"In the majority of David Whyld's games you see that kind of facility which springs from the absence of any high standard; that fertility in imbecile combination or feeble imitation which a little self-criticism would check and reduce to barrenness; just as with a total want of musical ear people will sing out of tune, while a degree more melodic sensibility would suffice to render them silent."
So might George Eliot have written if she had just choked on another offering from the David Whyld sausage factory. In the few short years of Adrift's existence, Whyld has written dozens of games, all bad, and all bad in exactly the same way. It's enough to try anyone's patience, and mine has finally snapped. More generous critics may still try to point him in the right direction, but I'm out of hope and out of charity. David Whyld's games are simply a lost cause.
The frustrating thing is that unlike so many comp entrants, Whyld knows both how to put a sentence together and how to invest it with a bit of personality, even if most of the time the personality in question is deeply irritating. But these talents are worth little when set against his total lack of of style, wit, balance, proportion, taste, awareness or self-criticism. The last is crucial. More than anything else, Whyld lacks a voice in his head telling him when to stop, go back, rein in his excess, rewrite the sentence, rejig the paragraph, redesign the game. He can't bring himself to look at his own prose and say "Enough! Or too much!" Quite the opposite: this is prose that is awfully pleased with itself, that chuckles away at its own jokes. Each command yields another screendump of the stuff; there's a whole lot of text in this game, and most of it should have been cut.
A Date with Death tells a light-hearted mock-fantasy story in the Pratchett vein. It's under the impression that it's funny, but Whyld's congested prose is not the most fertile ground for humour. One gag after another arrives stillborn, or is quickly smothered to death. Whyld appears to have no instinct for comedy: on the few occasions he stumbles across a funny idea, he has no idea what to do with it. At one point in the game, the player has to choose from a list of military advisors:
1) Captain Morograve.That's a reasonably funny list: a sequence of increasingly tough and macho names, ending with the bathos of "Admiral Sally"; Sally is a funny name for an admiral. But when the player selects one of the names from the list, the familiar Whyldean witlessness takes over:
2) Sergeant Major Steelhead.
3) Sergeant Vance "the Skullcrusher" Deathrush.
4) Admiral Sally.
Women aren't allowed in the army. It's a shocking thing in this modern age where quills are the main writing implement and civil disputes are settled by swords at dawn, but it's true. However, certain individuals in the army often seem to you to be a little... feminine. Take Admiral Sally for example. He's got soft, blonde hair down to his shoulders, dislikes the standard army uniform and has taken to wearing a skirt (showing off remarkably shapely legs for someone with many years of active service under his belt), an unusually lumpy chest area (apparently an infection he got fighting the barbarian hordes), never needs to shave (also a side effect from the fighting), wears makeup (to hide scars from said fighting) and has an unusually high-pitched voice ("the barbarians tortured me something rotten and my voice has been a bit girlish ever since")....and on it goes. We already got the message from the name; the joke becomes less funny with each passing line, but Whyld merrily keeps piling it on, until we're left with a corpse of a joke, gruesomely battered, as dead as roadkill and twice as ugly. And it doesn't even stop there.
That was a rare moment of promise. The rest of the game is filled with humour of the following standard:
An unpleasant sound emanates from the door. Or, actually, from the other side of the door. It's a lockpicking kind of sound. Now normally this wouldn't be a particularly unpleasant sound but when you're inside a room and there's an assassin on the other side of a locked door, then a lockpicking sound is perhaps the worst sound of them all.The quoted paragraph reads like the work of someone who has heard of wit but is not yet acquainted; it's like a fragment of HHGG as written by a Vogon. It apes the mannerisms of a certain school of humorous writing without realising what makes such writing humorous. "Or, actually..." corrections, for instance, are only funny if they throw the thing being corrected in an amusing light, or if the correction is an amusing rearrangement of the corrected. Neither is the case here: there's nothing funny about sound coming from a door, from one side or another. The Billy-Bunterish final sentence makes a play about lockpicking suddenly being an unpleasant sound when produced by a guy who wants to kill you, but this doesn't work. First, it's hardly a sound one would "normally" encounter, second, as an illicit activity, lockpicking usually would accompany some unpleasant business, and third, as it involves scraping metal against metal, most people would find it an unpleasant sound anyway. The author has just thrown a thoughtless comic template over his paragraph, and contrived the words to fit.
But I hardly need to persuade anyone of the quoted paragraph's unfunniness: it's obviously unfunny. And Whyld himself could easily have realised this if he had read over his work as another reader might, with a critical eye. But no, he is too pleased with himself and his creations. His writing leaves the air of one who savours his own flatulence.
The gameplay also suffers from all the usual problems: lack of direction, lack of complicity, lack of hinting, and an Adrift parser that pretends to understand more than it does. Once I was stuck repeatedly trying to talk to a key character only to be told "Your question falls upon deaf ears"; only after getting the same response to >TALK TO FUCKING BARTIMORY FOR FUCK'S SAKE did I realise I was spelling his name wrong.
Rating: 2