Ratings and Reviews by ccpost
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Choice-based fantasy game, expansive in scope, April 3, 2023I was initially drawn to A Crown of Sorcery and Steel because I adored Josh Labelle's earlier game Tavern Crawler, a shortish Twine game set in an intriguing and distinctive fantasy world that left me wanting more. Sorcery and Steel indeed delivers much more! This is a full-length choice-based game that picks up many of the threads started in Tavern Crawler -- a despotic Queen, a centuries-long war -- presenting an expansive and engrossing story that unspools the rich history of this lushly developed world populated with compelling characters.
The main aim of the game is confronting Queen Nidana, a tyrannical elvish Scribe who abused her deep knowledge of magic to create an army capable of dominating the entire realm. The player (who can choose to play as a human, dwarf, orc, or elf) joins a troupe seeking to unlock a powerful weapon that can end Nidana's reign once and for all. It's a classic fantasy set-up with clear influences drawn from Dungeons & Dragons campaigns -- in fact, the game includes a mode that mimics playing D&D by providing players with indicators about what skills or traits are being tested by various choice options that arise in response to challenges.
All of this is well done and plenty fun for anyone into high fantasy and D&D, but what sets Sorcery and Stone apart is the distinctive world building. This is a familiar fantasy world, but Labelle builds on and subverts fantasy tropes to construct a universe that is all its own. As the game progresses, players learn of the intricate political and social relationships between the various groups of people (Spoiler - click to show)-- the war between the humans and the elves that precipitated much of the present conflict, or how the orcs falsely promised to stamp out a rogue group that once seriously attacked the elvish Scribes -- all of which colors how this diverse party of questers interrelate and understand each other. The growing sense of history, and the different people's motivations for ending the Queen's reign, seep in to the game, informing the stakes of the choices the player is asked to make.
How the game uses magic is my favorite dimension of the history and mythology of the world that unfolds throughout the game. Each people has their own brand of magic, each with its own ethos and lore. How the orcs think about and practice bone scrying is markedly different from dwarven rune magic, for instance. In my playthrough, I developed some level of skill in a couple schools of magic, and the chance to hone my skills in the other schools of magic is a tempting reason to play the game again. Overall, I absolutely loved diving into the fully realized history and mythology of this world, and appreciated every tidbit about significant figures and events from centuries past.
While I really liked how Labelle implemented a D&D-style playing experience in ChoiceScript, my only qualms with the game is that this was perhaps not pushed enough. I appreciated the ability to focus on developing certain traits (e.g. might, stealth, charm, ingenuity), and I felt like these were tested throughout the game in interesting ways. However, there are really only a few scattered opportunities throughout the game to really "level up" in any of these areas, so I had a couple strong skills and others that were essentially at status quo for the entire game. This led to a couple frustrating decision points that depended on having developed particular traits. (Spoiler - click to show)For instance, in Chapter 8, my efforts to both unseat Laz as the pretender to the Vayyan throne and to steal back an elvish tapestry were thwarted because I didn't have sufficient might, charm, or stealth skills.
The tone of the game -- specifically a rather self-serious tone that differs notably from the self-aware humorous tone that characterized Tavern Crawler -- is not necessarily a weakness of the game but did give me some pause. I started this game with some expectation that it would read like Tavern Crawler; while Crown extended and deepened the story initiated in that game in a very rewarding way, it doesn't have a lot of the jocularity and lighter vibe that really drew me to Tavern Crawler. This is a different game seeking to do different things, and there are clear relationships to the earlier game, but the different tone should be noted.
Overall, though, I highly recommend this game, especially for players who love to delve into large, expansive fantasy worlds.
