Reviews by jakomo

An entry in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam, a competition for entry-level parser games for kids. Reflections goes out of its way to hold a first-timers hand: simple, bold and colourful images for each location, short MIDI-musical ditties at appropriate moments, a helpful tutorial mode, and a map on-screen at all times (alongside the competition-mandated two word parser).

You're a kid wandering around the house and the back-garden looking for the titular reflections of yourself. A light sprinkling of magical realism adds talking cats and magic mirrors to the mix. Puzzles are suitably basic: mix a recipe, find out a dog's name, distract a rat, play with coloured crystals. All well-clued in the environment if you explore thoroughly.

Would feel perfectly at home on a 1983 primary school's BBC microcomputer, alongside Granny's Garden and Devil's Causeway.

An Android adaptation of the Lone Wolf "New Order" subseries (books 21-32): if you're looking for books 1-20, Lone Wolf Saga is what you need. Lone Wolf New Order currently covers books 21-29: book 30 (Dead in the Deep) is still available for sale in paper format and not covered by the Project Aon licence. Dever died in 2016, so the future of unpublished books 31-32 is unknown.

You play as a new protagonist, a student of the original Lone Wolf who sends you out on missions around Magnamund to fight evil. The app is not quite as polished/bug-free as Lone Wolf Saga but still works great, a must-download for anyone who wants to see further adventures after completing the original Lone Wolf's story arc.

Tiny Twine scifi-horror: well-written, with very effective descriptions of the 'kills'. The twist in the tale has been done before, 20 years ago in fact, but remains pretty effective in 2020.

Unlike Taylor, the fun protagonist you talk to and advise in Lifeline, Silent Night, and Halfway to Infinity, Wynn in Flatline is an annoying and whiny nuisance. Complaining, ignoring your choices, and, taking minutes to perform the simplest of actions (opening a door?). The story does expand the Lifeline universe in an interesting way, answers some lingering questions from Taylor's games, and the heart-rate monitor is a neat new mechanic, but it's still a bit of slog to get through.

One part of the game requires you to access an external website to get some codes: that website is now shut down. You can now get the codes from https://pearsoncorp.green/ or https://twitter.com/Lifeline_Server/status/1076294978190622721

Melancholia: The Game. A comet has been forecast to strike the Earth and wipe out all life. Today is that day. A parser text adventure with a lot of locations, but sadly not much implemented in them. I assume this is at least partly intentional, to evoke the feeling of powerlessness, a world-weary depression that has descended over this character, and by extension of all humanity, knowing the inevitable end is nigh. This lack of connection further represented by the few NPCs scattered around, who cannot be communicated with or interacted with at all as far as I could tell. Gameplay seems to comprise finding the various ways to kill yourself, or waiting for the comet to do it for you. Lars Von Trier would love this game.

The "Choice Of Games" house-style is to start every story with a character-creator where you define their name, gender, sexuality and other traits. Cabin in the Forest takes things a step further, with a whole Myers-Brigg personality test being only the beginning of the detailed character-creation choices you have to make. I was expecting the resulting story to be something like the first vignette from Several Other Tales from Castle Balderstone, but things don't turn out like that at all... A wicked subversion of expectations, mischievous, malicious and magnificent. Almost Discordian in its chaotic outlook. Play it!

Short Choicescript game with eight possible achievements (I managed six). A dream-deity from Greek mythology (I guess Phantasos judging by the title) has captured you, and puts you through a gauntlet of challenges to secure your freedom. You're time-limited, with a candle-wax meter counting down how close to doom you are. The choices are somewhat arbitrary, so there is no real way to strategize, and role-playing is also limited to a handful of flavour choices. But the game is short enough that it doesn't matter, it's classic choose-your-own-adventure: play it over and over until you find the one winning path. Fans of Fighting Fantasy, especially, should enjoy.

A single-verb text adventure: EXAMINE everything to make progress. Why can't you do anything else? Because you're in your final death-throes, taking your last gasps before you expire in an abandoned church. As well as the physical objects around you, you can examine the memories they bring back, and the details within those memories too. There's no way to survive, you only have a fixed number of turns to live: it will take multiple replays to piece together the full story of this character's mixed-up life. Some English-language problems don't obscure a compelling central mystery. The ultra-deep implementation, with pretty much every noun I tried having further EXAMINE-text, is impressive.

Either a sequel or a spin-off to two previous stories by the same author. There is zero on-boarding for newcomers to this series, so start with Antique Panzitoum or Old King Nebb instead, will maybe help explain things better. You're a septuagenarian on a hike between two major settlements, stopping off at an old building for a night's sleep. Some light exploration, a couple of basic puzzles, and a dollop of intriguing world-building, and you're done. Elaborate prose style with pleasing turn-of-phrase evokes Arthur Machen. Puzzles avoid frustration.

Parser text adventure written in Dialog: a thoroughly implemented one-room escape game, requiring careful examination of your surroundings and judicious use of your inventory. The "twist" is not the one I was expecting, but surprises and delights all the same. Too spoilery to discuss in any further detail, but it's so short you can complete it in in not much more time than it takes to read this review. Recommended.