Reviews by ccpost

This is an earnest, vulnerable game with a powerful message. The game proceeds as the player progresses through a series of quietly despairing and distressing episodes -- passing by boarded up shops, realizing that a coworker is living at the office, being beset with bills. The player struggles to keep up a positive outlook on life until (Spoiler - click to show)a friend visits them and helps them to enter back into the world.

This is a kernel of what could be a very affecting game, though I had a few issues that kept me from fully engaging. Primary among these, even for a relatively short game, the structure got to feeling repetitive: most pages have a few sentences of text with a linked word that expands the text with some observation and then a link at the end of the passage that moves to the next passage. This effect works for the first few passages, creating a sense of inundation with the distressing events encountered, but the structure doesn't change much as the narrative turns. Even a slight change in the structure would signal a shift in the player's perspective.

While there are some interesting bits of writing throughout the game -- for instance, the observation that floors of the player's apartment are so weathered that 'a sparrow landing on the floors would likely make them creak' -- a lot of the language is generic and ungrounded. I never get a sense of any of the characters' personality, voice, or perspective beyond the broadest strokes.

I very much enjoyed the game and appreciate the message greatly, but was left wanting more.

Nose Bleed is an unsettling short IF work that explores the themes of social anxiety and debilitating self-doubt through an interesting conceit: you've got a nosebleed and, no matter what you do, it won't go away. The nosebleed quickly escalates from nuisance to horrific, and there's some strange, almost disembodied descriptions of your attempts to lick, rub, and ignore the blood seeping from your orifice.

The game is written in a Twine-like system (update: actually, it's written in TextureWriter, a system I'm not familiar with; but this game has the feel of a classic Twine game), but has a neat game mechanic to advance the story. Rather than clicking on links, the player is presented with 2-3 verbs in boxes at the bottom of the screen and drags them around to a corresponding word or phrase on the page. This helps to reinforce the tension of wanting to take control of the situation -- the verb that you're grabbing -- and the helplessness of inability, as any attempt to avert or address the situation inevitably results in only worsening the situation.

The player character's nosebleed is soon noticed by a coworker and, once the PC is shuttled to a company event, their nosebleed becomes an embarrassing distraction for everyone. While I found the plot intriguing -- and definitely effective in communicating the main themes of the work -- this is ultimately where I felt Nose Bleed was not fully realized. The office job setting where the nosebleed starts out is very generic and not described in any specific detail. The narrator's internal monologue likewise feels underdeveloped and lacking a lived-in tone or voice.

In part, the work is going for a surreal vibe and does not want to place the story in a fully realistic setting -- this is something like a nightmare, a vision of a hell. In that respect, this work reminded me a lot of Andrew Plotkin's Shade -- but Shade is so effectively precisely because the surreal nightmarish elements settle in over a concretely realized apartment. If Nose Bleed had a fully realized character and setting, the monstrous nosebleed that serves as an externalization of social anxiety and self-doubt would be even more powerful.

I absolutely love this game. I've been exploring more and more Choice of Games as I really like their balance of game-like elements (navigating characters through difficult situations to 'unlock' achievements and build up stats) and rich storytelling. Choice of Robots is a perfect example of an incredibly engaging story that you feel like you're playing through and shaping with your choices.

That story, of a disgruntled graduate student who invents a sentient robot and proceeds to alter the world forever, is finely crafted. Gold presents a thought-provoking sci-fi parable in which the reader gets to play out various scenarios (grand but plausible, in the way of a good sci-fi novel) starting from the premise of the invention of a truly sentient robot. The player can seek fame, fortune, power, etc. but can also be more insular and develop the robot as a thing of beauty and a companion. Even a single playthrough of the game presents a sweeping narrative that spans decades and sees seismic transformations in global society. The game carries the player through many poignant and troubling situations that ask us to consider the implications of many trajectories that we're currently on in society. The fact that this is but one branch of a many-branched story adds to the grandeur. Just scrolling through the achievements gives the player a sense of the many, many different possibilities to explore.

I died relatively early on in my first play through -- (Spoiler - click to show)Tammy got me!. The risk of death was surprising as all the other Choice of Games that I've played have not featured those dead ends, or at least not that I've found. But I actually appreciated the risk that that introduced -- and the subsequent gravity this lent to my choices as I played through the game a second time. For the titles that Choice of Games publishes, there may be some company style guidelines that prohibit too many dead ends like this, but I'd be interested to see more ChoiceScript games explore more game-like structures that have dead ends or less optimal game ending states.

