Ratings and Reviews by Coral Nulla

A confession: of the 100 top-rated games on IFDB, I have played zero. Since I'm working on my first parser games, and most of those top games are parser games, I figure it's about time I got started. Can these all-time classics live up to my alternative tastes and unreasonable expectations? Let's find out!

I worked out a name recently for a genre that I'm drawn to but can be difficult to find: romantic horror. While all mediums of fiction are full of romantic fantasies, interactive fiction and visual novels are perhaps unique in holding space for stories that are interested less in the chase towards eternal happiness than the actual grisly nuts and bolts of relationships. It must be something about the intimacy of the computer screen.

And so the central tension of Violet is will-they-won't-they, albeit not will-they-won't-they get together, but rather will-they-won't-they stay together. It's a romantic comedy in the sense that the "horror" in "romantic horror" is played for laughs.

It's also a one-room puzzle game. As usual, I was proud of my initial progress, only to end up resorting to the walkthrough three times after panicking that I'd softlocked myself. None of these cheats felt unsatisfying: it seemed pretty obvious that I would never have found the detail I was missing if I hadn't looked it up. The slow points feel odd; Violet chastises you for lawnmowering, but it really is a game of trying every possible command until you find the items you need to accomplish your goals. I typed in "cry" more than a few times. I even found a few rough edges where the game just didn't respond at all to my attempts to, say, throw a coaster at a pen. But the level of detail that is there is impressive, and I can't imagine how much work it would take to patch over everything. I mean, the game has a response if you type in "cry". That's wild.

Similarly, while I was frustrated by one part where it turned out I'd discovered the solution but not at the point the game wanted me to discover it, I think it's well-paced. You get through a few hurdles early to get you going, then there's the middle section with three simultaneous puzzles, and then the finale is a rapid bound-for-bound escalation into farce. I think parser games could lend themselves well to this sort of comedy; it's easy to imagine Fawlty Towers The Interactive Fiction, where the player would be stacked with more and more absurd tasks until their objective becomes impossible to achieve.

This is also a game where trying everything is very much the point, moreso than figuring out the perfect solution to every puzzle. The nature of the narrator—your girlfriend, Violet, or rather a version of her you seem to have introjected—means that every response the game gives you reveals something about our main characters. (I'm interested if there are more games that 'solve' the triangle of identities with some form of plurality, especially since I'm planning to explore that myself. It seems an obvious route to go down, and it's so smoothly implemented here that I don't actually have much to say about it.)

And who are these characters? Past the sheer joy of reading through ABOUT and discovering that the game gives you the option to play as a lesbian, I found myself split between which 'side' to identify with. I am, after all, an annoying half-Australian creative, but I did also literally start playing this game while procrastinating from my dissertation, so jury's out. Violet seems to walk the line between being the most fleshed-out character in the game and being strangely substanceless. How does she spend her days besides crafting eccentric artpieces to distract her precious little vegemite? Maybe I was distracted by trying to solve puzzles, but I couldn't tell you. And yet, on the other side, how our protagonist feels about their lover is left up to the player, though it's safe to say she looms large in their mind. You could make a case that the pair really are two halves of the same coin, both their lives adding up to one complete person. Whether this makes their relationship perfect or awful is, of course, the central question.

I'll note that 'losing' the game requires giving in to temptation or otherwise making your task impossible (my favourite being when, in desperation, (Spoiler - click to show)I threw the bin at the pen and promptly set off the sprinkler), yet 'winning' the game also requires giving in to (Spoiler - click to show)cathartic anti-Violet destruction. It seems inevitable that the charm will wear off at some point, but then isn't that what the protagonist is fighting so hard to avoid? Entropy and reflection, catharsis and compromise... I believe they can make it work.

There was a discussion on the forums the other day about what makes interactive fiction different from other mediums. I remember a note about how IF (or maybe video games as a whole) doesn't offer the easy voyeurism of linear books or films. It's not that IF isn't haunted by such things as the male gaze, but it doesn't necessarily have the same tension with the camera viewpoint that so much of subversive cinema explores. Violet's ending (Spoiler - click to show)presents an almost opposite perspective: here the player is the one being voyeured, presumably literally if they had played it in the IFComp and the automatic transcript feature existed back then. The player is goaded into typing potentially humiliating commands—of course, there's still joy in it, because it's happening to our avatar and not in real life. We are, in the end, both Violet and the protagonist, observer and player. But this is still something that noninteractive (if such a thing exists) media cannot achieve. It can't make you do the work. The things we do for love, eh?

Also, there's a bit where Violet declares that "our number" is... 67. How about that for a rating: 6/7.

Nice contemplative, descriptive piece with memorable imagery including frozen blood and running from your own body. Choose-your-own-adventure in the hybrid choice/roleplaying sense where you're encouraged to reflect on and decide what sort of character you are, that most of the backstory that contextualises the events is playing out in your mind, bringing up your own memories. You're given a little more to work with than some stuff I've played in that vein which makes it work quite well I feel. It's more about the other characters, but they're there to give you space to think about why you might want to run away to an island. The horror comes more in the nightmarish imagery that haunts conversations and the insomniac air - or I guess to bring it all together, the horror is in the past and we're (avoiding) recollecting what we're running from.