Ratings and Reviews by ccpost
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The apocalypse will happen off-screen, March 11, 2024This is a lovely, meditative game where you play as a kid who goes off on an adventure through the forest nearby their house -- though you go a bit farther out than your parents would like and you encounter some danger along the way. The main focus of the game is your exploration of the forest, including taking photographs of the landscape and collecting samples of plants, bits of debris, and odd artifacts. But as you explore, the narration that accompanies your observations reveals the contours of a bigger, intriguing story: (Spoiler - click to show)some kind of world-altering period in the recent past, some combination of climate change and political instability, that has impacted civilization for good.
Pseudavid develops this larger story in a brilliant, subtle way. We are not playing through that story; we learn about it second hand, refracted through the player character's natural descriptions of what they're encountering on their walk. These observations are written quite well -- beautiful bits of prose poetry describing a discarded snack bag or moss growing on a log. The player character also does not have full knowledge of this history either, as major events largely transpired in their parents' generation. This is the world that they know and have grown up in, though they have some stilted awareness of the world before.
There are some light puzzles, but these serve more to put up guardrails on your exploration and ensure that you hit spots you might not have otherwise. (Spoiler - click to show)For instance, you never would have needed to cross the river if the boar didn't knock over the water tower; and you never need to find the cabin, if the monitor lizards don't block the bridge across the river. For the most part, I found the Gruescript interface to work very well with the exploration/observation mechanics of the game, but it becomes a bit clunky when trying to solve the puzzles.
I could see this game as one in a series, where we learn more about this near-future world through the eyes of other characters. But if this is just a standalone, then it works really well as a kind of sci-fi game: a seemingly normal walk in the woods during which we learn about how very different our world could be.
To the Oversea, again, February 16, 2024You play as the warden of a crumbling temple, keeping alive the lore of a serpent god while also looking after a brood of odd, half-human sea children. As you proceed through the game, you glean bits and pieces of this fading religion and the strange world you inhabit, but you as the player never get the full picture. The persistent mystery, the uneasy unknowing, that continues even after multiple run throughs is what makes this game special. Akin to the experience of religious devotion, this game feels both incredibly massive and claustrophobic in its intimacy.
The game looks and sounds fantastic: a Twine rendering of a forgotten illuminated manuscript. The slightly glowing gold hyperlinks look like ink that's caught a bit of candlelight. The dull chanting in the background pushes forward deliberately, certainly. This look and sound are complements to the text: the thoughts of a hermit, thoughts that get puzzled over and twisted through years of silent, repeated meditation. Cycling links are used to great effect to communicate this mode of thought that folds in on itself until clarity -- perhaps -- is achieved, or lost for good.
Baccaris smartly doles out hints and glimpses of the game world and mythos in subtle and understated details embedded in prose that ranges in tone from contemplative to foreboding. I'm left so intrigued by the Oversea and the world beyond the island. Perhaps most powerfully, the player learns about this history and religion through a series of rituals. This was such a cool mechanic: as the player, you chose the ritual you want to perform, and then you tweak details of the ritual based on what you think will be most likely to garner a response from the Pursuer. It's through puzzling over these details that you really understand the nuances of this religion and the different orientations one might have to this ineffable god.
There is a story arc that's suggested at, as to whether the aging devotee to a fading religion can find peace, but this wasn't the strongest element of the game for me. I could keep playing around with the rituals, trying out different configurations of sacrifice, prayer, and votive offering -- even if the serpent god isn't ready to reveal themself to me.
To fry or not...the choice is yours!, October 18, 2023I like ChoiceScript games a lot, though they can often be significant time commitments, containing a novel's length of text and many possible story paths to explore. This game, in contrast, is a quick romp centering around a pretty unusual food frying competition...These authors have also released, The Bread Must Rise, a full-length Choice of Games title set in this same universe that I'm eager to try, but I felt that One Does Not Simply Fry was a fun -- though far from perfect -- introduction to this world.
The setup of the game is certainly intriguing and quite different from a lot of other ChoiceScript games that I've played. The game bills itself as a humorous send-up of fantasy novels (Lord of the Rings in particular) and reality TV baking competitions -- not your typical mashup! The first part of the game does a good bit of world building to introduce the player to the overall domain of the game world, the Twelve Mostly Civilized Realms, and to the city of Godstone in particular, a baking-obsessed city that happens to be situated at the base of an apocalypse-inspiring active volcano.
