Reviews by RJ Kowalski

For starters- this is a surprisingly grounded, traditionally structured puzzler that should be beatable in around two hours by someone with general IF familiarity - less if they've got some genre knowledge.

And I honestly think that's the furthest most prospective players should read, just keep in mind what you're getting into and fire the interpreter up. There are no unreasonable puzzles here, and nothing that reading this review will improve.

The structure is traditional in that the player will find themselves confronted by a succession of discrete puzzles, approachable in many different orders, each solvable by the application of the correct item and a little lateral thinking, some of which unlock others. There is one unwinnable situation I found - (Spoiler - click to show)don't eat the fruitcake unless you're ready to speak to the barker - but it's foreseeable. I'm sure if I pressed harder there'd be missable items.

At times the progression through these puzzles can seem a little arbitrary. But in every case the player can illuminate things by embracing a bit of the absurd logic with which they were designed. Cheerfully viewed through ACNE Cartoon Logic Glasses, everything comes into focus immediately. I think that's the greatest win here- there is plenty of entertaining description but the player creates most of their own humor.

No review would be complete without addressing the unique interface choices here. It's a wild choice. I respect it immensely. I also find it tedious in the extreme, but I recommend this one anyway.

When you crack that shell, this is a delightful, tightly-wound set of interactions, and very immersive, against all odds. The puzzles are not intricately detailed, they're more a matter of insight and logical thinking when the player is confronted with the right situation. Admittedly, they do urge replays and experimentation to find a survivable, then optimal route - and that is a pretty unpleasant prospect with the interface.

The command list is short enough to avoid any confusion and the writing is a pleasant balance between gentle satire and foreboding. If the interface doesn't scare you away, do your best to beat this one.

But I'm really not sure whether they're good together. A strange thing. Maybe that helps the theme of dualism above all else that's here.

The first game is pleasantly concrete but lacking somewhat in mechanics. Explore a French village, grab items as they appear, keep most of them and use one or two in one or two nicely designed puzzles, then use a large number of them in the right order when prompted. Your end goal is, effectively, (Spoiler - click to show)to obtain a key and transport it to open the endgame area, after acquiring a collection of items needed for the endgame. This is all nice clean fun.

The second game is the gradual investigation and discovery of the secrets of Saunière and the town, and this is executed more clumsily, but still satisfying. It is not quite like assembling a jigsaw puzzle from gradually discovered pieces, or like drawing connections between information- for the most part, it's more like discovering a pile of puzzle pieces first and then slowly uncovering a dozen different ways to fit them together. Into the same picture, at times. After a certain point the novelty of discovery wears off and there's only so many ways the same information can be presented.

That sounds very strange without spoilers, so- (Spoiler - click to show)By the first few discoveries, the player will likely know that the Cathars are involved, that Saunière found some sort of secret, and that there's a hidden meaning in the landscape of the town and its environs. And then in many other ways, these themes will be reinforced without much elaboration. Showing materials to the bookseller will offer somewhat more elaboration but it doesn't feel qualitatively new.

If it weren't for the fact that the player is arbitrarily prevented from doing so, they could stumble into the endgame sequence after almost zero investigation of the town and the tower. And their experience would be worse for it- but not that much worse.

It's very tough to give a rating here, so I won't- especially because I beta tested.

Alyas of Starhollow goes to great lengths not just to capture the feel of traditional/cassette fantasy IF, but to get the writing style, story structure, and even puzzle design right. In this it is a wholesale success and I can't fault it. It goes right down to having to press seemingly arbitrary letters on the title screen to start the game.

I love this, but it means one ends up with many splinters from the rough edges while playing. And yet even as I write that, it seems unfair. These rough edges are lovingly carved. This is a title that expects the player to go to some trial-and-error, to experiment heavily through timed sections, to guess and explore and reload and reload and refine. There are instances of guess-the-verb and a few of guess-the-noun but nothing counterintuitive- everything always makes sense in hindsight.

