Trust & Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot - Innovations

Innovations

The game had several unconventional features. For instance, it featured an inverse parser, a method for constructing sentences out of words while only presenting words that make sense for the given context. It also placed some emphasis on facial expressions as a visual form of feedback. It even had a primitive form of tooltips: if the player clicks and holds the mouse button on an icon (the game's abstraction of a word), one can see its meaning. The number of icons is small enough, and the pictures intuitive enough, that they can quickly be committed to memory. It also featured "interstitial stories", interludes that appear through the game that present the user with one of several choices, some of which may affect the game. For instance, to use an actual example from the game, if game designer Chris Crawford appears and lectures the player, and the player responds "Go to hell, Crawford!", then he or she loses some favor among the other characters, making the game harder to win.