While presenting a genuinely interesting and weird fantasy world, the first part of the game was also very information-dense, with exceedingly long passages that often lacked meaningful choices. Instead, I would have appreciated shorter descriptive passages of particular parts of Godstone that the player moves through as they are given options to interact with other citizens, make preparations for the competition, or undertake other activities that exposed them to details about the world.
The second part of the game, which centers around the actual fry-off competition, was totally driven by player choices and was quite inventive. The player essentially engages in a series of choice-based mini games: purchasing ingredients to make the perfect onion ring, setting up your kitchen, and then actually putting the ingredients together to make your onion ring. I haven't really played a ChoiceScript game that involves this sort of immediate, task-based string of choices. Typically, games will have you make a single choice at some important point and then, based on your stats or previous choices, determine an outcome that may lead to success, failure, or something else. This game design, where the player makes a string of task-based choices that accumulate and compound in real time (or in the time it takes for the player to read the passages) was very fitting for the fry-off competition.
I found parts of the game to be pretty funny and the satire often worked for me. There's an interesting underlying commentary here about people who put their heads in the sand and distract themselves with escapist entertainment while a black magic-powered volcano threatens eternal doom. I found the running gag of (Spoiler - click to show)the stadium seating built up over the caldera of the volcano, with fans of the baking competition continually falling into the molten lava, to be darkly funny. However, other jokes and aspects of the satire just did not work for me. Much of the game's humor relies on pretty obvious and groan-worthy jokey references to LotR, like the villain of the baking competition being named 'Sour Ron' (get it?!!). The LotR-specific references typically felt very forced and not really in service of the game's bigger satirical project. The points when the game successfully blends fantasy and reality TV tropes felt fresh and fun, and I wish those had been the main focus of the game's humor.
While this game was pretty inconsistent, it's compact enough to weather the not-so-good parts and get to the engaging and funny parts. I wonder if there was some rush to get this into the IF Comp that contributed to the inconsistencies in the writing and design. The good parts of this game have got me interested in the authors' full-length ChoiceScript game set in this universe. I'm eager to see how the satire and baking competitions work in what's likely a more polished game.
The Platonic Ideal of a romance simulator (almost), October 11, 2023Choice-based games lend themselves really well to romance simulators -- and this is of course a very popular genre for this style of IF -- the idea being that our choices in our interactions with other people add up positively (toward attraction), negatively (toward repulsion), or just don't register (toward neutrality). It's easy to quantify these interactions and to add in enough additional variables to make things interesting. Xanthippe's Last Night with Socrates bills itself as a romance simulator, but indicates from the jump that this game is going to do something quite different with the genre...
There are several things going on with the premise that make this an incredibly compelling -- and also very strange -- romance game. First, this is a work of historical fiction, exploring the romantic relationship between two real people from history. The ancient Greek setting, with very different ideas about relationships and sexuality and far removed in time from the contemporary moment, adds a good deal of ambiguity and uncertainty about what to expect. More notably, though, are the particular people involved and the point in time at which the romantic encounter is occurring: Xanthippe, Socrate's second wife, has bribed her way into the jail cell where the philosopher sits captive the night before his execution. Sex is probably on the menu for a last night rendezvous...along with some other not so happy thoughts.
Victor Gijsbers states in the introduction to the game some of his intent behind this premise: to complicate the figure of Xanthippe, of whom we know little about and the little we do know does not cast her in a favorable light. It's impossible to judge someone from a few lines in the annals of history (it's hard enough to judge contemporaneous personages!), and this is the utility of interactive fiction: to carve out an alternative imaginary, our own illuminated cave. Gijsbers depiction of Xanthippe (and Socrates for that matter) is rich and nuanced. Xanthippe has her problems, for sure, but she is presented as a powerful, intelligent, and really funny woman.
It's this woman that Socrates has fallen in love with and married, and through the course of the game, we learn about the complexity and depth of their relationship. So, yeah, the game starts with Xanthippe trying to seduce Socrates,(Spoiler - click to show) (and ultimately succeeding! at least in my playthrough, though I'd be curious to know if it's possible for the attempt at romance to flame out) but the conversation that develops touches on all aspects of their life together. There are so many beautiful, poignant moments that communicate the timelessness of love -- as well as the inescapable contingency of love.