Meditation on games, art, the meaning of life, and lunar bases, January 18, 2023This game is richly multilayered, weaving together many different fascinating narrative and aesthetic threads, while remaining incredibly fun to play and engaging to read. Throughout a relatable story about a person struggling to find meaning while working a draining job, Glasser balances a romance plot, thought-provoking meditations on games as art, and a game within the game that the player interacts with along with the protagonist. These all work seamlessly together to prompt the player to reflect not only on this game but games more broadly and the various meanings they have in our lives: the social interactions and communities they foster, the aesthetic experiences they engender, the philosophical questions they raise, and the escape they provide.
The underlying story of the game is deceptively simple albeit with a scifi twist. You play as a tour guide on the moon, a well-paying but ultimately dead-end job, and you play games in your spare time. The designers of your favorite game happen to be the latest tour group, and it's up to you to smooth out some issues -- both major and minor -- that interrupt a potentially pivotal business retreat for the indie game studio. While the scifi elements are relatively subdued, the game posits a depressing -- but probably pretty likely -- scenario for the future of space travel: the moon will become a tourist resort for the wealthy. Some of the themes dealt with here remind me of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy if on a smaller, more personal scale. Humanity's first inclination will be to pave paradise.
Integral to this main story are the threads mentioned above. The player character begins the game engrossed in the fictional game-within-the-game called Creatures Such as We, a scifi game of its own though more bombastic and action-packed. While I first found the sequences of applying the Choice of Games mechanics to choose my way through the fictional immersive 3D game played by the protagonist to be kind of detached, I got more and more into what Glasser was doing with these passages. These functioned almost like an autopsy of a game, using the choice-based game mechanic native to ChoiceScript to break down a 3D action game into discrete decisions. This has some weird effects with time, sometimes glossing over long stretches of playtime and other times allowing the player to linger over a decision that protagonist would need to make in a split-second.
In the interactions with the game designer tourists, the protagonist has the opportunity to engage in deep and wide-reaching conversations about game design and the aesthetics of games as art. Far from retreading worn out arguments about whether games should be considered as art or not, these sections of the game play out as interactive Socratic dialogues almost, with the interlocutors pushing you on your points and asking you to refine and clarify what you mean. While these decisions have essentially no stakes for the well-being of your characters, (Spoiler - click to show)in stark contrast to the nail-biting sequence at the end of the game in which the protagonist has to safely guide the tourists through an emergency evacuation of the base, I actually found these decision-points to be the ones I pondered and sweated over the most! These conversations really forced me to examine some of my own positions and beliefs on deep questions about why we play games and what they mean in our lives.
Finally, the player can choose to pursue a romance with one of the designers, the choices made in this most game-like aspect of the game for the real player immediately resonating with the philosophical discussions you have with the fictional game designers. I do not know the extent of possible outcomes with the romance aspect of Creatures(Spoiler - click to show) (in my playthrough romancing Diana, we shared mutual affection but also mutual recognition that the romance wouldn't come to anything as she left the moon base), but the romance seems designed to further the character development of the player character, providing prompts for self-reflection about what they're doing with their life and what life decisions they should make next. The game we're all playing...
The end I arrived at (Spoiler - click to show), on the moonbase, playing an updated version of Creatures online with Diana, was especially illuminating of the social role that games play in our lives, and did so in a genuine, moving way that somehow wasn't corny: we can be separated by countless miles but still connect over a great game.
Peak medieval weirdness, January 2, 2023I feel like this game was made personally for me. Centering around a monastic scribe who's thrust into a mission to investigate a potentially demonic book, Chronicon Apocalyptica hits on all my obscure interests and makes them actually quite compelling in terms of game play and narrative. Even if you're not personally fascinating by illuminated manuscripts and medieval history and lore, I'd recommend this game -- though having interests in those areas makes this one a must play!
The game reads like a work of medieval literature itself, akin to Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'history,' which mixes in lore, mythology, magic, and religion alongside historical events. From the beginning, when the player character encounters a disembodied 'tremulous' hand that's scurrying around the abbey, this game is full of wonders and strangeness. The main quest of the game revolves around investigating a string of strange phenomena reported in the aforementioned demonic book that sees the player character face ghosts, witches, dragons, and faerie. Like many works of medieval literature, the game is somewhat episodic, though the episodes follow a main throughline and add up to a satisfying conclusion.