The descriptive writing is appropriately austere, and I find it effective, overall.

Let me put it this way. Give this one a try - and if you make it out of the village without too much frustration, press on.

The parser is a serious achievement. It's smooth, with one exception having to do with contained items that's thoroughly explained in the introduction text. There are no puzzles requiring exceptionally complex inputs, but I struggle to think of much that this parser would struggle with.

If I had a nickel for every time I had to (Spoiler - click to show)interrupt the Trinity test to save all of time, I'd have two nickels. This shouldn't be taken as criticism, there's only so many (Spoiler - click to show)times and places to visit in a time-travel title. It's generally not story progression urging the player onward - there's definitely a before and after phase of the game, before and after one major reveal that ties a few threads together and gives the player some impetus. But the player will find themselves neatly cued onwards by interlocking puzzles, a bit of backtracking, and exploration. I never felt that I had to search to find the right spot to use an item or piece of information.

I didn't particularly like the prose - there are standout moments of atmosphere that land well, but other parts plod or use very repetitive language. It's a matter of taste, it wasn't for me, nothing more.

I never needed a map but I think the parallelism of locations is very much to the game's detriment. Exploration should involve discovery, and potential has been sacrificed when a player finds themselves seeing a new location as a new coat of paint on an old map.

None of this hampers or distracts overmuch. This is a strong technical achievement and extremely well-executed, just with creative choices I disagreed with.

First of all, I love Glumpus, and I would never let anything bad happen to him.

Well-written interactive fiction generally makes the player think "that description makes sense, I can see that object." One of the many routes to making great interactive fiction is to make the player think "Wow, that description makes sense, I want to see that object." Room descriptions, item descriptions, and action descriptions fit together here to create a sense of grounded whimsy. Nothing is absurd for the sake of being absurd; things are mundane to an absurd degree. There are so many pitfalls with comedic writing and the only one I can fairly accuse TMVCITW of is that there's some slang that's going to sound out of date within a year. Maybe sooner.

My playthrough took around ninety minutes. Backtracking was abundant and the game is good-natured about it. I stooped for hints once or twice, and by accident, got myself into the alternate ending the first time round. I ran into no significant implementation issues, and the game bends itself backwards to be polite, in a way that comes close to being cloying but never quite bothered me. The game's in on the joke. It wants you in on the joke too.

Puzzle design is a mixed bag. There are some classic archetypes, a few very practical, think-through-the-logical-ramifications-of-physical-qualities puzzles, and one or two that I found completely off the wall. But to the work's credit, I'm always left thinking "That makes sense, in its own way", and not "never would have thought to try that, not sure why it worked".

The writing, as mentioned above, is generally very good. It delivers the comedy and doesn't overstay its welcome. In one case, good writing completely saves a plot device that would be tiresome in almost any other title.

Everything comes together pleasantly. A minor annoyance struggling with a verb, a poorly cued puzzle, or a joke that doesn't land can sour me on a title quickly- but nothing here does because there's always another joke around the next corner, the puzzle is generally funny even if I couldn't make head nor tail of it, and the game goes out of its way to help me along with things that might involve struggling with the parser. It wants to be enjoyed, not fought with. I had a great time.

More than the sum of its parts. Maybe that's unfair - the parts are good - but what I particularly liked here is how the narrative development gradually builds things up from a low-key romp through expansive, nicely modeled hospital hallways into a properly suspenseful conclusion. Gathering the eight signatures gets the player to explore thoroughly and familiarize themselves with the rooms they can access at first, and there's plenty of background detail without it feeling superfluous. None of the puzzles are illogical and at their best they require some of that enterprising teen-fiction-paperback creativity.

None of the NPCs get truly deep characterization, but they don't need it at all. They fit neatly enough into well-trodden narrative tropes that the player gets a good idea of who to trust, who might be useful, and who represents a puzzle. The execution of the climax is excellent. A familiarity with the layout of the hospital and a careful eye for detail pay serious dividends.