There are just a couple minor aspects of the game that didn't work for me. First, I felt that the tone and diction of the game shifted in some jarring ways at times, from a somber and restrained tone to an upbeat, almost slapstick tone. The purpose of the tonal shifts is clear, in that the game has some powerful emotional extremes and contrasts, but this was not always done subtly in the text. It almost felt like the writing would go between different styles of translating ancient Greek literature: from Chapman's Homer to a retelling of the Odyssey in contemporary tongue. Xanthippe and Socrates would at times talk in quite quippy exchanges that just felt kind of out of place. I'll be clear that this was not the case on the whole, as the writing in general was strong, but Gijsbers didn't always land these shifts in emotionality.
The other issue was one of design. This is a choice-based game, though long stretches of the game did not present momentous choices. In fact, for much of the game, I didn't feel -- as the player -- that I had a real stake in determining how Xanthippe was directing the conversation (or her seduction attempts). I still very much enjoyed the ride, but a lot of the game felt like a shadow play being carried out before my eyes. There were definitely some key decision points,(Spoiler - click to show) (like when Xanthippe comes clean about her affair with Plato and confesses to Socrates whether this was just a fling or a serious relationship for her) but these typically were chances for the player to register their thoughts about the situation and not make choices that would initiate drastically different paths in the game itself.
Interesting premise falls flat, October 7, 2023This game has a really interesting premise -- you wake up and you're falling toward a void in the middle of cyclone, and you make sense of your predicament by grabbing onto a Fellow Faller and chatting about life, the afterlife (?), and your regrets. The game begins with the promise of a surreal short interactive story, but the interesting bits flatten out pretty quickly.
There are two aspects that could have been addressed that would have really livened up this game to make it the weird and engaging experience that I was hoping for. First, there's very little in the way of interesting characterization of either the protagonist or the Fellow Faller. This FF is described as Rock Star, and fits the bill pretty stereotypically (leather jacket, etc.). There's really just one time that the protagonist shares something about themself, and it's a memory without concrete details. We learn something about the Rock Star's regrets and his motivations for wanting to escape the terminal fall, but this (Spoiler - click to show)(feeling bad about leaving his partner) is also kind of bland and not developed with any specificity. Some distinctive characterization through interesting conversations that push beyond cliches would have made me care much more about these characters and their fates.
The other aspect that could have been addressed was the limited range of interactions and branching options. For most passages, there are a couple of the same interactions: to grab (onto your Fellow Faller), to dive, or to look. In most cases, these actions have the same kind of results. I get that the point of the game is to (Spoiler - click to show)dive into the unknown of the cyclone-void, perhaps dying or perhaps escaping back into life but these actions felt constrained and without real stakes. A game with a limited set of actions or a mostly linear trajectory can work well, but only if other aspects of the game are sufficiently robust to motivate the player -- perhaps if sometimes these actions led to unexpected results, or if the 'morale of the story' was not telegraphed so early on.
Gothic romance mystery that adds to Crème de la Crème universe, September 17, 2023I absolutely loved Hannah Powell-Smith's Crème de la Crème, and so I've had the follow-up games set in the same universe on my to-play list for awhile. Noblesse Oblige does not directly continue the story of this previous game -- at least to my knowledge, none of the main characters from CdlC recur in Noblesse -- rather, this game tells its own captivating story while building out the history, culture, and social dynamics of the Creme universe from a quite different perspective. Powell-Smith's strong writing and sophisticated approach to romancing characters clearly ties this game to CdlC, but Noblesse is its own game in many important ways -- and a really good game at that.
Both the plot and the tone of Noblesse are very different from CdlC. In this game, you play as a college dropout who has taken a post as a tutor for the niece of a reclusive Countess. Instead of navigating your way up the social hierarchy as in CdlC, the protagonist of this game has to negotiate the challenges of a fall from their expected upward trajectory. In fact, one of the areas where I felt this game did better than its predecessor was in the bevy of choices that invite the player in to the protagonist's interior reflections and thoughts. In addition to external decisions and interactions with NPCs, the game offers several check-in decisions that enable the player to register how the character is feeling about themself and their situation. I felt like I had a much greater role in the character development of the protagonist than in CdlC.
The other major difference is the tone of the story. Powell-Smith fashions this game as a gothic romance in the vein of the Bronte sisters. The setting is an aging manor on a secluded, windswept island, and many things feel just a bit uneasy and out of place throughout the game. Early on in the game...(Spoiler - click to show)Pascha, your charge, howls outside during a stormy night before being captured and brought back inside the manor, all of which felt very much like a scene ripped from Jane Eyre. This tone is established nicely early on and Powell-Smith did an effective job of developing this mysterious, gothic atmosphere as you explore the manor and the rest of the island through proceeding episodes.
