Reviews by MathBrush

Olaf Nowacki is a popular figure in both English and German IF, with games like Schief/Wry and Fischstäbchen/Eat the Eldritch having made a splash in past years.

This game is fairly small and compact but has a strong voice and characterization. I'd describe it as anti-capitalist and just anti-work in general.

You play as a worker being fired from their crummy job and bent on revenge. But the evidence you meticulously collected has been stolen by your boss!

You have to recover it, in the process overcoming a ludicrously anti-worker building and boss's lair (parts of which definitely reminded me of past jobs! I had a desk in a closet once) to defeat him.

There are multiple endings (with worse endings usually giving hints for better endings) and lots of funny commentary.

There are a couple of rough edges carried over from German; Forklift in German is Gabelstapler, which I thought was just a stapler when I first played, so I picked it up and tried to staple things with it (which makes for a very amusing picture in my mind, now). This version still lets you pick up the forklift, but I don't think I found any other errors.

I played and reviewed the Spanish version of this game before. When I play a game in another language, it has an air of mystique around it to me. Everything seems cooler when it's in another language. But it's harder.

Playing this game in English was an interesting change. It uses a lot of technobabble which was mostly incomprehensible when I played the Spanish version. Here I can understand it more, and turn a more critical eye on it. But the technobabble still holds up pretty well; the ideas used are at least plausible.

This game is about mind uploads. You don't know that at first; the game simulates a file system like DOS or command line Linux. Navigating the file structure, you discover that a war is wiping out humanity. You are going to die. A brain upload might be what saves you.

The majority of the game is piecing together what is going on through navigating the file system and finding older documents.

Along the way, the game uses interesting mechanics, including a simulated Inform parser (written entirely in Twine) and a cheeky towers of Hanoi (cheeky because it's a famously bad puzzle to put into an IF game, so much that several games mock the concept, like Wizard Sniffer that has a dumpster with towers of hanoi in it at the start. I don't mind it too much here).

This game is visually rich and has subtle details that can really throw you for a loop and more explicit text that will help you connect the dots (I'm thinking here of (Spoiler - click to show)checking the date before and after the upload. It gave me a realization that was later explicitly confirmed.

I liked it in Spanish, and I like it in English.

This was a solidly coded and enjoyable game that I found just slightly under-clued.

In it, you play as someone who gets drawn into an interview to become the assistant to a word wizard, or semantagician. The interview is a locked room puzzle. You're locked in the room, and need to get out. But there's not even a door!

Your tools consist of a few objects you can find laying around in addition to a half-dozen or so implements that can alter words. Some of these are easy to figure out (like a 'sawing in half' table, although that one had a catch I didn't quite get at first), while others are pretty obtuse (like the chimera box).

Helping you along the way is a cute rabbit named Weldon who can answer your questions.

The puzzles here are fun and funny. I liked how there were a lot of animals in the game but, instead of implementing lots of details about animal sound and behavior, etc., there was a lot of discussion about how these aren't real but simulacra, and the strange implications that has philosophically.

I had a great time with the puzzles, but I did get lost pretty often. In a way, that became the puzzle. I did consult the walkthrough because I never thought of how to handle the robe. Opening it, I saw the solution to a couple of later things ahead of time.

I wonder if it could have used a little more guidance here and there. On the other hand, it's a small, constrained environment and not too long a game, so there's some wiggle room on how clear it needs to be. I guess it comes down to player preference. If you want a puzzle game and not have your hand held (but still have some hints in-game), this is great for you.

I like Penthesileia by the same author, so I was looking forward to this.

This is an intense love triangle (actually more like a incomplete love tetrahedron) in a fantasy story. You, a man, have heard about the return of your childhood crush who was called to be 'the hero'. But he and your sister also had a relationship, and it's hard to have your crush so close and see what's going on and not be part of it.

Later on, someone else is thrown into the mix, a fourth option that provides intense love but comes with immense, pretty awful baggage.

The fantasy story provides the framing and is essential to the nature of the fourth character, but all other aspects of this story could work in almost any setting. It's about essential aspects of human nature: love, obsession, hope, despair, jealousy.

There are some options that felt significant, but I only played once so I don't know if they have an effect on the overall story (it's okay if not, they were good for roleplaying).

The game had some strong profanity, which I muted with a filter. It is a queer love story and has drama but does not (I think?) contain homophobia. Someone else who has played can feel free to correct me, but I had the impression that the relationships were dangerous and felt illicit but not because of homophobia, but because someone else had loved them first. Still, all gay relationships are treated as secret so it's hard to say (I'm only including this part because I know some people have a preference in how the world setting treats gay relationships).

