Aneel reviewed Twisty Little Passages by Nick Montfort
Review of 'Twisty Little Passages' on 'Goodreads'
1 star
Sadly, I found this rather dull. It's literary criticism about Infocom-style text adventure games. Because this is a pretty new field (the games have been around for decades, but apparently nobody has given them a serious critical reading), the author spends a good deal of time just defining terms and providing a history of the genre.
Montfort spends an early chapter arguing that text adventure games are descendants of riddles, a more established literary form. This seems to be the meaty idea in the book, but I felt it wasn't very well-developed. Perhaps I'm just not used to reading criticism, but it seemed like he was constantly telling the reader about the point he was about to make, rather than making the point.
I'm tempted to play a bunch of the recent works he describes. I didn't get much more out of the book than that, though.