The overall structure and goals of Noblesse are somewhat similar to CdlC: you can romance characters and/or develop friendships while unraveling some intriguing mysteries that threaten to alter your situation and trajectory for the better or the worse, depending on your choices. While there's one really big mystery in CdlC ((Spoiler - click to show)the disappearance of the students into the mines), in Noblesse there are three mysteries that you can unravel, one for each of the three major non-player characters that you interact with.
This aspect of the design is the one minor issue that I had with the game. There are probably ways to develop relationships with each of these characters such that you can uncover all the mysterious backstories in one playthrough, but that strategy was not really appealing to me because to do so would have jarred with other plot, character, and romance-based decisions that I was making. I had an idea of what relationships I really wanted to focus on, and I would have had to go against the motivations that felt 'right' with how I was developing the protagonist for the sake of uncovering details that felt really key to the overall plot. I suppose this adds to the replayability, as I could focus on uncovering these other mysteries on subsequent playthroughs, but I just don't like this structure as much. I think I prefer games with the one Big mystery (as in CdlC) that the player can get at in many different ways rather than several different mysteries that can only be uncovered through many playthroughs.
For fans of CdlC, though, this is a must play if only for the new light that Noblesse adds on the bigger universe of these games. Powell-Smith brings in tons of rich detail on Jezhani culture, mentioned somewhat in CdlC but as a minority group to the dominant Westerlind culture. As a tutor coming from the outside, you learn about Jezhani religion and social mores and need to reflect on how you relate to them -- as a neutral observer or really embracing them as your own. As with CdlC, this involves bigger questions and tensions about class and social dynamics that push past the bounds of the game and ask the player to think about oppression, elitism, and cultural appropriation in our own world. Powell-Smith doesn't hit us over the head with these comparisons, but rather the richness with which she develops this world invites critical reflection that spills out beyond this fantasy universe.
Powell-Smith continues to build something really special with this addition to the CdlC universe. I'd recommend this game on its own as an intriguing gothic romance mystery, but of course it really shines within the broader context of the series of games.
Dark cyberpunk mystery exploring larger ethical questions, June 23, 2023Rent-a-Vice has the setup of a noir mystery story in a near-future cyberpunk setting: you're a private investigator, down on your luck and in debt, when a tantalizing missing persons case walks through your door, a case that will send you into the seedy underbelly surrounding a controversial virtual reality technology... Virtual Experience is a radical step beyond typical VR, offering the opportunity to connect directly into the experience of another person. While lauded as a tool for promoting empathy, VE has quickly fostered underground circuits of 'feeders' peddling in experiences of self-harm, addiction, and other vices.
The core mystery story is compelling enough, though the real pull of the game is the exploration of the thorny ethical questions prompted by VE. Does VE set up an inherently exploitative relationship between feeders and users? If VE neutralizes some social ills because people are partaking in vices virtually, does this warrant the damage done to the feeders? If feeders willingly enter into this work, does this justify the danger they put themselves in? The game does empower the player to take firm stances on these questions, though easy or straightforward answers are never supplied. The choice-based game mechanic is deployed very well to prompt the player to articulate their thoughts on these various questions and consider alternative viewpoints.
By exploring the ethical questions around VE and foregrounding issues of self-harm, self-destructive behavior, and suicide, the game delves into some very dark territory. Theodoridou does this responsibly, offering content warnings and ensuring that the player is aware of the difficult issues that they are going to confront. However, the game does not shy away from direct depictions and discussions of these topics. The player character has a tortured past (that the player in part gets to determine through their choices), and engaging this case brings that repressed trauma back to the surface. This adds some real stakes to working the case, and makes some parts of the game quite challenging. The introduction of these topics never feels cheap, though, as direct confrontations with the darkest applications of VE are really core to the game.
The game excels when it has the player exploring the complicated depths of VE, though there are some points where the stakes of the choices can feel forced and inauthentic. (Spoiler - click to show)For instance, there's a point where a feeder is almost surely going to commit suicide and, at that very moment, you get a call that your child has gone to the hospital. Choosing between your child and the feeder becomes a starkly binary choice in a way that doesn't serve the narrative and leads to an unsatisfying resolution in every case. There are a couple other points where the narrative falls back on noir tropes as narrative shortcuts. (Spoiler - click to show)The loan shark character, in particular, feels like a narrative shortcut throughout the game. They are never developed as a character and just show up to turn up the heat and add urgency to solving the case. These are minor issues in an otherwise great game, but the small dips in narrative quality feel more pronounced because of how strong the rest of the game is.
