Reviews by jakomo
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To thrive in life you need three bones: a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone, April 8, 2022This Pratchett-esque comic fantasy adventure has a narrative that I found kinda bland: it doesn't challenge or provoke in any way. The same could be said about the author's previous excellent 4x4 Galaxy and 4x4 Archipelagos, but those games being mechanics-driven RPGs meant the writing was far less important. This is a traditional text adventure, so the emphasises story and puzzles. I found myself skim-reading a lot of the long text-dump sequences to get to the game parts, which is where the cool stuff lies. Attach and detach your body parts (which then become playable characters), swap between them at will, use them as inventory items, there is a hell of a lot going on, but it successfully avoids overwhelming the player. There was only one puzzle (the candle holder) that could have done with a bit more in-game prompting (though external hints are supplied). UI feels a bit clumsy but the game is constrained enough that it doesn't become annoying.
Strike first. Strike hard. No mercy., April 8, 2022Pay off your mob debt by training for, then competing in, an underground cyborg fight tournament. The training part lets you customise your stats, which then unlock different choices during the actual fights. Does a great job at making the fights feel player-driven, despite actually being carefully authored. I was gripped during those encounters as if they were the Rocky films' climactic battles. Your trainer is a brilliant character too. Yes, I pictured Burgess Meredith. The synth-wave neon cyberpunk look-and-feel is beginning to get tired in 2022 but story-wise this takes a hard left-turn away from typical genre tropes in the third act which certainly keeps things fresh.
Yummy yummy yummy I've got bugs in my tummy, April 8, 2022A micro-twine about establishing a restaurant that serves insect-based food. Really funny, well-written and entertaining, and very educational! The kind of twine game you'll want to replay multiple times to read the results of the obviously silly choices.
(Game) Boy meets Girl, April 8, 2022A conversation in a cafe with an old flame. Made with Bitsy, so it has a neat Gameboy-ish aesthetic, pretty similar to Sakura Wars GB. There are only two meaningful decisions to make to steer the conversation, a choice from three options and a subsequent choice from two, so a single playthrough is very short, but it's well worth playing through to see all (3*2) combinations which together give a rounded picture of the two personalities and their relationship.
"In my dreams I am the Wizard Master!", March 28, 2022The World of Lone Wolf by Ian Page was a 4-book spin-off from Joe Dever's Lone Wolf gamebook series, featuring a new magic-focused character in a distant part of Magnamund. This mini-series shook up the formula quite a bit: Grey Star the Wizard is often accompanied by chatty and memorable sidekicks unlike the lonesome Lone Wolf, he was raised on an isolated island so is naive in the ways of the world, and not being a warrior means combat can be extremely difficult (even impossible at times) and to be avoided at all costs. You do have multiple cool magic tricks up your sleeve but they eat up willpower points which are hard to recover.
This Android adaptation is from the developer of the excellent Lone Wolf Saga: it naturally has the same high-quality UI and QoL features, and is again free.
I see dead people, November 4, 2021Solve a missing person case with a ghost partner, like Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), who only you can see. Three scenes (an apartment, an abandoned mall and a construction site), each with a few rooms to explore and a couple of puzzles to solve (mainly lock & key, with some variation). Feels like a first-time effort, as the game is filled with pedantic parser issues. The lack of synonyms for nouns, and the lack of automatic implicit actions are the biggest problems. Pretty flat writing throughout: the scary bits need to be scarier, the funny bit need to be funnier, characters need to have a bit more personality - I only found the homeless biker memorable. It's solidly designed though, with no moon-logic puzzles, no time-wasting travel (complete the objective in one scene and you're instantly whisked to the next), and even a basic hint system.
I don't paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality, November 3, 2021A 1-bit styled super-low-res graphical adventure buit with Môsi and set in "Oniria World - the world of dreams", a popular shared setting used by many Spanish language indie gamedevs. Move your sprite, a newly born "nightmare", around 2D tile-based graphic screens, bumping into interesting objects/NPCs to get some descriptive text that may or may not progress the (somewhat opaque) story. Appropriately for a "world of dreams", logic is not a priority: events often feel arbitrary and the pseudo-philosophical musings are difficult to untangle (especially when they occasionally remain untranslated from Spanish). I saw two of the three endings, neither of them the optimum one, which would presumably require not becoming a killer - something surprisingly difficult to avoid! Perhaps that's the point - the sheer difficulty of living a life that does not harm others, both in the world of dreams and our own.
Oh deer, November 3, 2021Starts off very promisingly, with a tense deer hunt, even if the game is literally telling you what to type at each prompt. Things get spooky as you track the deer's trail to an eerily abandoned farmhouse, where you learn the story of it's occupants. At this point it loses focus: suddenly, it's a collect-em-up where, without motivation, you're catching rabbits, trawling a pond - and that's as far as I could go, as I hit a game-breaking bug trying to use the meat scale. As compelling as much of this content was (shades of Edgar Allan Poe), the sluggish online Quest interpreter nevertheless made it a chore to play: use the offline interpreter if you're able.
For though myself be a ful vicious man, A moral tale yet I yow telle kan, November 3, 2021Interactive adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, in which the titular three rogues find treasure then trouble. The 14th Century language has been modernised a fair bit to be understandable to 21st Century folk, but the central moral parable remains. Choices are mainly between sticking with the original text or diverging from it, with divergence usually leading to a swift bad ending. Except, there is a way to subvert the original ending and "win" (as Chaucer turns in his grave). Excellent monochrome woodcut illustrations decorate a well-presented and easy-to-play game, although a more ambitious effort could have included further interesting choices and more branching storylines. The game also tracks five stats at the top of the screen, but they don't seem to be used at all?
You are here, and it’s beautiful, and escaping isn’t always something bad., November 3, 2021As in Firewatch, you've volunteered for Fire Tower duty, deep in the forest, far from civilization, and far from the personal tragedy that feeds your nightmares. Unlike Firewatch, you won't be doing much hiking, exploration and mystery-solving: in The Lookout the horror comes to you. Although very linear, this is an effectively told creepy tale, with a strong emphasis on atmospheric descriptions that provide a slow-burning escalation of visceral terror.
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