In Facade, I was most impressed by what, by the standards of contemporary games, were least impressive: the graphics and the music. I enjoyed wandering around a 3D environment in which I was expected to talk to other characters, rather than kill them; I liked the way the music came in at certain dramatic moments. But I found everything else about the game rather irritating.
Facade has some severe interface problems. I join in the conversation by typing what I want to say; I'm not a slow typist, but I often couldn't keep up. The feedback from the interface is poor: I don't hear my own words (making the conversation sound like one side of a telephone call), and I had little idea of whether what I typed was accepted or understood. The parser is called on to understand a lot, but seems to understand little; I ended up doing an Eliza and typing random keywords in the hope they would be picked up. Perhaps, as with an Infocom-style IF parser, I have to learn how to interact with it, but I didn't have the patience. In a game ostensibly "designed to be replayed", I have to restart to play again, and sit through another minute of loading and begging screens. This doesn't encourage me to experiment.
Least encouraging of all was the actual content of the game. Story and characters were not in the least compelling; playing the game was like being trapped in a bad soap opera. As soon as Grace and Trip started arguing, my instinct was to run for the door. A touchy-feely game about relationships must be more "mature" than a dungeon crawl or 3D shooter, I suppose, but after two minutes with these characters I was begging for a shotgun.
Wisely, most of the praise for Facade either ignores the content of the work, or brushes it off with a few polite compliments, concentrating instead on the shiny interface and the struts and girders in the background. Essentially, Facade is just a facade; an interface and story generator with no content to interface with and no story to generate. It's an impressive, empty edifice, an elaborate museum of nothing.
Maybe there is some advanced and nifty story-generating concept behind the game. I don't know, and futhermore, I'm not interested, and furthermore, I don't see why I should be interested. I have little time for the school of IF criticism, or indeed the school of IF, that concentrates first and foremost on form and technique. These critics and writers restrict their interest to the surface structure and the machinery behind the scenes. Their approach is both too superficial and too deep; they miss the work itself somewhere in the middle. For them, mechanical gimmicks and technical innovations are more important than content; what matter are tools and technique, and not what you do with them.
Even when game content -- story, writing, ideas -- is discussed, talk is generally confined to the technical side. First or second person narration? Past or present tense? How do I develop this theme through interaction? What is the best way to express this idea? Such talk reflects, and contributes to, the common belief that it is often sufficient to describe your hypothetical game, instead of actually writing it.
There are many reasons why we make a fetish of form and technique in the IF world. The first is the historical nature of the medium itself. For a long time, IF games were content-free puzzleboxes, from the original Adventure, to Zork and its clones. The idea that a game might actually be about something arrived fairly late on the scene, and was still controversial well into the 90s. The second is the course of development of amateur IF. The annual competition became the only venue to get new games noticed, and the competition is restricted to short games. Its format encourages fleshed-out gimmicks, brief technical experiments. And finally, there is that small group of IF people who have consciously infected themselves with Pomo virus. For one who believes the author is dead, there is no distinction between form and content, between art and technique. The IF writer is a technician, working with pre-rendered parts, assembling them according to some pre-packaged "style" picked off the shelf. Expression is impossible and content is a chimaera.
I'm getting fed up of IF experiments. Too many games are tarted-up hypotheses, tested on a captive audience; the feedback is examined, a few things are tweaked here and there, and the process is iterated. "It's an experiment" is a fairly easy defence for game with no interesting content, and one I have decreasing patience for. I suppose it's more admirable to release an experiment than merely to talk about it, but there's only so much guinea pig treatment a player can take.