The story itself is wonderfully weird and quite well written, but the game play complements the story and really makes the whole thing cohere nicely. The game puts you in the head of a monastic scribe, and you approach the various challenges in the game very much as a scholar. There are different ways to investigate the events and oddities recorded in the Book -- through archival research, intuition, or systematically analyzing patterns -- but all these avenues are steeped in a scholarly mode of attention. There's some swordplay and fighting, though it's mostly the non-player characters who are engaged in this action. The player character is a scholar through and through, and the ways they can approach challenges as a scholar are robust and interesting to think through. The game encourages the player to engage with the game text as scholar, and this close attention is rewarded -- quite explicitly, too, with such fantastic in-game achievements as "Archived: Your book is deposited in the royal archives. (30 points)"
This scholarly way of attacking problems is carried out well in the game: the game always outlines clear choices for how different decision points, representing different ways of approaching the problem at hand, and consequences follow from cogently from different choices made. However, I did not think these scholarly skills were well represented in the various stats tracked in the game. I've found the stats in other Choice of Games to be very responsive to different choices and reflective of my own understanding of how I'm shaping the character toward different tendencies, but I never really understood how the stats were functioning in this game. I also found the achievements very unevenly distributed throughout the game -- I earned a couple early on, and then earned a bunch toward the end of the game but missed out on many during the middle part of the game. This could have been a result of my own poor play, but it seemed like there were fewer opportunities for achievements during the meat of the game itself.
Despite these minor quibbles, I found the game very delightful and an overall great experience. I don't know if I would recommend this as some one's first Choice of Games title since the achievements and stats are kind of funky, but I'd recommend this to anyone familiar with choice-based games who also happens to be interested in medieval weirdness.
Gleeful and grotesque interactive fanfic, December 15, 2022As noted in the other reviews, Batman is Screaming is an early Twine game by Porpentine, interesting now in how it hints at some of the themes, tone, and imagery that Porpentine would develop in her later, more fully-formed games.
But this work is more than just an historical curiosity -- it's a really fun, gleefully grotesque, piece of interactive fan fiction. Porpentine totally captures the voice of the Joker but, like the best fanfic, introduces a scenario that would (likely) never make it past the DC editors or Warner Bros execs: (Spoiler - click to show)Batman has been trapped inside of some sort of bizarre ant farm; pieces of him have been slowly pulled apart while he still maintains consciousness and a sense of self that, I imagine, is deteriorating along with his bodily integrity.
This is a brief work that almost reads like a prose poem, given Porpentine's typical flare for evocative language and poetic images. Alternatively, as this is a work told from the perspective of the Joker after all, we could read this as an extended joke -- in which Joker gets the last laugh, of course. In either case, Porpentine uses Twine to parcel out the scenario in brief passages, both haunting and hilarious. This is a nearly linear story (with a couple tangents that circle back to the main thread), but the affordances of Twine are still well deployed. Plus, the purple and green color scheme is too good.
The future of digital archiving is here!...in a thoughtful slice-of-life story, December 7, 2022As someone whose day job deals with digital archiving/curation work, I was instantly intrigued by this game. The protagonist, Maria, works as an exhibition tech at a digital culture museum in the near future, and grapples with burgeoning romantic feelings for a curator, Sean, at the museum while they work together on an upcoming exhibition. Both aspects of the story are very well done, as scenes that feature detailed descriptions of Maria's work meticulously restoring aspects of historic games switch off with at times awkward and at times sweet interactions with Sean.
I found the mix of these narrative threads to be balanced well, achieving a realistic representation of someone who's engrossed in their work, who has a fulfilling (if complicated) family life, but runs up against romantic feelings for their coworker. More so than a description of the affair, the game centers around Maria confronting these feelings and struggling with what they mean and what to do about them.