I like this author's writing style in general and look forward to future games.

While I was playing this game, I thought, “This almost feels like if someone went out of their way to antagonize as many people as possible by doing everything people on the forum hate.” Later on, I started to wonder if that might actually be true, since the game is ‘meta’.

First, this is a windows downloadable executable, which, outside of uncompiled python code, is typically the least-played out of all IF formats. Unlike Steam, where windows executables are king. many IF players and authors use Linux or Macs and can’t run windows exe’s easily. A big attraction of IF is the ability to have it running in the background during other tasks, able to start and stop it at will, but executables are full screen. Also, unlike Steam, there aren’t really any safety guarantees that exe’s won’t give you viruses.

Second, this game uses timed text in perhaps its most devious form: text in a typewriter font that is slightly slower than average reading speed, but very quickly moves on to the next passage once done, with no back button and no history option. There is a pause button. If you look away from the game for a conversation or to check the stove and forget to pause, you’ll have to start over.

Third, the game picks your choices for you. The controls for much of the game do nothing, with the cursor moving itself and picking what it wants. There is no agency in these portions.

But, the game does address these things! Kind of. You see, the game is a scene, like in a play or movie, and you are the ‘player’ in the audience. Eventually, you get the option to protest what is going on and to deride the lack of agency. I eventually consented to an option to ‘erase’ the game, and got one ending.

So, it’s a clear commentary on the nature of agency in games. While I dislike all of the choices listed above, I’m glad the game is self aware and that everything is done intentionally. Sometimes it’s okay to do unpopular things to make a personal statement you care about. Also I liked the art style, it reminded me of the witches in Madoka Magica.

Penny Nichols, Troubleshooter

This game consists of instructions to an AI on how to run a game for a human player.

I was excited to see this, because I've often thought when playing an AI-generated game: "I bet the prompt the author used would be so much more interesting than the output I have to read." And here I had the prompt itself!

So I tried playing it twice. In the first, I made myself both player and DM. Instead of AI, I used it as a writing prompt as I explored what might happen with these characters and this setting. I had a lot of fun; I usually struggle to write more than 300 words at a time and 1000 in a day, but I got up to 2270 words in less than an hour. I relied heavily on cliches and tropes but I liked the setting and concept.

I then plugged it into Copilot. Copilot made it look fancier and was much, much faster. Parts of it were interesting and fun to read. It was much more fast paced than my own transcript, and I had been trying to go fast myself. Amusingly, we used a lot of the same cliches and tropes. Where I was most disappointed is that, where I had tried hard to spool out the mysteries and fill in the backstories and characters, the AI just gave away half of the secrets in the first few paragraphs and mostly ignored my companion characters and almost all of the backstory. I felt like it wasn't really making use of the extensive mechanics sheet and was more just giving a series of climactic scenes without real buildup or denouement. It makes me feel like I couldn't personally rely on an LLM to follow my instructions if I were to make such a game myself.

Interesting concept, very glad I just got the prompt instead of having to suffer through pre-generated pages and pages of boring prose and instead got to write my own pages of boring prose.

A Conversation in a Dark Room

This is an author's first game, but is well-polished and has multiple endings and engaging dialogue.

You play as a man hired to be involved in a death. You meet a man in a dark bar late at night, and the two of you have an in-depth conversation. You are a reporter, but it's not clear that you'll be doing any reporting tonight. This seems more intimate. Your counterpart is old and wealthy, very wealthy in fact.

The story is split into three chapters, two of which are in the same location. Mechanically, you have three different stats that you can increase, which the game helpfully clarifies with some about text early on and popups when a stat goes up. Depending on your stats, you can get one of five different endings.

I think this is a promising start and that this author has hurdled over many of the mistakes new authors make.

There were a couple of things that would have enhanced or changed my experience.

While I just recently posted a review praising a different game for slow text, which I usually detest, my experience with this game was a return to form. On chapter titles and a few other select screens, text is spooled out painfully slowly. There are usually two reasons, I suspect, that people use slow text:

One, they want to control the experience of the reader by emphasizing important lines or moments. Many times I believe this is due to a lack of confidence in the power of static organization. Paragraph breaks, fonts, font size, and page breaks naturally provide a pacing for text that has been used effectively for thousands of years (like the elaborate capitals in illustrated manuscripts). At times, slowing down can provide drama by keeping the most interesting tidbits to the end, but in this case it was just regular text that was slowed down.