The non-player characters also seem well developed, though I didn't choose to invest much in personal relationships -- aside from remembering to call my Mom every so often! Rather, I focused more on the relationship with the robot, as this was the most intriguing to delve into, given the nature and theme of the game. The game does reward this probing of the inventor-robot relationship and presents it in full complexity and complication. Do you position yourself as a godlike creator, the inventor of a tool (or weapon), an artist, a parent, a friend? All of these shades and nuances are explored in the game, and I imagine that an understanding of this relationship would be deepened even further on replays.

Overall, this game is a wonderful expression of the possibilities of choice-based interactive fiction. The story is foregrounded -- and players are rewarded for engaging with the story at the level of narrative, structure, and style -- but this story is driven by gameplay.

This is a rich, fully-realized work of long-form interactive fiction. In the game, you play as a 'plague doctor,' just arriving at a town stricken by a mysterious illness that keeps those afflicted from ever falling asleep -- slowly and gruesomely dying in a kind of waking nightmare. The world and story have elements of medieval period fiction, fantasy, and horror but it's really something all its own. Along with two other plague doctors, you navigate the sickness along with a web of other social and political issues. The story never strays from the town, Thornback Hollow, but this setting becomes a prism for looking out onto a much larger world.

Even though Parrish had been writing this for a couple years before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, that was of course fully the context in which I was playing this game. It's actually really amazing that this was written before the pandemic for how many resonances I noticed with the Waking Death plague. The doctors confront challenges like clearly communicating medical truth about the plague, even if it conflicts with local customs. (Spoiler - click to show) Toward the end of the game, when the doctors are able to develop and administer a vaccine, the scene of dealing with the townspeople's uncertainty and anxiety with the inoculation mirrors real-world vaccination debates. Among other takeaways, this game provides powerful insights into the effects of a pandemic on the psychic fabric of a community.

There are some really interesting choices driving the forking narratives of the game, largely balancing efforts to combat the plague against other pressing issues like competing religious factions and various sources of political unrest. Another interesting array of choices come from how you decide to approach the plague, ranging from coldly scientific to mystic and magical. This thoroughly developed body of medical theory and knowledge felt distinct and native to the storyworld and not just a rehashing of medieval medicine. I personally embraced the mysticism route and found it really rewarding.

My only critique of the game stems more from personal preference than anything inherently wrong with the game itself. Based on what I had read before starting the game, I was expecting this to be more of a horror story. While there was an eeriness pervading the game and some mildly spooky scenes, the game is not predominantly a horror story. The Waking Death definitely felt like a threat throughout the game, but it never came across to me as unsettling or chilling as it might have in a through and through horror story.

That said, this is a great game offering a substantial and engrossing story.

I played this game shortly after howling dogs, as I was absolutely blown away by that game and wanted to play more of Porpentine's works. It's perhaps not fair to review this work in comparison to the other, though there are significant similarities and differences between the two. Both feature incredibly visceral and beautiful writing, and both integrate seemingly discrete episodes that mix the surreal and familiar into a broader whole. The main difference is that the episodes in howling dogs revolve around and return to a central location, which lends the game a certain coherence, while their angelical understanding is more meandering, without a clear sense of how one visionary scene connects to the next.

Despite the lack of a strong connecting through-line, their angelical understanding does have a driving core message that comes across powerfully even through the somewhat elliptical language and the often outright bizarre scenes. Ultimately, this is a story of the player-character grappling with abuse -- both the abuser and friends and family members who enable the abuse. The end of the game presents a simple but insidious gameplay mechanic that forces the player to grapple with how to confront this devastating situation.

While the game leading up to this final encounter does not quite cohere for me, each episode in and of itself is brilliant. Throughout, there are many examples of inventive uses of links and text manipulation to achieve different aesthetic effects. In some cases, a whole game could be built around what's essentially a one-off experiment in this game. While some of the scenes work better than others, there are several moments that rise to a level of true horror that I felt deep in my body. Perhaps the most haunting being (Spoiler - click to show)the cottage where countless hands fall to the floor. Contrasting with the surreal horror, there are the even more horrifying moments of a cleanly rendered domestic scene in which people in another room are ignoring abuse in the adjoining room.

This is definitely not a game to approach lightly, but if you're prepared to engage -- both directly and obliquely -- with themes of abuse and self-harm, their angelical understanding is a remarkable game.

When I finished this game, I was left absolutely speechless. I sat at my computer, just sort of letting the experience soak in. I finished the game a few weeks ago, and I'm still trying to gather my thoughts on it. While I don't have a cogent or coherent interpretation yet on what I think the game means -- and the work does warrant this level of thoughtful, reflective engagement -- my initial impression has persisted: this is a stunning work of hypertext fiction.

