Ratings and Reviews by Sam Kabo Ashwell

The essential problem of any piece of art is getting the audience on board with what you're trying to accomplish. The worst thing that can happen to an author is if, by accident, your piece strongly suggests an interpretation completely incompatible with your aims.

Repetition can be dark, claustrophobic, ominous, spirit-crushing. It can also be ridiculous. These functions aren't mutually exclusive -- just within IF, the repeated self-sabotage of Violet is both funny and heart-rendingly tragic -- but the emergence of one when you were meaning to just do the other is lethal. (Spoiler - click to show)Grief's portrayal of a paranoid, overprotective parent, becoming increasingly desperate to protect their child over multiple iterations, is meant to reflect agonising guilt; instead, as the parent's protective measures get stronger they seem more ridiculous, and as the child finds ever more arcane ways to die things drift into the realm of Edward Gorey or South Park. Serious tragedy is hard, and the structural idea is not inherently awful; perhaps with stronger prose and less generic characterisation it might have worked.

The other problem is that the subject matter, and to some extent the structure, draw inevitable comparisons with Photopia; intentional or not, that's a tough act to follow.

There's been a few games where a significant part of my experience was tied up in community play; something fairly long and puzzle-oriented gets released outside the comp, and there's a few weeks during which a good portion of IF people are playing simultaeneously. There's a tone of mild competition, you can get tailored hints fairly easily, and if you want to discuss something about it then it's fresh in everyone's mind. It doesn't happen too often; the game needs to be fairly long, somewhat difficult and reasonably well made. First Things First and Savoir Faire are good examples of games that really benefited from this kind of play, but I think of Heroine's Mantle is the primary example -- largely because I wouldn't have played it very far without that context.

The style is superhero cheese plus a good deal of campy spy thriller. I'm fairly sceptical about how suited superhero fiction is to IF; it's a genre all about action and visuals, it doesn't exactly play to IF's strengths. HM deals with the action problem by making your powers functional but quite limited, like the superhero version of an Enchanter spell; this is a tenable approach, but the puzzle structure is really too linear to make the powers feel very powerful. There is a good use of the training-sequence in which you learn to use your powers -- common in mainstream videogames, not much-used in IF. (A game needs to be pretty long for it to be of much use; games like The Erudition Chamber or The Recruit, which are entirely training-sequence, always strike me as kind of unsatisfying.) The puzzles are generally pretty hard, there are a lot of them, they're mostly very traditional in style, and they're sometimes a little awkward.

The writing's indifferent, and the plot's about at the standard of Hollywood superhero movies, with similar problems of tone -- too earnest, and inclined to leering. Your mileage may vary. Length is a big advantage; most IF is so short that there's little space for character arc or really explore a game mechanic. So the storytelling here isn't very dense, but it can still accomplish a fair bit.

If you like old-school puzzlers and superheroes, and aren't very sensitive to representation of women in fiction, you're likely to get a lot out of this. Otherwise, unless circumstances align, it's likely to be a struggle.

Jacaranda Jim was the first IF I ever played. It was, to put it mildly, not a brilliant game; the tone is wacky-morose-snark in that Douglas Adams style that's unbearable when done by anybody other than Douglas Adams. It was clearly aware of this. The world doesn't make a vast amount of sense now, and it made even less sense to an eight-year-old. It kills you a lot. It traps you permanently in certain rooms. It has a sidekick character, Alan the Gribbley, who is both revolting and useless. When I wrote off for the map and my one hint, the former turned out to be larger by several orders of magnitude than the area I had actually managed to explore.

There were, however, a number of puzzles that I managed to solve. They didn't really resemble anything that might be considered a plot, but I gained a good deal of satisfaction from them anyway. And I played and played and played it, despite everything, because I understood that this was a medium vastly more appealing than anything else available at the time, if only the content wasn't so horrendous. So I owe it a fairly substantial debt, despite all.

Moreover, it introduced me to a number of words, including 'bootleg' (there is an evil Software Pirate) and 'plinth'.

The key to this is setting and aesthetics. Most of the gameplay revolves around running errands, finding a cat, meeting your friend for lunch and so on, but you're doing it through sun-dappled vineyards and grand old libraries. It's (somewhat girly) high fantasy, which isn't really my genre, but it was a very pleasant space to inhabit nonetheless.

Plot-wise, the game ends just as the action begins, which is sort of an anticlimax; it feels like the intro to a much larger game. "More please" is hardly excoriating criticism, but as it stands the grand-scale political intrigue and the closing action scene feel like a distraction from what the game's good at.

There are a few pieces of art, which are effective as far as they go; there aren't really enough of them to contribute much to the game proper, though, so it's probably best to think of them as cover art.

As with Gun Mute, the basic approach here is to take a lot of fun, highly familiar tropes, pack them in densely and then turn the saturation up a couple of notches. So, the crime-fighting protagonists are ravishingly attractive and barely avoid falling into each others' arms at any given moment; the villain is given to over-the-top monologuing; and so on. The writing is good, even if the one-word parser limits your ability to poke at the scenery.

Because the basic style being drawn on is an episodic one - a Sherlock Holmes short story, an Avengers episode - the game feels very short. Character development doesn't really get very far beyond introduction, for instance.

Not as theoretically exciting as Gun Mute -- the setting's more conventionally handled and the interaction gimmick is less striking -- but a solid and enjoyable piece of work.