As with Dr Froth’s previous Quest game – the IFComp entry Gathered In Darkness – Cabin Fever is a huge step up from the average Quest game. All the items mentioned in the location description can be examined, there are precious few (though still more than I would liked) spelling mistakes and the whole thing comes across as a proper game such as might have been written with any other IF system. It certainly seems light years removed from the last few Quest games I played. It even has an honest to God introduction.

There are problems with every game, but the ones here are relatively minor in the scheme of things. The default font colour has been set to green, which is every bit as nasty in Quest as it in Adrift. Fortunately it’s possible to override it and set it to something slightly less nauseating. As mentioned above, there are spelling mistakes, but thankfully relatively few. The ones I encountered stuck out more because of how rare they were, but at least the author has at least taken the time to give his game a proofread or two. The only real flaw in game design is, unfortunately, one that affected the author’s previous game as well: namely the location description which is displayed the first time isn't the same one as shown when you type LOOK. This time, only one relevant item is actually missed out, but as this is one that is needed to be referred to in order to make any real progress, it’s still a definite flaw. My usual style of play, particularly in games that have room descriptions which stretch to more than a line or two, is to briefly glance over the description then start randomly trying things out, examining items and opening and closing stuff, to see what’s what. When the room description has scrolled off the screen, I bash LOOK to bring it back up and carry on from there. By the time I ran out of things to do and was reaching the head-scratching stage, I’d completely forgotten all mention of the closet in the initial description and didn’t see it until, after remembering the author pulling a similar trick in his other game, I scrolled back up through a dozen or more screens of text and found what I was after. As far as I'm concerned, LOOK should *always* display the full room description; a cut down version just isn't the same unless everyone playing the game happens to be blessed with a photographic memory.

But those are all pretty minor points in the scheme of things. On the positive side, and by positive I mean REALLY REALLY POSITIVE, is the fact that – finally! – someone has decided to write a Quest game and disable the side panels. Hooray! Of all the things in Quest that I dislike, the side panels are top of the list. Actually, they occupy the second and third places on the list as well, which goes to show just how much I dislike them. While they sometimes contain potentially useful information, they also make authors lazy and they're something of an eyesore. I particularly dislike playing a text adventure where most of the commands seem to be actionable by dragging one word and dropping it on the other. That isn't a text adventure. It’s a graphical game with text. So well done to an author for disabling them. Hopefully he won’t be the last one to do so.

Dr Froth has a tendency to overwrite, or, rather, to write a little *too* dramatically for the subject matter in hand. I remember a phrase from Gathered In Darkness where I was told that the player’s “scream was murdered by his fear”. Granted, that was a darker game by far than this and the overly dramatic writing suited it better than it does here. In Cabin Fever, when the player trips over and a jigsaw box goes flying and the pieces scatter across the floor, we’re treated to such a wildly over the top description of it that you could be forgiven for thinking that an event of world-shattering proportions had just occurred. But no, the player just dropped a jigsaw.

The bulk of the game after this involves the finding of the various jigsaw pieces. Not a terrible puzzle by itself, but it becomes a little tedious in that it involves examining things you’ve probably already examined beforehand. Before I found and dropped the jigsaw, I’d been over pretty much every part of the game’s single location (yes, it’s a one room game) looking for a means to make progress and now I found myself faced with a puzzle that effectively had me going over the same territory again. This time I had a purpose whereas before I was just searching for a purpose, but it still felt like I was repeating myself.

While the early part of the game, there are few bugs, or nothing that could really be counted as a bug. Unfortunately, bugs begin to creep into the later parts. The room description is often replaced by the last action the player carried out, thus concealing pretty much everything you want to look at and the only way to recall what’s right before your eyes is to use the ever handy scrolling back up the screen trick. When you're expected to find items by examining everything you can see, this makes an already frustrating puzzle even more of a chore.