Overall, the game is a deep and honest exploration of some challenging issues, using a well-crafted cyberpunk conceit to shine a light on all-too-real psychological, emotional, and social concerns.
Too-fast historical game in an extremely compelling setting, May 17, 2023As a librarian by day, I was extremely excited to dive into this game. I also adore Kevin Gold's other near-future Choice of Games title, Choice of Robots, so the prospect of another choice-based game by Gold—where you play as the librarian of Alexandria no less!—had me in the bag. While I enjoyed the game overall and really appreciated Gold's treatment of the historical setting, the game had some major mechanical hangups that made it difficult for me to get fully invested in the game.
The basic premise of the game is that you play as the incoming librarian of Alexandria (based on the historical figure of Eratosthenes); buoyed by your reputation as a scholar and inventor, Ptolemy III has contracted you to tutor his son, and heir to the throne, Ptolemy IV. Through the game you make decisions about how to best educate a future ruler, contend with rival influences at court, and negotiate complicated cultural tensions with the subjugated Egyptians.
All of this is very compelling, and I love the setup of the game and the various tensions and conflicts driving the major decision points. However, the too-fast pacing of the game keeps the promise of this premise from being fulfilled. The chapters are relatively brief, especially compared to other Choice of Games titles, and there are huge temporal leaps between the chapters. This makes sense to some degree, as the game covers an expansive time span, but the combination of very short episodes and significant gaps between episodes made it feel like I was having very little impact on the story.
The other mechanical flaw (for me) was a far too direct causal relationship between choices and consequences for the narrative. Now, players of choice-based games expect there to be some logic connecting the choices they make and the consequences of their choices as they impact the story, but many decision points in this game just felt especially artless. For instance, (Spoiler - click to show)after killing Sosibius, a rival advisor to Ptolemy IV, the player is presented with a very simplistic decision point: take Sosibius' place as a manipulative influence or advise Ptolemy wisely from now on. Many decision points like this are overly straightforward without any nuance on how they might impact the story and without requiring any insight into non-player character's potential motivations or desires.
There is some payoff at the end of the game. (Spoiler - click to show) Based on the choices you make throughout the game, you arrive at one of seven entirely different endings that illustrate the long-term historical effects of the life you lead. I ended up with a scene of a modern-day 13 year old girl reading a work written by Eratosthenes and pondering its importance. These wildly branching endings is a cool effect, but it seems more like these different endings are the real story. However, this payoff at the end was ultimately not fulfilling, a substitute for having a gameplay experience that more fully rewards your choices in the moment.
I'd still recommend this game—how else are you going to know what it was really like to be the librarian of Alexandria??—but to go in expecting a very brisk romp through this history rather than a fully developed, character-driven story.
Unsettling game about the deforming power of belief, May 8, 2023This is a short work of interactive fiction that functions in the way of a good short horror story: the game strongly establishes its premise, gets the player invested quickly, and concludes with a swerve into an artful and unsettling ambiguity that asks the player to mull over the brief piece of fiction.
I started my playthrough with a general idea of the gist of the story -- (Spoiler - click to show)the protagonist witnesses the slow deformation of their father, who obsessively digs a network of tunnels beneath the house -- and found the execution very well done, achieving a deeply felt sense of unease as the protagonist progresses through their story. The player has some sense that the protagonist has survived, as they have lived to tell the tale, but the player also has a sense that the protagonist has been altered -- haunted -- in some essential way. Rather than totally subverting the player's expectations, the game works by slowly unraveling the full scope of the final weird and traumatic encounter with the father.
What I found myself going back to and mulling over after finishing the game was the motivation for the father's digging. This, never fully explained but suggestively characterized, was the really disturbing part of the story. What would cause someone to abandon their life and commit to a toilsome, endless digging? Lutz introduces just enough of the father's perspective to give players insight into his twisted mind while keeping the father still essentially obscured, unknowable.
As a more or less linear story, the game achieves this unsettling experience through subtle atmospheric effects and gripping writing. The linear structure of the game makes the draw toward the encounter with the father feel dreadfully inevitable; but the conclusion, in its ambiguity, makes any consequence, from damnation to salvation, feel possible...but we know in our core that whatever happens after the game ends can't be good.
