Ratings and Reviews by Sam Kabo Ashwell

Drawing heavily on the Alice corpus but not precisely retelling it, Sentencing Mr. Lidell is a guilt-ridden, surreal journey that partially reveals the history of a deeply messed-up family.

Partially is the key bit, here. Most of the story takes place in a state of dream-logic, laden with significance that can't be unpacked. Elements of characters are gestured at rather than explained or directly shown, and little that is suggested is ever really cleared up. Even before the dream-sequence, most things are not expressed directly.

The plot, such as it is: after work at his hat shop, Alastair Lidell meets his wife Catherine and their infant daughter, and they go to visit the funfair. Their relationship is falling apart: Alastair is numb and withdrawn, Catherine hypersensitive. As they argue, the pram rolls into the canal. Alastair dives in after her and enters a dark Wonderland from which he never emerges, an underground train populated by strange versions of his family.

A good number of people viscerally dislike Sentencing; the amount of misery floating around is so high, and the specifics so indefinite, that it's not hard to end up loathing one major character or another, and with them the whole game. At one point of the dream-sequence you have to (Spoiler - click to show)viciously beat a family member in order to advance. If you're sensitive to issues of PC-player complicity, you're likely to have a hard time with this.

It develops a strong feeling of doomed, dreamlike inevitability, but this involves to scanty implementation, linearity and other unfairness to the player; and this, in turn, ends up disrupting the dreamlike flow. One of the strongest examples: there are scenes in which a previously unmentioned character speaks up out of nowhere. This is just how dreams work, but as far as gameplay goes it doesn't inspire confidence in the world. And that confidence would be misplaced: the implementation is pretty ragged. At various points this interrupts the dreamlike flow of the game; it's somewhat too puzzley for the sort of experience that it's trying to deliver. When it does flow smoothly, these problems fall away; but the texture isn't as even as it could be. Its central gimmick -- in which you gather words from the text, then assemble them into a sentence that determines the ending -- falls far short of what it could be, and is incomplete even at its relatively unambitious scale.

At its best, Sentencing Mr. Lidell is poetic, evocative and challenging; at its worst it's noncommittal and incomplete. Whether its emotional impact is a cheap and nasty trick or an artistic accomplishment is going to depend heavily on your individual reaction.

At first glance, this looks like a big pile of crap-IF tropes: a squalid apartment, a detective-type PC, and a narrative voice that lampshades crap-IF tropes and the game's own half-assedness. On closer inspection, the writing turns out to be actually funny a reasonable proportion of the time.

As the titular slob hero, you're tasked with uncovering a busybody conspiracy against Halloween chocolate in a small American town. Sometimes you encourage delinquency and attack fun-hating prigs, but as often you disrupt The Kids instead: the general tone is one of sociopathy born of slacker incompetence. The design approach aims for scale at the expense of detail and smooth play: characters are thrown in and out with wild abandon, a classic adventure-game jump-between-different-areas map is delivered as a high-speed sketch. The gleefully irresponsible action is sort of charming, although it doesn't quite overcome the game's overstretched design.

The main problem with the thing is gameplay, which is at the lower end of speedIF quality. Crucial exits are never mentioned, read-author's-mind abounds, and there's nothing really resembling direction. At times play flows very fast, at others it flounders. There's an in-game walkthrough, however, and not all of the evidence-gathering seems to be strictly necessary.

An entry in the horror-themed EctoComp, which requires games to be written within a three-hour limit. The usual SpeedIF qualities apply: synonyms are largely absent, the writing could do with a little editing, and the one puzzle suffers from guess-the-phrasing. Keep the walkthrough handy.

Blue avoids SpeedIF wackiness, aiming for a sweeping SF plot -- a hazily-defined plague of worm-like parasites collapses human civilisation, but the protagonist has managed to lay hands on a rare, stupendously expensive android. He could upload himself into it, or use it to save his infected girlfriend. (Spoiler - click to show)If he saves himself, it turns out that the rest of humaity chose a different way to save themselves. There are some minor obstacles to this, but it's essentially a grim-choice kind of game.

The game tries to avoid Usual SpeedIF Wackiness in favour of grim survival-horror and dark irony. (There are strong overtones of Vonnegut.) It's not wholly successful at this: the writing veers into the vague and overwrought a little too much to be really convincing, and there's so much crammed into a rather limited space that some crucial elements lack the time to breathe. Still, a good attempt at a difficult proposition.