For the earlier part of the game, the puzzles were fairly simple and straightforward. The later ones were less so, and were often made unnecessarily complicated by the guess the verb problems and the game not allowing what I would have thought were perfectly acceptable solutions to puzzles. The puzzles seem to have only one way to complete them and that way isn't always the first one you'll think of. At one point I have to put out a fire which is burning. I'm in a cabin which is surrounded by snow so the logical thing to do would, in my opinion, be to open the door, grab some snow and use that to extinguish the flames. Alas, the game disagrees. Opening the door just repeats the same description from before; it doesn’t allow me to take any of the snow outside. More annoyingly, this very same description indicates that a block of ice has been thrown into the cabin but as this was obviously a one time event, despite it being possible to be informed of it multiple times, the ice isn't something that can be used for putting out the flames. As for guess the verb problems…

What should have been a relatively simple task involving retrieving a jigsaw piece from a crack in the floor instead became a nightmare. It’s one of those puzzles where you know what needs to be done to solve it, but getting the syntax exactly right can have you tearing your hair out. It’s like, for example, the correct phrase required to open a door is OPEN THE DOOR. While the parser should understand that OPEN DOOR, UNLOCK DOOR, OPEN DOOR WITH KEY and so on and so forth mean the same as OPEN THE DOOR, the game simply won’t let you open the door unless you manage to hit upon the exact phrase. The puzzles here are further complicated by Quest’s stubborn refusal to admit that I had items which I knew full well were in my possession:

> GET PIECE
YOU NEED TO FIND A WAY TO LIFT THE PUZZLE PIECE CLOSER TO THE FLOOR BEFORE YOU WILL BE ABLE TO TAKE IT.

> STICK GUM TO LINE
YOU DO NOT HAVE WHAT YOU NEED TO ACCOMPLISH THAT.

> ATTACH GUM TO LINE
YOU DO NOT HAVE WHAT YOU NEED TO ACCOMPLISH THAT.

> TIE GUM TO LINE
I CAN'T SEE THAT HERE.

> TIE LINE TO GUM
I CAN'T SEE THAT HERE.

> PUT LINE IN CRACK
YOU CAN'T PUT THAT THERE.

> PUT FINGERS IN CRACK
YOU DON'T HAVE THAT.

> REACH INTO CRACK
I DON'T UNDERSTAND YOUR COMMAND. TYPE HELP FOR A LIST OF VALID COMMANDS.

> GET PIECE WITH FISHING LINE
I CAN'T SEE THAT HERE.

> GET PIECE WITH LINE
I CAN'T SEE THAT HERE.

> USE LINE TO GET PIECE
YOU DON'T HAVE THAT.

> USE FISHING LINE TO GET PIECE
YOU DON'T HAVE THAT.

> USE LINE
YOU PULL THE SOPPING WET, STICKY MUSH OUT OF YOUR MOUTH AND WRAP IT AROUND THE END OF THE FISHING LINE. THIS WILL BE HANDY IF YOU DROP YOUR CAR KEYS THROUGH ONE OF THE CRACKS IN THE FLOOR OR SOMETHING.

Better worded error messages would have been a positive boon here. Being told that neither the jigsaw piece nor the fishing line are here when I know full well they are is a problem. Being told I don’t have the fishing line when it’s right there in my inventory is even more of one. To make matters even worse, Quest seems to produce misleading error messages when a command is entered that it doesn’t understand. When I tried to stick the gum to the line, I'm guessing it didn’t understand the word “stick”, yet rather than simply tell me that it implies I don’t have the necessary items.

Overall I felt my character’s motivations in finding the pieces and putting the final part of the jigsaw together seemed a little hard to swallow at times. To begin with, they're reasonable enough. You're stuck in a cabin in a snow storm and the jigsaw provides a way to pass a few hours of time. But later, when sinister things are afoot and it seems my very life might be in danger, the idea that I'm still more interested in putting the jigsaw together than trying to save myself just struck me as wrong. When I start seeing and hearing things that can’t possibly be happening, my first inclination is to run like heck and get out of there… not stick around and have one last crack at that darn jigsaw puzzle. At the very least, the game should have stopped me leaving the cabin with an excuse better than it’s not very nice weather out there. No, it’s not. But I'm likely to die if I stay here so surely a bit of snow isn't all that bad by comparison…?

I won’t say whether Cabin Fever has a happy ending or not as indicating what happens right at the end would spoil the nice little twist in the tale, though the identity of the person in the jigsaw is hinted at pretty strongly and it’s not hard to imagine that something unpleasant is lurking not too far ahead. All in all, I think I preferred Gathered in Darkness to Cabin Fever, but this certainly ranks as the second best Quest game I've played.

6 out of 10

Operation Sleepover also disabled the side panels.

Really? I remember playing that one but don't remember the side panels being disabled. Then again, it's a while since I played that game.