Poetic, hyper-episodic space saga, April 11, 2023The main narrative tension driving this game is a quest to free your titular vagrant twin from cryo sleep after they've been abducted by some unsavory types. The task is simple but the road is arduous as you then proceed to earn enough credits to free your twin, exploring a vast and varied intergalactic environment in the process. It's both the elemental story -- rescue your family from malevolent forces -- and the enormous scope of the world in which this story is set that give this game the feel of a sci-fi epic poem.
As is the case for many epic poems, the structure of Superluminal is episodic and the rhythm is that of a melodious and mnemonic repetition. The player character traverses numerous worlds (several dozen in my case and likely more left unexplored!), interacting with a diverse cast of characters coming from a wide range of socioeconomic situations and cultural backgrounds to buy, sell, and trade your way up to the requisite 500k credits. Each world to visit is evocatively described in just a scant few words and, similarly, every character is brought to life with a terse, smartly composed description. Truly, reading the description of each new planet brought me such great joy -- to take one example, at random, "slender megastructures rise gleaming from the silvery continents below, arcing over oceans" -- and I was heartened to re-encounter familiar descriptions as I revisited planets, akin to a Homeric bard repeating "wine-dark sea" for the umpteenth time.
The game itself is also very compelling. There's a bit of a puzzle trying to match the odds and ends that you're able to buy off inhabitants on one planet to the needs and wants of inhabitants on other scattered planets. Each of these matches is something of a hyper-episode in the larger story. The pared down mechanics (certain verbs common to IF games are stripped out, and there were no instances that I ran into of needing to play 'guess the verb' to advance) make the game easy to jump into, even for a newcomer to the genre, while the variety of ways to earn credits keeps the game interesting. The main quest can be completed relatively quickly (Spoiler - click to show)as there's a large but fairly easy job that will earn the player character sufficient credits to free their twin, but this is only a small portion of the joy of this game. As with many epics, the pleasure is not in summarizing the main story line but luxuriating in the encyclopedic details of a fully-realized world. This is a poetically charged reference book -- the highest compliment coming from someone who adores reference works!
Superluminal achieves one of the finest balancing acts between the literary and game elements that make the best interactive fiction so compelling. This is an epic poem that you are play as well as read.
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.
Deep, engrossing medical fiction tinged with fantasy and horror, July 11, 2022This 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.
Elliptical poem with moments of true horror, May 31, 2022I 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.
Beautiful and haunting work of hypertext fiction, May 31, 2022When 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.
Fun, accessible hypertext adventure, April 27, 2022I 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.
Richly told story, but a departure from Chaucer, April 6, 2022The 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.
Tight, well-crafted piece of short IF, November 8, 2021Playing 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.
Engaging Balance of the 'Interactive' and the 'Fiction', September 7, 2021I'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.
Powerful, Affecting, August 29, 2021I don't know that there's much I can add to the numerous reviews, but I played this for the first time recently and I wanted to register the incredibly moving experience that this game delivered for me. I'm still fairly new to IF, though I've had thought-provoking experiences with several works that have quickly demonstrated the artistic potential of the form to me. Photopia, though, is the first IF work that I've encountered that has moved me at a deep, soul-searching level. From start to finish, Photopia is a fine crafted, emotionally-wrenching experience.
I went into the game with only the barest information about it -- that it has been considered incredibly influential and that it experiments with the interactive fiction form. As much as probably any IF work, this one really benefits from going in with as few (or none!) spoilers as possible. I won't delve into any of the specifics, but I will discuss one especially affecting scene behind the spoiler tags below.
(Spoiler - click to show)The scene that especially got me was early-ish in the work, when you play as a father whose task is to go outside and retrieve his daughter (who we learn is Alley, the focus of the work overall) for bedtime. You can choose a number of options, either telling her to come inside right off the bat, or prolonging the conversation, discussing some of the finer details of astrophysics. As a father of a young daughter myself, this scene absolutely devastated me. By this point, the astute player can start to see that something ominous is heading for Alley, and so this time is all the more precious for the father. I wanted to keep the conversation going indefinitely, though the astute player also can see that there's really only one outcome for this scene -- bedtime will have to come at some point. By the end of this scene, I was not only in tears, but knew that I was in the midst of a truly special work of IF.
If you haven't played this game, stop reading these reviews and play it! Like a tightly written short story, you can engage with Photopia in a brief span of time, though it will stick with you long, long after.
