Reviews by jakomo

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.

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.

The second werewolf-at-a-party game of EctoComp 2020, after Social Lycanthropy Disorder, but this time everyone else is a monster too. A short Twine where you resolve the terrifying and traumatic situation of not having enough pumpkins for the party games. Oh no! The game requires you to wander around chatting with the ghoulish guests, so it's annoying that you only get one conversation choice at a time, and have to go and start the conversation again to pick the other choices. I though this was about to turn into The Great Pumpkin Heist Adventure, but disappointingly you only get to solve one puzzle, then an NPC does the rest for you. It's an easy read, the low stakes are unstressful and relaxing, and the colour scheme of orange text and red links is pleasing to the eye. "Living together in harmony", you might say.

Weird choice-based story (prose-poem?) inspired by true events: falling through a manhole into rat-infested sewers and getting stuck down there. Everything is off-kilter, even the interaction method: you click the link until it displays your choice, then scroll down to see the results. Is it a stylistic choice for the player-character to speak in broken english? I don't think the spelling mistakes are a stylistic choice: "An uneven ground slams against you heels", "You grit you teeth." That the player-character's chooses to rage about society rather than addressing the practical issue at hand, is a definite stylistic choice, though, and plays nicely into the game's themes, a metaphorical descent into the human psyche.

Wow, powerful stuff. A post-Covid Twine game (with clay figure illustrations) in which you are a live-in carer for a dementia sufferer in his last days. Choice-based conversations with your patient and reminiscences about your own life and relationships are interspersed with a deliberately grindy series of repetitive tasks (cooking, cleaning, counting medicine, reading Pride & Prejudice) that make excellent use of mouse-over effects to dynamically modify the links, cleverly representing the ghost of the house messing with you (or are you just losing your mind during the lockdown?).

Characterization of the player-character and NPCs feels very real, full of flaws and conflicting emotions, thoroughly multi-dimensional, sometimes beautiful, sometimes chilling: "Mark these words: there is no hope of escape. Lockdown will not end soon, and there will always be more. This is only the beginning." There's lots to process in this one, lots of levels to analyse, the Jane Austen quotes being just the beginning.

A Twine about a magic mushroom picker lost in the woods after eating one of his finds. Quite verbose, with a big web of links, so reading it feels like the player is stumbling though the dense undergrowth, just as the character is. A cool mirroring of narrative theme and choice-space design. The physical actions the character performs to try to find his way out probably make up only 10% of the clicks, the other 90% being inner thoughts: about his job, his company, the woods and its mysteries, the mushrooms and their effects. Lots of intriguing notions are set up (the God of the Woods for example), but my playthrough ended abruptly before seeing any of it pay off properly. I assume you can use the various mushrooms you find to affect the outcome, but I didn't figure out how.

I normally associate ChoiceScript with ultra-long epics so it's refreshing to find one that takes only ~30 minutes to complete. A Very Dangerous Criminal starts with the well-trodden urban legend premise of picking up a hitch-hiker while a killer is on the loose. But things soon take a surprising, dark turn. Like, really dark. It goes to some pretty disturbing places. Not for the squeamish.

This was a good, compelling read, with a few annoying grammatical errors that could have been picked up by getting it proof-read first. I could have done without the final coda, where everything is clearly spelled out for the reader, it's likely that most players will have already figured out most of it for themselves by that point. Better to keep things slightly ambiguous for max creepiness. Good effort though: nice to see subversive stuff like this from the overly formulaic ChoiceScript factory.

I've somehow missed the previous two instalments of Castle Balderstone, but on the evidence of Several Other Tales, I need to fix that omission immediately. A comic horror anthology in the classic Tales From The Crypt style, it's presented as four spooky short stories from different authors, within the framing device of a late-night meeting of horror authors. It's all Ryan Veeder, but the four stories really do feel like they come from different authors, not just literarily but in the way they play too.

The first is a ridiculous improvised romp with laughs aplenty that would feel at home on "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" or on stage at The Comedy Store. The second seems like a parody of the 2008 horror IF Afflicted, with it's hygiene inspector sent to a scary commercial premises. The third, written by a class of schoolkids as a project, is absolutely pitch-perfect, capturing that childrens-storytelling tone with panache. The fourth is a substantial, meaty monster-hunting adventure with many puzzles and a neat combat mechanic that feels suitably climactic.

Choice-based game with seven endings (I saw three, including a "winning" one) and eight achievements (I found five). You're a werewolf, on the full moon, stuck at a party. Can you avoid turning into a slavering killer beast? Or even worse, making yourself look like a dork in front of your friends?

I was bowled over by how much content there was here: there is a ton of stuff to do, lots of interesting characters to chat to (with different conversations depending on what time of the night you approach them), lots of party-related activities to partake in, even some time-management based gameplay to give the whole thing some structure. Pretty great all-roooowwwwwnd!

Parody of The Seventh Seal's chess-with-the-Grim-Reaper scene. It's a proper implementation of the game, in Ink (albeit only on a 4x4 grid), interspersed with a choice-based conversation. I managed to win first time, so I'm unsure how much branching or how many endings there are, but what I found was well-written and effective. Unfortunately Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey has already done this joke way back in 1991. Woah.

Crazily original concept. "Translate" a Latin text into English, using a dictionary and a grasp of the grammatical structure (verb endings and how they match with nouns). LOOK UP words you don't know, MATCH word A WITH word B to make sensible sentences out of them. Don't worry, non-Latinophones, there is hand-holding as you go. It's an entry in EctoComp, the spooky Halloween competition, so no surprises that there might be great danger lurking in the words. Would love to see this mechanic integrated into a larger game. In it's current form, it's slight, but works well as a quick trick-or-treat bite-size candy.

Grab as many treasures from the cursed ancient ruins as you can, and get out safely before you get eaten by bugs, fall down a pit, die of thirst in the desert, or get ripped to pieces by a mummy. I was never fully sure of the game's mechanics but still found it enjoyable throughout, with it's mildly comic tone falling somewhere between the more serious Infidel and the more silly The Horrible Pyramid, to name two other grave-robbing adventures. I finally escaped with my life and £150 to my name. Lots of opportunity for replaying here, trying to maximise your winnings in the style of Captain Verdeterre's Plunder. Fun.