The Sound Of One Hand Clapping - Author Erica Sadun (Text adventure, part of SynTax Disk 840) Reviewed by James Judge on a 486sx "Think thou subtle thoughts As does the clever dragon In quiet circles" Yee-es. Well, when a game has an opening phrase like that you know you're going to be in for something different. All this Chinese mumbo jumbo - Zen gardens, Yin Yang symbols, Taoistic sayings, number 22s with a side serving of noodles - makes very little sense to me, being a bit of an unsubtle person. So, how did I get on with a game whose title is a conundrum that's meant to take the most wise man years to contemplate? Not very well, is the honest truth. In the game you play the part of Ginseng. Who he is and what he does has been left completely out of the picture, unless I have missed something. And I thought Ginseng was a type of tea... You start the game in a clearing not very far away from a temple. When you come across it you are challenged by an ageing priestess to "...enter the World Beyond and to restore the hope that has been lost". You must "walk gently lest you miss-step and imperil those who do not dare to lose their last link to life". What that basically means is that if you accept this challenge you'll be whisked away to another world where you must solve a number of tasks to gain coins which can then be deposited in a fountain which is at the centre of the game world. The coins are obtainable by interacting (subtly, of course) with a number of different coloured Dragons who have been called to this world. After you have collected the coins I presume that you then go ahead and defeat the evil Black Dragon, but I haven't got that far yet. It was at this point where I shouted 'where's me sword?' and intended my foray into this world to be brief and bloody. Unfortunately, this being a peaceful, subtle game, swords are not deemed to be all THAT subtle. Dunno why, they get the job done, but we'll just have to play by the rules, won't we? In fact this game is a very laid back game which has you wanting to reach for certain (illegal) calming substances and uttering 'hey man, chill out. It's all so... so... blue, man. Yeah, peace'. The first thing that strikes you in this game is that the descriptions of each location are very long, man . To read the description of your opening location takes a while and describes a lot of things that can't be interacted with, such as a kill (according to the game a kill is kind of a stream) winding around a boulder and all the different kinds of flora and fauna that can be found about it. That's all well and good, but then for every examine command you get you're told it's part of the scenery. Personally this approach to text adventures really annoy me. After wading through lines and lines of meaningless text and spending five minutes trying to examine every single noun mentioned in the text you find out you are, in fact, in an empty location. For me the ideal opening description would have been "You're in a field with a stream. You can go west, man". Ignoring this extremely verbose manner in which the game world is described, what are the puzzles like? Well, they seem to be bordering on the surreal, for me. I have been stuck for ages in this game and it was only with the hints printed in SynTax a couple of issues ago that I actually progressed any further and am now stuck about half way through the game... The puzzles are object oriented puzzles with you giving something to someone or dropping a particular item in a certain room. This sounds fine, but until I actually stumbled across the solution to a particular puzzle there was no clues (for me) that led towards the correct solution. In retrospect, the puzzles seem logical, but that's looking at everything from behind and not being actually confronted with the puzzles. Being plonked in this (relatively) small game world with very few clues as to where to go next was very disconcerting and I ended up trawling through every location pouring through all of the text trying to look for that elusive hint or clue that might lead the way to enlightenment. Most of the hints, though, are given through meditative thought. There are very few bugs that I can see - just the ones stated in the actual game and in one room I found that a coin wasn't mentioned in the description. The parser for the game is very particular. You must specify each object with its full name (such as Goldfish Figurine) and a lot of commands just don't have any response whatsoever. So, given the length of the text, the slightly strange puzzles and finicky parser did I enjoy the game, as far as I have got? The truth is, not really. The reason for this is mainly due to the very ornate room descriptions. The author obviously has a very good grasp of the English language and is not scared to utilise it in her games. The trouble with this is that I want action, I want puzzles, I don't want to be told about a lot of things that aren't really there - it's like being shown a really great scene through a glass wall; you can't interact with any of it. This level of verbosity and Chinese overtones has soured my opinion of the game from the word go and I have not really been able to get truly into the game. Maybe if I shaved my head, carted my computer to the top of the nearest mountain and played it while saying 'ohm' every three seconds while balancing on my left leg with my right arm behind my back and dressed in an orange robe I would have been able to enter into the spirit of things. But sitting here in my chair with my cat lazing beside me and Metallica blasting out of my hi-fi I can't seem to get into the game at all. If you are looking for a different adventure - one which poses good, but slightly off the mark, puzzles, described in some of the most elegant English you are liable to find in a game (and from an American!) - then this is one to go for. Maybe not for the newbie adventurer, but anyone who has a couple of adventures under their belt should be able to get their teeth into this, as long as they can appreciate the atmosphere and text descriptions which I, sadly, could not. A good game which, for me, was spoiled by the unity of overly long room descriptions and a pernickety parser. Can't wait for the next game, though - One Cymbal Crashing. "Think thou subtle thoughts, man 'Coz, like, the dragon does it an' e's a clever dude, man But do it in, like, those quiet circles, man " - o -