There's no real parser fiddliness except for the service elevator, which I think I just didn't understand completely.

Around about halfway into the game, I found myself thinking something like 'gee, the tone of this one reminds me of something else I've played, in a good way. I wonder..."

Then I took a closer look at the box.

Still, it's not remotely derivative; moreso, it's pleasantly reminiscent of some of the best, eeriest magical realism in games that have come before. It just works nicely.

In terms of structure, the three-fold parallel approach fits well and avoids any headaches; it's very merciful and allows the player to focus on puzzling. And goodness, the puzzling. These expect you to think on your feet, notice and examine everything, make some logical leaps, take breaks and backtrack, and think laterally. The parser is generally your friend throughout. Where this design approach doesn't work so well is in the intro 'action' scene and to a lesser extent in the finale; when the player is put under real or apparent time pressure I feel that things should be more closely cued.

It's a long ride but it's very satisfying to finish. I deliberately haven't said much about the story; I think it complements the puzzles and keeps the player attached, but of course many questions are left unanswered.

Everything in this game feels robust. Efficient use is made of relatively concise descriptions to create immersion; good liminal space vibes. There are 'useless' rooms but not so many as to get overly confusing, the puzzles are all logical, we get small hints of characterization from the protagonist but that's clearly not the focus.

There's definitely several points where I feel more X blurbs could have been implemented - starting with the working bits of the gate at the beginning. Then again, I'm a stickler for background detail being examinable. There's one puzzle that in my opinion was unfair - (Spoiler - click to show)sitting on the bench. It didn't need better signalling, but more than one verb should have worked there.

It's not a giant game but it does a good job of translating a real location into an immersive experience and fitting some relevant, logical puzzles into that location.

I found myself liking this one more than I expected - it took a moment to grasp the core mechanic in the second part of the game but once I did, I was delighted. The first part of the game has some parser/background fiddliness but it's nothing world-ending.

(Spoiler - click to show)The acting scenes thread a fine line between having everything cued to the player, leaving no room for experimentation, and leaving the player lost. The in-world conceit for not having a script works, a script definitely would have killed the fun. I did find that there wasn't much dramatic payoff to the 'right' choices. Not exactly a ratings win, I should think.

In the end I was left with a strong desire to experience more of these characters and this setting, and that's a great achievement.

But not much more. There's nothing really wrong here, everything works as expected, it shows off how to accomplish many basic design tasks with PunyInform, but the experience is very short and without many frills. It's a 38kb game after all.

Ultimately, at many points while playing this title I had to keep in mind the fact that it was written in less than eighteen hours, and with Inform 6 to boot. By those standards I think it's a fun, mostly structurally solid exploration of what you can really do in such a brief time.

You're on an abandoned ocean liner, stuck in an iceberg, and need to formulate an escape. Doing this will require a thorough exploration of your surroundings, a disregard for personal property, and at least one cruel prank. I'm reminded of some classic 80s works, not least of all when it comes to the central feature of the game - two hundred cabins with randomly-generated contents.

Description, where present, is evocative and well-done. The brief writing time means that there are several parser difficulties but none proved too difficult; in some cases only one verb will work but it's the most obvious one, which I don't even consider a problem. There are a few item disambiguation issues but again, none showstopping. Searching two hundred cabins sounds incredibly tedious, but it's not so bad. What *is* regrettable is several cases of unmentioned items in room descriptions; nothing requires guessing but it can take unreasonable leaps of logic to figure out what to examine to find these things.

(Spoiler - click to show)The clothing necessary for one puzzle is found in the first four or five suitcases you find, and the gas cylinder you need for the balloon is found in whichever room the clown was staying in; it's a very reasonable implementation.

There are three, arguably four real puzzles, and all are logical without too much fiddling; the sparseness of the game makes the cues fairly obvious but not unenjoyable.