Some Fantastic Highlights and Regrettable Lowlights, August 20, 2021I desperately want to love this game, but sadly I can only sort of like it. I'm obsessed with words, odd phrases, and idioms, so I went into this game with quite high hopes. Broken up into a series of 'interactive short stories,' a few of the stories are fantastically fun and pull off the wordplay game mechanic marvelously. A few of the stories are confusing and confounding to the point of being unplayable.
The stories that really shine -- "Shake a Tree," "Buy the Farm," "Shopping Bizarre" being the main highlights -- integrate wordplay like spoonerisms and taking idioms literally in truly inventive ways. As your playing with words often alters the game world, there are many opportunities for surreal, odd, and plain funny happenstances (Spoiler - click to show)like when some locks on a door become smoked salmon lox...that need to be 'unloxed' . O'Neill's writing in these sections is superb, conveying the strangeness of some surreal transformation caused by you invoking a bit of word play.
If this had been sustained for a full game (a la Counterfeit Monkey), I would easily give this game a 5 star review. However, the short stories that fall flat fall very, very flat. At least two of the stories almost certainly necessitate using the (fortunately built-in) hints, as the 'puzzles' involve guessing at some joke or bit of cleverness that you have only some vague idea of. This is essentially the same driving mechanic in the stories that work well -- except you are able to arrive at the right conclusions by playing around with the words in the text. For stories like "Manor of Speaking" and "Act the Part," there is very little actual wordplay involved, and few other clues in the text as to how to make progress.
Although I absolutely love the parts of the game that work, the fact that I was forced to heavily rely on hints and walkthroughs for nearly half the game seriously soured my overall experience.
A Substantial Achievement, August 15, 2021I played this game several months ago, curious to try out Choice of Games for the first time. I fear this may have ruined other Choice of Games for me, though, because this one may be difficult to top. As I became familiar with the mechanics of the Choice of Game format (a story driven every few paragraphs by a set of multiple choices that impact the trajectory of the narrative and also affect various stats), I could see how masterfully Powell-Smith utilizes these features. Every choice feels meaningful, and the stats help you to see how you're making progress (or not) to a wide range of goals. I found myself truly strategizing as I made choices, checking my stats and considering how one choice over another may help lead me to a desired outcome.
In the game, you play as a character starting at a prestigious finishing school where your main goals include finding a suitable marriage and/or securing a social station that will help to clear your families troubled image. Though the genre of the game is not in my typical wheelhouse, I immediately became hooked.
What really makes the choices, stats, and achievements/goals feel meaningful is the enormous size and scope of the game. With 10 NPCs that you can develop relationships (both romantic and platonic) or rivalries with, along many other in-game achievements that can shape the plot in large or small ways, there really are an astounding number of ways to chart a course through the game. At over 440,000 words of game text, I only scratched the surface in my one playthrough. I believe I will feel compelled to play through again in the not-too-distant future.
More than just the scope of the game, though, is the craft behind the writing. Every scene is well written and richly descriptive. The NPCs have distinct personalities, lending real weight to the choice to develop relationships with one versus another. The setting is also rendered to great effect throughout the game -- by the end of the game, I felt like I knew Gallatin (the finishing school) even though you don't navigate through the world a la a text adventure.
The game is certainly an achievement, a wonderfully executed work in its own right, but also a testament to the possibilities of Choice of Games and the like. While CYOA-style works can be interesting, they typically feel like you're taking one of a handful of alternate paths through a set narrative. In Creme de la Creme, I really felt like I was moving through a fully realized game world and making impactful choices along the way. On top of that, the writing is sharp and the plot is full of intrigue. I understand that Powell-Smith is currently developing another Choice of Game set in the same world as Creme de la Creme, and I'll be playing that as soon as it comes out.
Good Game with a Major Flaw, August 14, 2021I'm a newcomer to IF, and so I've been working my way through some of the classics to get acclimated and learn a bit about the history of the form along the way. As a game consciously designed for and marketed to 'adult novices,' I thought this would be an ideal game to play early on in my IF career.
Wishbringer definitely fits the bill as a good game for beginners. The story is charming, the atmosphere is engaging, the puzzles are interesting but not difficult, and the game overall is quite forgiving. I appreciate how the narrator prompts the player to save at key times when an irreversible action is about to be taken, for instance.