The work has a game-like setup, but ultimately plays like a story on-rails. The player occupies a barren prison with a few rooms, which, in its eerie desolation, reminded me of the empty barracks from Steve Meretzky's Planetfall. In the initial interactions with the game environment, Howling Dogs could play out like that IF classic, with machines still dispensing food long after other life has moved on. Instead of exploring an expansive abandoned space station, though, the player in Howling Dogs remains confined to a small cell and a few adjoining rooms, one of them containing a VR-like device that sends the player into a variety of strange scenes, some familiar and others fantastical.

There's some branching, but (it seems like) most of the links add details to a scene without leading the player down many drastically different trajectories. After each session in the VR contraption, the player wakes up again in the prison, a day (or more) having passed and the cell becoming more and more unkempt. Part of the beauty of this game is in its design, which effortlessly communicates this tension between confinement and escape that's core to the message of the narrative. The player feels hopelessly lost within a narrow cell, despairingly constrained in world-bending simulations that transport across time and space.

Those simulated sessions constitute the bulk of the gameplay. Each session is both distinct and part of a larger whole, each an intricate verse in an expansive poem. Each node in these visions is made of arresting passages. I won't detail any of the scenes because winding your way through each session is sublime, but here are a couple sample passages plucked: 1) "sometimes the smoke is high enough to be mistaken for the sky, sometimes it collapses low as a cavern"; 2) "We saw its spirit ascend with the morning light, and from its grave grew trees of dizzying height, and the fruit was birds, one of each kind of bird in the world. Your zoo now has one of each kind of bird in the world."

Overall, this work reads more like a work of hypertext fiction than it plays as a game, but it is a testament to what can be done with text and links.

I used to play a lot of RPG's for console systems (e.g. Final Fantasy and the like), though I fell off of them because they tend to be self-serious and require enormous commitments of time and energy. Tavern Crawler delivers an imaginative fantasy world, some meaningful character customization, and an engaging (slightly offbeat) story without the humdrum.

I was immediately quite drawn into the fantasy world. From the first scene, set in a bar, the player gleans details about the society/culture and political structures of the game world, all cleverly integrated into narrative events that move the story forward. Just bumping into a soldier at the bar sets off a chain of detailed interactions that situate the player in a fully realized and lived-in fantasy world. This continues throughout the game, and even though the game world open to the player is itself rather small, you gain a rather sweeping sense of the world of the game through these interactions.

There are some limited, but meaningful, ways to customize the character through decisions made throughout the game. Principally, the player can take actions that build up the players mage, tank, or rogue stats. Interactions with the non-player companions, Ford and Aurora, can negatively or positively affect the player's relationships with these characters. These decisions can impact the course of the game, but (in my playthrough) it was not difficult to advance to a satisfying conclusion to the game without maxing out any of these stats.

The story itself -- in brief, a quest to slay a dragon that goes wrong -- is well told as the player advances through the various quests. This is, of course, not a typical dragon slaying mission. While I'll refrain from any details that might spoil the story, the narrative opens up questions about the ethics of adventuring that are quite thought provoking.

All of this is done with a knowing sense of humor; while I often found myself smiling, this is not just a send-up of RPG's. The game exhibits an impressive emotional range, which especially comes out in the conversations you can have with Ford and Aurora along the journey. As you complete main quest objectives and side quests, the player can chat with both companions about what they've been experiencing. These side conversations provided some of the most engrossing bits of story and offered insight into both the non-player characters and the broader fictive universe in which the game takes place.

My only qualm with the game is also perhaps a strength -- that the main story itself can be accomplished fairly quickly. You can get in and out pretty quickly and still have a meaningful gameplay experience, but it would be nice to stretch out more in this intriguing game world. This is a fantastic short story length work, and I'd gladly take a fat novel.

The Canterbury Tales is one of my all-time favorite works of literature. I adore Chaucer's nuanced and varied sense of humor (from fart jokes to biting social satire) and his inventiveness with language. I was psyched to see a Choice of Games title adapting this classic and I was exceedingly curious to see how Kate Heartfield would leverage a choice-based game mechanic to recast what is a pretty linear story in the original. Well, really, there isn't much of a storyline at all in the original, as the meat of Chaucer's work is in the stories that the pilgrims tell along the way.

What The Road to Canterbury delivers is a richly told story set in Chaucer's universe but representing a pretty significant departure in mood, tone, and content from the original work. There's little in the way of humor (though Harry Bailey does pull off a pretty good fart joke early on), and a lot more in the way of political intrigue and detailed descriptions of medieval life. In the end, it's probably for the better that Heartfield struck out on a different path from Chaucer (few authors are going to win going head-to-head with Geoffrey...), but it wasn't what I was expecting and, ultimately, wasn't something I was terribly into.

