Reviews by Bell Cyborg

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm probably not Artful Deceit's intended audience, at least format-wise. The closest I have come to interacting with a Commodore 64 is the other retro game in this competition. But the mystery and the interesting format caught my interest, and so after trying two emulators I jumped in.

Artful Deceit is an affectionately goofy detective game, the kind where a detective's job is more about solving puzzles than breaking alibis. It is emulating (so to speak) a very retro, barebones style of play, with crucial information to be found in the lovely feelies, and only a few verbs. But by that same token I was never majorly confused about what was interactable in the room. The puzzles in the sections I completed were sensible and didn't require any bizarre leaps of logic. (Although the hints allude to a puzzle where you (Spoiler - click to show)press buttons around the sculpture--somehow this did not happen when I played. The (Spoiler - click to show)magenta button was visible to me when I entered the room, and so I (Spoiler - click to show)pressed it and obtained the device right away.)

The biggest hurdle I encountered was simply navigating the house, especially when trying to get into and out of the garage. It is a very large space relative to the number of rooms that can be interacted with, and when the hardware/emulator takes 5-10 seconds to transition between rooms, the time added up. I also struggled with the emulator itself. I had several crashes, and at one point accidentally started editing over the text of the game. I don't know how much of that was the emulation vs. me (as mentioned at the beginning), but after a third crash that was fairly far through and running up against the judging time limit, I had to call it quits.

This was one of the comp games I was most looking forward to playing. I love a good straightforward escape room--and LUNIUM is a good straightforward escape room, with some truly lovely illustrations of the various set pieces.

While in the midst of investigating a series of bizarre murders, you find yourself chained up in a strange room, apparently by the killer themself. Puzzles progress by manually typing in the keywords of various objects--perhaps to ensure that players inspected them thoroughly? I had a few moments of trouble with guessing the noun for this mechanic, notably (Spoiler - click to show)that to light a match, you don't light a "MATCH" but a "PRESTIGE". That took me a while to realize, even having inspected the matchbox--I thought that you simply couldn't burn the matches. But thankfully there is a robust and forgiving hint system, so I was never really "stuck" on a puzzle. Generally the logic and flow through the room was clear, and I enjoyed the puzzles and how they tied into the room's theme.

The one place where I did want to manually input the name was the (Spoiler - click to show)final puzzle: naming the culprit. The input only being available on the confirmation page made the twist more obvious--but maybe that was the intention?

I had my suspicions about the culprit early on, but was pleasantly surprised by the (Spoiler - click to show)multiple possible decisions regarding what to do about it. That was a nice touch.

I was intrigued by the idea of a two-player online murder mystery, so I managed to rope my wife into playing as... my wife. I had fun and so did she.

It is a very, very silly game--there is no worldbuilding reason why the Queen of Egypt is investigating a US diplomatic incident in 2021, it is (as far as I could tell) purely for "don't take this too seriously" purposes and various historical figure jokes. If it was a straightforward twine mystery, I'd probably call it "solid". However, the two-player mechanics were novel and well-implemented, and brought the experience to another level. You share a schedule and have to agree on how to budget your time for interviews and investigations. Narration changes and dialogue options differ between Antony and Cleopatra (sometimes just with slight rewording, sometimes actually differing in information), and the conversation progresses depending on who speaks first. And it seems that the two players can name different solutions--though in our case, we just went with my best guess, which turned out to be correct. I'm very impressed that the author pulled this off in a way that was satisfying to play.

+: Unique two-player mechanics done really well, sandbox mystery with fair clues, some laughs.
-: Prose is somewhat sparse, with scattered typos.

While leaving your house in the aftermath of a breakup, you literally get lost reminiscing on old photos of you and your partner, and have to travel through each picture to diagnose the issues that led to your separation. As I progressed through the photo spaces, I found myself uncovering "insights" that apparently solved the dilemma in the photo, but something wasn't quite right--I felt frustrated by cut-off routes, loose ends, and inventory items I couldn't do anything with. But then I was sent back through the same rooms again, looking at them from a different angle and burrowing deeper into each puzzle room, and I realized this was intentional. It evoked the feeling of unpacking old issues with a friend or in therapy, having to cycle through the same ideas again as you gain further insight into your own character. The structure was a very interesting way of reflecting themes in gameplay, and the ultimate conclusion is somewhat defined by the player.

This felt like an exploratory parser game (my first pull was Photopia) but implemented in Twine, and I quite enjoyed it. I was thankful for the link + inventory format, due to the lateral nature of many of the puzzles (lots of testing inventory items against everything). (Spoiler - click to show)"Cut the wrapping paper to make a smiling mask" and (Spoiler - click to show)"dip a rock in garlic spread" were some of the more out-there examples that I only found through trial-and-error.

+: Interesting surreal puzzles that reflect themes, open-ended conclusions, robust puzzle areas with generally clear clues.
-: Unclear direction at the beginning/some trial-and-error, repetitive structure with returning to the poets.