As has been my practice for the last few years, I’ve set my RSS feed to truncate entries so that I can post reviews without spoilerage. Within an entry, there is a short, spoilerless discussion (though the comp purists may want to avoid reading even that before playing for themselves); then spoiler space; then a more detailed discussion of what I thought did and didn’t work in the game.
I’m also pursuing an approach I came up with a couple of years ago: I’m playing and reviewing games that have listed beta-testers, and skipping those that don’t. In 2008 that turned out to be a pretty fool-proof indicator of which games were going to end up scoring 4 or less on my personal scale, and it made my reviewing process a happier one in 2009, so I’m sticking with it. I’m hoping this will mean I have more time to devote to the remaining games, which in turn will (I hope) be of higher quality, and you, dear reader, will have fewer rants inflicted on you.
Next up: Heated.
It’s a game where you wake up in your miserable, messy apartment and get ready and go to work. So it’s already starting at a disadvantage with me, because I’ve already played that game over and over and over again.
I’m especially tired of that common IF-comp protagonist who lives a sad, lonely life in a poorly furnished home with a grubby kitchen, showing no sign of friends, family, hobbies, affections, tastes, or personal history. Hir one note of characterization is an aversion to household chores. Where does this tedious loser come from?
The problem isn’t even that this game has no ideas, though in general I tend to associate the generic setting and protagonist as a sign that not enough effort has gone into the concept. But Heated does some moderately interesting things technically, and its core puzzle functions all right. It just would have been way more fun had the same polish level and technical attention been directed at a more compelling scenario. I dunno.
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The premise is that you are trying to make it to work early enough and well groomed enough and in a good enough mood to earn a raise, but the mundane little things in life are conspiring against you, and whenever something crosses your will, it increases your level of rage. It’s not the first go-round for that idea either, but never mind: the Sneaky Hate Spiral is a thing we can all understand. Heated‘s heat meter made a good interactive illustration of the concept, though it was not extreme enough to become really funny.
The individual tasks that go into doing this are pretty trivial and are fairly heavily hinted. I’d say it’s really a game with one large puzzle, an optimization puzzle of timing and execution to get everything done in time for where you’re going.
There were several touches that impressed me here. On a technical level, the game successfully circumvents any attempt to abuse UNDO to get around the rage meter. And despite a few things I would have preferred to abstract out or smooth over (the unneeded spare backyard rooms, the ease of ruining the chewing gum by using it too early, etc.), the optimization puzzle is of a good size and difficulty level to replay several times. There are hints and solutions for every piece of the puzzle, too. A little more proofreading wouldn’t have hurt here and there, though I personally didn’t run into some of the dynamic text problems other reviewers report.
To sum up, this was okay. I was mildly amused and I only found the game gratuitously annoying once, because I had typed SEARCH SHOES and found nothing, but it turned out I had searched my work shoes instead of the shoe pile and that was why I couldn’t find the iron. (Maybe set a disambiguation rule to make the player by default search the shoe pile? That would make sense.) I am ready to admit that it was my own fault I didn’t read carefully enough to notice I’d been searching the wrong thing there, though.
So: the distance between okay and good was mostly in the setting and concept rather than execution. Maybe something more ambitious next time? Or take on a collaborator to develop a richer premise?
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
I think this game was bad-written and bad-implemented. Many times I had to “Guess the word” to go on and story, let me say, is really banal and ordinary. The rage meter too was completely useless.
I can’t speak to your experience, obviously, but I didn’t run into any guess the verb that I can recall; the game handled smoothly my attempts to (for instance) bend the hanger, and gave me good hints when I tried to iron the clothes but didn’t have an iron yet.
“The rage meter too was completely useless.”
This was a core mechanic of the game — do you mean you thought it was a bad mechanic to have? Or that you felt like you didn’t have enough feedback about what it was doing? I’m not sure I understand the complaint, since it certainly was doing something in the game.
I vaguely remember some trouble with the hanger — I think I maybe tried “open hanger” first? Also the “How do I get the water from the jug into the radiator” problem was pretty annoying, though perhaps it was meant to be. I mean specifically that lbh unq gb fcraq fb znal gheaf erzbivat gur pnc sebz rirelguvat; V unq gubhtug gung gurer jrer rabhtu gheaf gb trg gur jngre vagb gur wht vs lbh erzbirq gur enqvngbe pnc orsber qbvat nalguvat, ohg ab “Gur pnc vf fgvyy ba gur wht.” But the game’s so short that it wasn’t much punishment to start over.
Also the response to “get X with Y” was very good.
For me, the rage meter ended up having no material effect on the game that I could discern. I forwent ironing my clothes, didn’t explore most of the house, and, as preacherjohnposits mentions below, fixed the car by carring the radiator round to the trunk. Maybe if I’d had to deal with the iron and the gum, too, I’d have had to worry about the rage meter. As it was, I got to work in good time but with rumpled clothing, thereby earning a modest raise. This seemed to me to be about as much as the PC deserved, so I didn’t play again to try to get to a better ending.