Maria's internal monologue as she goes through these thought processes is well written if a bit detached. Maria reflects on her identity as a Mormon, which adds an interesting dimension to her character, but doesn't seem to overly determine anything about how she approaches her feelings for Sean. On my first play through, I was expecting something spicier, more akin to a romance game, but I actually found this headier self-assessment of what these feelings mean to Maria to be just as intriguing. There are enough books and games out there that deal with carnal passion -- let's actually enjoy sitting and thinking through even our remotest attractions!
The other major thread of the game, Maria's work as an exhibition tech at a digital museum, was equally engrossing to me and equally thought out and well written. I enjoyed the descriptions of Maria thinking through the decisions she was making and the highlighting of some of the intricate details that can be really important to recreations and restorations of historic works of software -- the way digital grass moves, for instance. I appreciated the introduction of some longer texts, some of Sean's writings, for instance, that deal with the theory of archiving digital culture in the near future.
The discussion of some other aspects of society and culture in the near future was the only part about the game that didn't work as well for me. I felt like Helps was trying to inject some social commentary about our current trajectory in regards to algorithmically-driven systems and corporate social media platforms, but this sort of fell flat for me. There are some efforts in the game to discuss some of the implications of these things, but it seems like the media landscape of the present time in the game isn't all that different from ours today. So I was left wondering what Helps' point was in making this commentary. I'm not sure if this is a complement or a criticism, but it felt like the game could have been set 5~ years from now rather than the 70+ years from now that was the intention.
This commentary on our media landscape is a really minor aspect of the game though, and doesn't really impact the otherwise stellar treatments of Maria's digital curation work and Maria's tentative affair. All in all, this is a lovely slice-of-life story tinged with just a bit of melancholy.
A sweeping sci-fi tale with emotional resonance, October 18, 2022I 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.
Haunting story with inventive gameplay, October 12, 2022This is a deeply affecting game that grabbed me from the beginning with an eerie atmosphere, and then continued to enthrall me with intriguing gameplay mechanics until the story reached a powerful conclusion. The game starts with a poetically stilted observation -- 'the sky over the garden is too bright' -- and slowly focuses and clarifies this thought into a moving realization about (Spoiler - click to show)a person, Miriam Lane, quietly suffering and struggling just out of the view of her family and friends.
The game starts with the player character questioning a man who seems to be suffering from amnesia or some other bout of forgetfulness. There's someone missing, something not quite right, and you're here to help him. From the start, the game is sparse and almost haunted -- the text is white on a black background and many scenes are accompanied by sketchy, high-contrast illustrations of the room or object that you're encountering. A soft, moody music is just enough to set the tone without becoming distracting. Given the unclear sense of the mission at first, and the eerie atmosphere, the game almost feels like a ghost hunt.
The game proceeds through a really interesting gameplay mechanic. The player character is equipped with certain observations/thoughts, and can apply these to different items or parts of the house to arrive at a heightened awareness of what's going on. (Spoiler - click to show)The unraveling of these insights in the bedroom is especially gripping: the player character sees small hints of a disturbed, unwell person, like half the bed being tidy and the other half being messy, a divot in that side of the mattress "as if something lay here in exactly the same position for a very long time." The more the player uncovers things that aren't quite right, the more the story clarifies and comes together, the answers being sought ambiguously between ethereal and corporeal.
The gameplay distinguishes this work from a typical Twine game. While clicking on links is the main mode of interaction, these links move the player around the space and enable them to interact with the environment. As such, the game plays more like a point-and-click adventure than an unfolding hypertext story. There are a couple other parts of the game that introduce other compelling innovations, too, like a flower plot in the garden, where the player can combine different attributes (color, amount of sun, shape of leaves and stems) to find different types of flowers. The concluding sequence, when the player (Spoiler - click to show)tells Miriam Lane her story to fully bring her back from absence, makes excellent use of cycling choices links. The gameplay, on the whole, integrates really closely with the theme of the game: the player needs to look carefully, read critically, and, above all, become attuned to small details to successfully find what they're looking for.