Second, some people slow down text for cinematic effect, to be like a movie. I think that can be used appropriately (Ryan Veeder uses a nice intro technique in some of his Little Match Girl games), but I personally appreciate it better when it's part of an overall audiovisual strategy and not the only movie-like element used.

So I downloaded the game and edited the code to speed it up. One good rule of thumb is that, if you have trouble sitting through slow text while playing your game (and everyone should play their game while writing it), the player won't enjoy it either.

The second thing is that I found it a little difficult to strategize the different paths of the game. The stats are genius, and they already provide branching and replay value, but I often found it hard to figure out what the effect of each choice would have on stats. I personally would have found it more fun to be more clear.

But these all are just my opinions; there's no one true way to write games, so I offer this as only my own account of my game experience.

As a final side note, I don't drink, but see it a lot in media, and I was pretty surprised by the drink count of my character by the end of the game. I took one drink early on, and after that they ended up pounding down seven drinks in the night, were then invited over for whiskey, and, in one ending, propose going to another bar. I checked and it looks like that amount of drinking can get a lot of people blackout drunk, and is pretty high above the bar for 'binge drinking', so I wonder if our character is a hardcore alcoholic or is going to have a really bad day tomorrow. Both are completely appropriate for this game, so this is not a criticism, it was just fascinating to learn more about drinking culture.

This game really spoke to me. It reminded me quite a bit of the last year of my marriage in an introspective, helpful way (outside of the creating an AI to help me work through things).

Like the blurb says, this game was written "On the making of your very own artificial general intelligence, and how to live — or not live — with it."

It is in three acts. The first has a portion mimicking a command-line interface and an AI that you are training. The second and third branch out into a more natural-looking interface as your program develops.

There are a lot of fancy styling techniques going on, from hover-over hints, slow typed-out text, the aforementioned interfaces, blacked out text that you have to hover over, images with different expressions.

The whole game (outside a bit of memories and intro) is a conversation between you and the AI you created as both of you try to figure out your place in the world. It is a romance, or, more accurately, the topics of conversation are about relationships.

I noticed that this is one of the last games to be reviewed. I think two possible reasons might be that the game mentions AI, perhaps giving the impression that generative AI was used (it might have been, but I don't think so; this is just a story about a fictional AI), and the game uses slow-typed text.

I usually hate slow-typed text and have gone on rants about it before, but I didn't mind it quite as much here, especially since I could often get the next line started before the first had finished typing, and I could read them in parallel, which was kind of fun. Also the small scope and lush nature of the game made it feel reasonable and even enjoyable.

Overall, I thought this was well done, and it resonated with me personally more than most games in the comp so far (which is completely subjective, and may not be everyone's experience).

Penthesilea

This is a short twine story about a near-future authoritarian regime where you are wife to one of the highest officials in the nation. And you are a perfectly obedient wife, your husband telling you what to say, what to eat, what to do.

But something's wrong in this strange world, and you find yourself with the capability to resist.

The setting is reminiscent of 1984 (it feels to me like an older time's vision of a dystopian future) and the setup of the regime vs the rebels reminded me of Hunger Games in the way the rich are portrayed. There are some references to Greek mythology for the names, but I didn't see a clear connection between the Greek figure and this game's story, so I think it's just for flavor.

There is interesting interaction in the game, enough that I played twice (once obedient, once rebellious) and there is some non-linearity in the scenes. I found the quality of the writing and the plot structure to be enjoyable, and so I look forward to the other two games by this author. There is some strong profanity.

This is one of several games entered into this competition translated from other languages, in this case Spanish, although I didn't see it entered in any Spanish competitions in the past year, so it is fresh to me.

This game consists of three vignettes set in Israel, America, and Palestine.

Before going into deeper spoilers, I'll mention the general idea of each section. In the first, you wake up in Tel Aviv where darkness has completely covered the sky. You can investigate by walking through different neighborhoods of Tel Aviv and hope to discover the truth.

In the second, you are Donald Trump, waking up in Mar-a-Lago after a night of excess.

In the third, you are a father in Gaza, and it is your daughter's birthday.

The game is explicitly political with some clear messages but parts are open to interpretation.

With more spoiler detail:

I received less than half of the possible points in the game, which are given for exploration, so I likely missed out on some interesting chunks.

One notable line that stood out to me:

While parts of it are clear wish fulfillment (literally) with fantasies shared by millions, the other parts are sad reflections of war. (Spoiler - click to show)The daughter, living in a world of starvation and death, caused by her enemies, now sees her enemies as inhuman and deserving of torture and death, perpetuating the endless cycle of hatred. It's a sad commentary.