One of the questions in a recent survey on rec.arts.int-fiction asked if we preferred "story" or "puzzle" interactive fiction. Though it's not as much of a binary choice as the wording implied, there are two extremes of a continuum, and many people have a preference towards one end or the other.

I'm not a very big IF player, but I did get into the competition in 2004, when I played and voted on every z-code game and many of the others. My favourite games were Blue Chairs and Gamlet. Both had great writing, lots to do, and, when they tried to do puzzles (Blue Chairs's midsection, the second half of Gamlet) lost it completely, requiring judicious use of the walkthrough to be able to continue the story.

I completely bypassed the puzzle-based scifi game, All Things Devours, the first time around: I'd found it an unappealing combination of boring, hard, and confusing (I died repeatedly, without ever having understood what it was I was meant to do). It turns out ATD placed 3rd, just after Blue Chairs, and after reading some rave reviews of it, I decided to give it another shot. That time I managed to get into the lab (previously I'd missed the buttons that opened it) and managed to blow myself up once or twice before getting bored.

Now the premise of the game sounds interesting: you have to travel back in time, but while you're there, you can't meet your future self or Bad Things will happen. My problem was that I couldn't even work out how to use the time machine...

Just recently, interest in IF briefly sparked again, I decide to give ATD another go. I'm momentarily put off by the fact that setting the "timer" doesn't mean the one on the time travel device, but the one on the bomb I'm carrying. Oops. So I have to set the panel? But what to? I try random numbers between 1 and 500 and end up dying. So I resort to a walkthrough. It's a number of seconds (why the game can't tell me this, given that the PC I'm controlling invented it, I don't know). I calculate the right number of seconds, press the button, and vow to actually pay attention to the time reported in the status bar. Then I start wandering around and, yes, the game is actually very clever (as I've heard, but not experienced first hand up until now), you die if you see your future self, or if that self discovers part of her world universe in an inconsistent state. My resolve to stick at this with a map and a list of times and object locations vanishes after dying twice.

I'm not trying to criticize ATD by the way: people whose opinions I trust have said great things about it, and I have tried really hard (well, fairly hard, but a number of times at least) to get it. It's just much further inclined to the puzzle end of things than I'm comfortable with, hey ho. If you've not played ATD, then go and play it now, you might well love it (but play Blue Chairs too!)

Oddly, I love Spider and Web, and that has some really difficult puzzles too. Now some of them I got by myself: getting in and out of the scanweb, and that puzzle. But others (the clattering lockpick) completely baffled me. I don't get the world model well enough to know when my actions will do the right thing, especially when they're about timing (which is an odd thing to do without detailed visual/sensory stimulation to work with). But, in the main, though I don't really get on with puzzles, you're given a gentle training in the use of the gadgets. And I loved how the game deflates your progressive attempts to do things like learning how to shut down the scanweb to sneak across the gun. So having to resort to a walkthrough to work out the frustrating "boring" puzzles is actually worthwhile: because it gives you a payoff including more clever and fun puzzles, the NPC interaction, and the aha moments of the unreliable narration. OK, so the endgame doesn't work for me: yes, it's nice to see what use the PC actually made of various gadgets and hiding places, but now you're working without the training wheels of the interrogator to tell you what you "actually" did. (I'm torn between wishing on the one hand that the dash through the facility was more "on rails"; and on the other that I'd taken a deep breath, mapped it, and realised that the basic principle was "look at all the places that have been signalled in unreliable narrations" and solved the puzzle/story myself).

But no matter, the first half of Spider and Web has set things up, it's earnt the right to have a cruel and boring timed puzzle. I'm not sure it quite deserves the final lab puzzle though, oh well...

The r.a.i-f thread I linked above has some more discussion about the dichotomy/continuum of puzzle/story IF. If you haven't already read/played modern IF, then it's worth looking at a number of different styles before making an opinion on this varied form! (And if you play IF, where do you fall in the continuum?)