My only qualm with the game is that sometimes the next step or stage in the search can be a bit too unclear. (Spoiler - click to show)In the second part of the game, when the player is giving Miriam Lane objects to revive her, there is some negative feedback for incorrect objects that's helpful; but in the first part of the game, the player could apply thoughts to pretty much everything in the house without any penalty or without much guidance. Searching through the flower plots, while a really cool feature, can also become aimless, as there's not a great way to know if you've recovered everything there is to find from the garden.
Despite a few places that can snag the player a bit, the game provides a relatively tight, well-constructed experience that moves from an eerie ghost hunt to something far more real and far more troubling.
Ingenious take on post-apocalyptic fiction, October 10, 2022There's a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction out there across all mediums -- comics, books, movies, games, etc. -- and there's a lot of retread across many of these stories. Rather than social structures totally collapsing or totally transforming, The Archivist and the Revolution crafts a post-apocalyptic world that perpetuates many of the familiar inequities and challenges even as those social structures crumble into ruins. The other ingenious aspect of how this work approaches the post-apocalypse is that the story is told through a limited perspective, one person's experience of struggling to keep a job and pay bills in an irradiated world bereft of non-human animals.
The player character's job puts them in an especially interesting position between the past and present, allowing the game to explore the impact of a dramatic break from a previous cultural history. The player character is an archivist (pushed into contingent contract labor) who decodes and classifies fragments of documents that had been coded into DNA -- this preservation strategy engineered precisely in fear of an apocalyptic catastrophe. Through this work, the player learns bits and pieces of the events leading up to the world's current ravaged state, as well as wonderfully decontextualized bits of history and present pop culture, like a fragment from a Wikipedia entry for the Food Network show "The Best Thing I Ever Ate."
This is a great world building trick as the game can slowly reveal the contours of the universe and not dump everything on the player all at once. And this is a richly detailed world with an intriguing, complicated history. I feel that I only got a glimpse of the full story of this world from a single playthrough, and know that I would glean a lot more on multiple playthroughs. But this is also a brilliant meditation on how the past constructs the present and forecasts the future: through the workaday acts of cleaning up and classifying documents for later retrieval, the activist, though marginalized and precarious, fulfills a critical social role of putting together a patchwork of the past so that we can understand the present.
Ostensibly, this is a resource management game, though one that's very difficult to "succeed" at in a conventional sense. The player character has mounting expenses and gets paid very little for their contract work. The other options are reaching out to people from your past with whom you have very complicated relationships. In addition to money and expenses, you must also manage your energy and psychological well-being; these aspects are not quantified but certain actions can be closed off if lacking in energy or motivation. The game creates an experience of precarity as most choices are difficult and compromised -- there's no easy path forward.
The player character's personal story and identity are developed as the game proceeds, and the player learns how this personal story is deeply imbricated with the cultural history of the Cataclysm and the Revolution. (Spoiler - click to show)The player character is a trans woman and we learn that the Revolution was catalyzed by oppression of trans folks -- transgender and transhuman. Without spoiling the main plot points, the story deals very powerfully with living as a trans person in an oppressive society.
This personal story of the player character is one aspect of the game that I wish had been developed a bit more. While we learn some of the key details about the player character's past, it's not always enough to understand the significance of taking certain actions over others with regards to the two people from the character's past. The end of the game also came somewhat abruptly, after I made a major choice regarding one of those other characters, the game ended and succinctly summarized the implications of that decision. That said, this was a game made for IF Comp, so perhaps a fuller, longer narrative was curtailed to better fit the expectations of the competition. I would gladly play a longer version of this game, or another game set in this world.
Short Story IF with an interesting conceit and play mechanics, October 6, 2022Nose 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.
Brief game with a simple but powerful message, October 4, 2022This 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.
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