The fairy tale tone and the at times whimsical to surreal atmosphere of the town was done to good effect. I also found the map to be perfectly sized, as I quickly internalized the town layout of Festeron. This works well since meat of the game is a non-linear treasure hunt/puzzle solving deal that involves exploring the mostly open map. Despite the relatively small map, there are really two Festeron's that you get to explore since the world goes topsy-turvy after the introductory section of the game. I may play through again just to explore some of daytime Festeron.
While I liked all of those aspects of the game, there's a major flaw (to my mind) in the game design that keeps this a merely good not great game. The game centers around a magic stone, the Wishbringer, that can grant 7 different wishes. However, Moriarty &co decided to make using the Wishbringer optional, a way to make puzzles easier to solve for newcomers and build in more challenging (and more rewarding) ways to solve puzzlers for advanced players. I was looking forward to the magic/wishing aspect of the game, though I never actually used the stone. Even as a newcomer, I was able to solve the game without using the stone. If the wishes had been actually integrated into the puzzles and story, rather than leaving them as an optional feature, I would have loved rather than just liked this game.
A Simply Fun Game with Remarkable Writing, August 14, 2021I had a blast playing this game. I'm not much for genre fiction of any kind (mysteries, romance, pirates, what have you), but Briggs uses genre fic tropes as tools to great effect without this being a straight up "romance" story. This is done in large and subtle ways -- from the Caribbean setting to details like using "aft" and "starboard" as commands to move around the ship. PH perfectly nails the atmosphere while creating an original story. Though not a simple game by any means, it is, simply, fun.
Several aspects of the game work really well to draw in players of all experience levels. I'm relatively new to IF and text adventures but was able to make good progress without making extensive use of walkthroughs hints. More than the relatively straightforward (I'd say 'fair' rather than 'easy')puzzles, though, the structure of the game is quite effective. Extensive descriptive and dialogue-driven scenes intersperse the sections of exploration and puzzle solving. This was done in a balanced way so that I never felt I was just slogging through treasure hunts to solve puzzles nor did I feel bogged down in scrolling through text.
In addition to the effective structure, the writing itself is outstanding. I was often struck by rich, evocative descriptive passages that just floored me. These are the types of lines I would put a star by in a paperback book...except I was playing this on a computer! Things like: "Rats’ scratchings counterpoint the lullaby of bilge water sloshing in the bulkheads, punctuated by footsteps slapping the deck overhead."
Others have made this point, but it's worth reiterating that this game perhaps most fully achieves Infocom's promise of interactive literature. Though made 30+ years ago, there are still lessons to be drawn from this one.
Great Introduction to IF, August 12, 2021As a recent convert to interactive fiction, I have been looking for good games to get started with. Although this is perhaps not a typical work, I was intrigued by the sci-fi dystopian premise and encouraged by the wealth of critical praise heaped upon AMFV. Rather than detailing specific aspects of the gameplay or plot that I found especially effective, I want to focus this review on the merits of AMFV as an introduction to IF.
In short: I found AMFV quite stunning in its own right and also an effective introduction to IF more broadly. The work opened my eyes to the artistic potential of IF as a form and delivered a playing experience that was easy and engaging for someone with only minimal prior exposure to IF.
A few more detailed points:
I appreciated the relative lack of puzzles. Though I'm not averse to puzzle-heavy IF, I wanted a work without punishing puzzles or cruel game design (e.g. unwinnable states, lots of learning by dying). I loved that the main mission of the game is to explore the simulated versions of Rockvil, which still requires some careful attention to the description of places and objects without the demands of a typical puzzle (e.g. finding just the right use of an object to get past an obstacle). AMFV helped to ease me into the playing mechanics of IF without suffering the pain of banging my head (literally or metaphorically) against some puzzle to make progress.
I also thought that AMFV did a great job of introducing the a novice player to the poetics of IF, that is, the joys (and challenges) of navigating a simulated world via a text interface. Cleverly, the simulated versions of Rockvil can be seen as sorts of IF worlds within the broader IF work -- Perry Simm is in the same role as the player. This effect was achieved quite well and not in an eye-winking kind of way.
Finally, this work is clearly significant in the broader history of IF, which is obvious even to a newcomer like myself. Playing it definitely helped me to better understand the historical foundation of where more recent IF works have come from, but the experience was not that of an 'eat your vegetables' history lesson. The work is still fresh and enjoyable on its own terms, and indeed the satirical thrust of the work is still very relevant (even if the political satire could be heavy-handed at times -- probably my only real complaint about AMFV).
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