't relate to the storyline, either. They're built into the
domains of Tomb 35, and at the end of each domain you get a crystal which
advances the game state. But there's no thematic relation between the
puzzles and the domains (or the Dormeuse, or the plot). Your actions do not
tie into the storytelling. Not until the very last puzzle, and even there
the thematic relation is optional -- you can simply solve it as a pattern
puzzle.
I'd compare it to _Jewels of the Oracle_, except that _Sentinel_ does *have*
a story.
Also, now that I think about it, _Jewels_ had some very complex puzzles --
ornate slider variations which required multiple levels of manipulation. The
puzzles in _Sentinel_ never get that fiendish. Some of them are
*complicated*, in the sense of requiring you to discover and organize a lot
of information; but once you have it all written down, the puzzle mechanism
itself is usually simplistic.
This is not exactly a complaint. I like abstract puzzles. I enjoyed
_Sentinel_ as a puzzle collection -- with some high spots and low spots, of
course. I just prefer games in which the challenges are inextricably tied to
the world. The pattern-matching is not the reason I keep going back to the
adventure wellhead.
(The worst puzzle in _Sentinel_ is a blinky-lights affair in which
thirty-two switches control twenty lights. You have to pick the four correct
switches. As far as I can tell, there's *no* way to solve this except to
write down *all 32* switch patterns, and *then* start combining them by
brute force. I wound up writing a program to solve it for me, which at least
saved the brute-force step.)
_Sentinel_ has a fully 3D environment. This is a recent trick which I expect
to see more of in adventure games, and _Sentinel_ does it very well,
although not brilliantly. The necessary comparison is to _Uru_, and -- well
-- _Uru_ looks better. _Sentinel_ has a lot of excellent scenery, and
there's plenty of model detail. But the designers rarely added that one
extra layer of dirt, gloss, wear, or glow which made _Uru_ so stunning. The
surfaces look just a bit flat and repetitive.
Navigation is no problem; you run around in the usual first-person 3D
manner. Mouse to turn, arrow keys to move or sidestep, left-click to trigger
whatever's directly in front of you. (The cursor is locked to the center of
the screen.) My only problem was that the mouse was very jittery; I had to
turn the sensitivity all the way down. Oh, and there is a jump key -- but
it's a tiny hop, not any part of the gameplay. I think jumping is only there
in case you get wedged against a floor polygon in a funny way. (Which you
can probably also solve by backing up and trying again from a different
angle.)
One odd interface addition is a "directional hint" -- a translucent arrow
which floats near your cursor and points at the nearest interactable
hotspot. (Or several arrows, if you're near several machines.) I'm not sure
I like it. It's *effective*, in that it's usually easy to follow it to a
nearby clue or puzzle. But it's also somewhat distracting. And if the
"nearest" hotspot is on the other side of a wall, it can become
frustratingly useless -- you're on your own as far as *reaching* the item,
if it's even reachable at that point in the game.
I'm not necessarily opposed to out-of-game interface mechanisms like this.
But I worry that they can become substitutes for exploring, rather than
helpful additions. The directional arrows in _Sentinel_ rarely told me
anything useful, because the game design was generally good enough to make
important objects stand out. And the arrows may have added to my sense of
disconnection with the game world. On the other hand, I didn't *need* to
feel connected to the game world, since _Sentinel_ is all about the puzzles.
So maybe I'm playing the game correctly, and just unloading my discomfort on
the directional arrows.
*Overall:* A mixed report. _Sentinel_ has an interesting story, which is
imperfectly presented. It has a lot of enjoyable puzzles, but it doesn't
even try to integrate them into the story or the world. Exploring it is
cool, but the scenery is just background art, and it didn't knock my socks
very far off. _Sentinel_ is very well done for what it is: a pretty puzzle
collection with a bonus story included. You should play it if that's what
you like. But I wish it had been more.
(This review, and my reviews of other adventure games, are at
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/index.html)
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
I'm still thinking about what to put in this space.
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