Great cartoon! –but what it describes is not “hate.”
Well, in a technical sense, no, I’d agree with you. But that’s what the cartoon calls it, and it’s a good representation of what’s going on in the game, no? Where the universe seems to be thwarting and irritating you at every turn, and your patience fails gradually?
The cartoon and the game are talking about the same thing, I feel, yes.
Although there’s an important difference in the two treatments. The cartoon amounts to a slightly shamefaced confession of the inability of the person, as a rational creature, to control their emotions.
The game, on the other hand, seems nearly to advocate the rage-a-holic mindset. Smashing the alarm clock is correct behavior; the game carefully defeats thinking solutions.
To my mind, this is why the cartoon is successfully entertaining and the game is not. Come to think of it, it’s probably more effective for the cartoonist to call it a hate spiral: although it’s inaccurate, the taboo against expressing hatred is much stronger, making the shameful/pained/funny response intenser.
The game, on the other hand, seems nearly to advocate the rage-a-holic mindset. Smashing the alarm clock is correct behavior; the game carefully defeats thinking solutions.
Yeeeah, though on the other hand you’re explicitly punished for being too upset, and if you completely lose it, the game is over. There’s a bit of a mixed message here.
It might be interesting if there were multiple puzzle solutions in each case, some “calm” and some “the type of solution used by a guy insane with rage”. And you could only use a puzzle solution that corresponded to your current state, so if you couldn’t think of the “calm” solution, you could wait to get annoyed enough to smash the alarm clock (say); but then you had to find a way to reduce your annoyance again…
But that would be an awful lot of work to put in unless the premise were also a bit more compelling.
Well, or if the different solutions altered the narrative in different ways. I tried to avoid smashing the alarm clock by putting it in the fridge. Let’s say that had worked: Now enter the roommate who wants to know why on Earth you’re putting an alarm clock in the fridge.
“Yeeeah, though on the other hand you’re explicitly punished for being too upset, and if you completely lose it, the game is over. There’s a bit of a mixed message here.”
You’re punished for not properly pampering yourself; never for acting on your rage.
I want to rant about this:
But, it’s my rant and probably doesn’t reflect most people’s experience of the game:
This thing that middle Americans do, where they expect everything to go their way, and to get what they want, and if they don’t they’ll be “frustrated” — because the cashier told them they can’t have what they want, and that “frustrates” them —
I observed to a friend of mine that her daughters were very committed to getting what they wanted, to getting it immediately, and if they didn’t they tended toward tantrum.
Her response surprised me: “As a mother, what do you think I should do?”
I said, “Inculcate the values of stoicism. Tell them that sometimes life won’t go well. It’s to be expected. There are times you have to be strong. Making things go well takes work.
“Then when they start complaining, tell them, Hey, this is it. This is what I told you about. Be strong.”
And this is why I don’t like the mindset _Heated_ portrays. Too damn sensitive.
Ok, rant over. As I say elsewhere, the author shows solid craftsmanship throughout. Just not to my taste.
I observed to a friend of mine that her daughters were very committed to getting what they wanted, to getting it immediately, and if they didn’t they tended toward tantrum.
I agree with you in finding entitled behavior fairly distasteful.
To my mind, that’s a slightly different thing from the stress one feels when one is trying to do something important and gets disrupted by fiddly problems: here it’s less “OMG I don’t deserve this WHY UNIVERSE WHY???” and more “oh, crap, I really really have to accomplish X and it just keeps getting harder and my failing to accomplish this is going to cause problems for others and augh…”. A lot of the Heated problems seemed to me to fall into the second category.
That said, the protagonist of Heated shows plenty of entitlement as well. It seems clear that he hasn’t done anything that actually warrants a raise and a promotion, but for some reason he believes (and the boss confirms) that it’s sufficient for him to show up to work in clean clothes for once. And that does make him a bit less sympathetic to me as a character — but then I didn’t find him a very attractive person to start with.
After Q. Pheevr pointed out to me that the radiator was (probably erroneously) not fixed in place, and you could carry it to the back of the car to fill it with water… I realized how this game’s concept (the part that most of us seem to have an issue with) could have immediately been improved with almost zero work: if, instead of being a normal person, the main character was simply The Hulk. Or someone who just believed they were the Hulk.
Agreed with you and Conrad about the “attack” verb being the solution for certain things (I believe the trunk also responded to this) while not interacting with the core mechanic at all. The idea of different puzzle solutions depending on rage level could have played out well. Or alternately, the violent solutions lowered your rage but gave a contrite response. Anything giving a better impression that the character was *knowingly* struggling with their own tendencies…