Ratings and Reviews by J. J. Guest

It seems an odd thing to say about a computer game, especially one released this year, but Birmingham IV has "period charm". I started playing the game before I knew that it had originally been written in The Quill in 1988, but it immediately reminded me of BBC Micro games of that era.

Birmingham IV shares many tropes with the games of Geoff H. Larsen. It has a rural English setting with standing stones, long barrows and village inns with colourful names. It is peopled with trolls and other folkloric figures.

Unfortunately it also shares many of the faults of games of that period, such as an inventory limit. Room descriptions tend to omit the direction from which the player first approached the location, perhaps assuming that the player had made a map. It is also very easy to make the game unwinnable without realising it.

Nevertheless the Birmingham IV does have charm, and enough that its flaws didn't stop me from wanting to play it. I'm excited that David Welbourn has now produced a walkthrough, and I do hope that there's a post-comp release that's a little less "old school".

In this short, puzzle-centric game, we play as a young woman with a newly acquired superpower - the ability to stop time. Our job is to save a group of superheroes (and villains) from a nuclear explosion which we have put into a state of stasis.

As with all of Mathbrush's games, The Origin of Madame Time is clever, well implemented and fun to play. The action-packed superhero genre is a tough one to pull off in IF, but Mathbrush achieves it here by presenting the action just as it appears in a comic book - as a series of static vignettes. The puzzle mechanic is also clever; we must utilise the powers of the different characters in order to get them to safety.

Where it is less successful is in its sense of priorities. The exploding airship, which ought to have been front and centre, is not seen until some way into the game. In some of the descriptions, important details and bits of biographical trivia are given equal weight, which robs the setting of some of its drama.

The Origin of Madame Time was written as a sequel to The Owl Consults, but it is not necessary to have played the earlier game in order to enjoy this one. Both games are great fun, and highly recommended.

I first had the pleasure of playing Bogeyman in an IF Meetup group, and of meeting the author, Elizabeth Smyth. Before the playthrough, she felt the need to give us a trigger warning. The game does indeed include scenes of cruelty towards children.

What impressed me right away about the game was its presentation. A choice-based game, Bogeyman’s links are presented at the bottom of each scene in a grid formation, separated by white lines, which is very effective. A glow effect around the text of each link on mouseover was a nice touch. The choice of a fixed width font for the Bogeyman’s dialogue was less successful, however. There are also a few illustrations, of which I would like to have seen more, and some suitably eerie music.

One thing that parser-based games tend to be better at than choice-based games is creating a sense of place, but Bogeyman, a choice-based game, left me with a very clear mental picture of the Bogeyman’s mountainside hovel and its surroundings. The child-kidnapping title character on the other hand is more of a cypher - we are given only glimpses, and this also works very effectively. One gets the feeling that description is absent because none of the children can bring themselves to look at him.

Also well evoked was the sense of a daily routine, which serves as a reminder of how quickly we tend to normalise a terrible situation.

Bogeyman is a long game, and I only had time to play through it once during the competition, but I’ll certainly be returning to it now that the comp is over.

Footnotes in Ashes is a short story about a man lost at sea with his dead wife's ashes. Presented in six short chapters, it is not in any real sense interactive, and there are no alternative endings or different paths to take through the story. The reader advances the story by clicking on super-scripted references which reveal footnotes at the bottom of each page. The footnotes reveal more information, and sometimes a link to the next chapter. It's all a bit unengaging. The unnamed man and his wife remain ciphers, barely sketched in, and without any real agency the story becomes a game of hunt-the-link-to-the-next-chapter. I can't be sure, but I suspect there are one or two bugs in the implementation. It's hard to know whether they are bugs or deliberate text effects; at one point, for instance, footnotes from a previous chapter reappear, seemingly out of context. Towards the end, a genuine error message appears:

Error: <<audio>>: track "thunder" does not exist

With a bit more polish some might find this an interesting short story, but it's not really interactive fiction.

How Gorxungula’s Curse came seventh out nine entries in Abbie Park's Odd Competition, I'll never understand. Eight years have passed, and apart from the one I wrote, it's the only entry I remember. It remains one of my favourite Duncan Bowsman games. I suppose we gravitate to people we admire, and not long after the Odd Competition I got in touch with Mr Bowsman and mooted the idea of collaborating on a game - sadly that association has yet to bear fruit, but I live in hope.