That said, this is a solidly crafted work, and someone looking for a choice-based game full of medieval political drama will likely love this. The central mission of the game is to decide whether or not you want to convince an elite member of the court to move toward peace or continued war between France and England. That storyline is especially well developed, and the player can develop a pretty complex moral position toward the ongoing war and the combatants.

One major aspect of the game that I did feel could be objectively improved was the tale telling "mini game" couched in the bigger story. Just like Chaucer's work, the pilgrims spin tales as part of a contest initiated by the host, Harry Bailey. While there's an effort to make both hearing others' tales and telling your own an interactive experience, I felt that this was pretty flat. There are points in listening to others' tales where you can interject and influence the tale, and these decisions just never felt all that meaningful. When you finally tell your own tale, it's kind of nifty to string choices together to craft a story, but this could have been built out even further and made more a central part of the game.

As it is, the tale telling feels like something of an afterthought and the main focus is on what happens on the pilgrimage itself. This, of course, is the mirror opposite of The Canterbury Tales, in which we learn very little about the journey and almost exclusively hear the pilgrim's stories. Again, this fits what Heartfield seems to be out to do with this work -- which is decidedly not to retell Chaucer's original work but rather use this as a jumping off point into Chaucer's world.

Playing through Shade felt like reading a finely-crafted short story. The game environment is small, though precisely described so that each detail is striking and rich with information -- nothing extraneous. The work is focused in on a particular theme, and develops this theme deliberately and effectively. The imagery is evocative, though narrowly centering on a particular motif (Spoiler - click to show)(sand! and more sand!!). Like the best works of short fiction, Shade can be experienced in a relatively brief session, though it leaves a powerful impression that stays in the reader's head long afterward.

Shade presents a strange, disquieting kernel that the reader can contemplate beyond the bounds of the text itself. I won't delve into the content of that kernel in this review since, as mentioned, the work is easy enough to engage with quickly and a new reader does really benefit from going into the work with minimal foreknowledge.

While I absolutely loved the work, I had some minor issues with the mechanics of how a reader progresses through the narrative. It seems as though there's essentially one narrative trajectory through the game, with the player progressing as they accomplish tasks in preparation for an upcoming trip. None of these tasks are particularly difficult to figure out, and at it's best, the progression of the narrative felt like it was happening all of its own accord (Spoiler - click to show)with more and more sand filling the apartment, and the environment slowly transforming into a desert hell-scape.

However, there were a couple times when I got stuck looking for just the right object in the environment that I needed to interact with in just the right way to keep the narrative moving. These times took me out of the otherwise absolutely engrossing experience of the game.

I'm not a huge Hitchhiker's fan, but I still thoroughly enjoyed Douglas Adams' characteristically witty, sardonic prose. Though the game has a (deserved) reputation for being difficult and at-times cruel in its design, the world-class satirical writing and absurdly fun sci-fi narrative are more than enough to motivate the player to meet these challenges.

The first half or so of the game largely follows the plot of the first Hitchhiker's novel, and occasionally draws verbatim from the novel, though with enough wrinkles, puzzles, and knowing tricks thrown in to make it more than a straight adaptation. A working knowledge of the novel will certainly help a player of the game, though having read the book does not at all make this first portion of the game redundant. Adams (apparently a huge fan of IF) and Infocom veteran Steve Meretzky build in lots of charming, self-aware details like warning players to don 'peril-sensitive sunglasses' before viewing a low score after they've died, or a death sequence where the story continues following the deceased Arthur Dent in the ambulance and scolding the player to stay out of it. There's just a lot of learning by death in this game, but it's usually fun if infuriating!

The second part of the game diverges quite a bit in its design, moving from the more or less linear plot following that of the novel to a non-linear episodic design where the player departs from a central map to points across time and space. I really, really liked this except for some major details regarding the mechanics of this episodic structure that are not divulged to the player. It takes quite a bit of finagling (or consulting a walkthrough) to understand how to (Spoiler - click to show)handle the Infinity Drive and get in and out of the darkness, none of which is explained to the player. For many of the episodes, it's also not very clear what the objective is or what the player needs to do to make sure they don't end up in an unwinnable state. Nor is it clear how many episodes the player needs to go through before advancing to the concluding sequence of the game.

In full disclosure, I made heavy use of a walkthrough to get over these difficulties. Even still, I greatly enjoyed this game, and found its design inventive and its writing winning. I feel like a bit more direction about how to navigate through the episodes in the second part of the game would have added to the player experience without necessarily sacrificing any difficulty of the game. As it is, it feels like parts of the game design are cruel just for the sake of being cruel. Regardless, I highly recommend playing this -- and no shame for using a walkthrough at some key points.