Duncan is a prose stylist who varies his style according to the needs of each project. Here, he writes in the herky-jerky fashion of a carnival ghost train. Abruptly changing direction and crashing through our expectations like bang doors, his writing leaves the reader with the same weightless feeling in the stomach as a thrill-ride. You never know what's coming up next, but it's always the last thing you expected. Bowsman possesses the admirable talent of being able to take elements that have no business being together and forge them into a seamless whole. It looks effortless, but I suspect that this is an illusion, and like the proverbial swan Bowsman’s legs are going like the clappers beneath the surface of the pond.

Gorxungula’s Curse might look at first glance like something thrown together in five minutes, but then you look at the detail, and it’s like a Fabergé Egg, albeit one made from odds and ends from a wizard’s attic. He’s a consummate wordsmith, raiding the second-hand stores of literary history for forgotten treasures and stringing them together like a Dadaist shish kabob that somehow tastes… delicious. He is not afraid of inventing a new word when nothing in the dictionary will suffice, or of resurrecting some archaic term to do his bidding like an Atlantian mummy in a Clark Ashton Smith story. It’s this love of words, and the sheer joy of jamming them together that give his work such energy and colour.

Don’t get me wrong. Bowsman is quite capable of writing a straight story with beginning, middle and end all present and correct and in the right order. Irvine Quik, though quirky, is a great example of this. But it’s these bold experiments of his that I enjoy the most. They’re the text adventure equivalents of Captain Beefheart songs, and in a medium increasingly full of audience-pleasing pabulum, that’s sometimes exactly what we need.

This is an interesting, short Twine game in a fantasy setting, in which one plays a thief hired to steal a gem.

I found the beginning of the game frustrating. Every 'optional' choice I made took me straight back to the 'Rules' page and I had to start all over again. In terms of immersion it threw me out of the game, quite literally, and slammed the door in my face. I wondered what I had done wrong. I can't help feeling that this could have been handled better, perhaps by having a separate page for the rules and for the first paragraph of the game.

The 'rules' themselves had a peculiar effect on the way I played the game. Choices fall into three categories; rogue, dissident and diplomat. We are advised "choose carefully" because "If you choose inconsistently between two category choices, you can often lose points that you've earned from a prior choice. To pass speech checks and earn the best endings, it is ideal to have 0s in the categories that you aren't choosing".

This injunction transformed my experience of the game, and not in a good way. Suddenly, I found I was no longer exploring the story world and making choices at will, instead I was skimming the body text and carefully scrutinising the choices in order to ensure that the ones I chose were consistent. Instead of being a game of "can you steal the Gem of Vorus?" it became a game of "can you tell the difference between a dissident choice and a rogue choice?" Judging by the number of times I got this wrong, the answer is a clear 'no'. I was frustrated by my inability to stay on the straight and narrow, knowing that it would result in my not seeing 'best' endings.

All of which is not to say that this isn't an enjoyable game. It was nicely balanced between action scenes and world building, and contains some very nice writing and characterisation. I'll definitely look out for whatever the author comes up with next. The author clearly knows how to tell a story, but for me the game was marred by the 'rules' which made the game more about second-guessing the author's intent than about taking part in the narrative.

The Tunnel comes across as an intensely personal meditation on the subject of depression. It's intriguing, but the closed off demeanor of the protagonist means that the other characters in the narrative remain more or less ciphers, and though we are invited to fill in the blanks from our own imagination, we're not given much incentive to do so. As a player, there isn't a lot to do, and my feeling is that this story would have worked just as well as static fiction. The multimedia effects add interest but the text sometimes faded off slightly too quickly forcing me to refresh the page in order to finish reading.

So far as I can tell, this gory tale, centred around the programmers behind 'DOOM' isn't interactive at all. There's something that looks like a parser, but it doesn't seem to make any difference what you type. The story is amusing enough, more so if you're a fan of 'DOOM'.

The most frightening of the Ectocomp 2014 games that I've played so far, Lime Ergot creates a genuinely unsettling atmosphere for all the beauty of its tropical setting. The game's main NPC, the General, doesn't do or say much but she nonetheless exerts a terrifying power.