Ratings and Reviews by Emily Short

This is a vignette-sized piece about trying to get the attention of someone who interests you, at a diplomatic ball, through a short series of light puzzles.

I initially struggled a little bit with what I was supposed to be doing and had to glance at the source -- the main interaction mode could be better hinted in-game -- but once I'd worked that out, I was able to get through without further spoilers. The main things to bear in mind are that you should TALK TO and LISTEN TO other people: this will give you hints about what they're likely to want, and allow you to make some progress in the story. Also, one critical action is coded in terms of the general task you're trying to accomplish, rather than the components of that task. (Spoiler - click to show)If you find yourself struggling with the tea leaves and cauldron of water, don't bother -- just MAKE TEA.

I also did run into a few typos and mis-punctuations.

That said, there's actually a little more world-building than one might expect from so brief a piece, and I found myself smiling several times at character behavior and descriptions. Also, because all of the puzzles involve doing things that will provoke a reaction from other characters, they gave me a certain satisfaction even though they weren't exactly difficult.

If you enjoyed Plundered Hearts, August, or the games in SwashComp, you may find this a fun few minutes' play.

On a Horse with No Name is a fast-playing, lightly puzzly fantasy short. It's a tale about a person with amnesia in a trackless waste, but it has better than usual excuses for this, and the main selling point of the piece is its slightly Twilight-Zone twist. Neither the prose nor the setting depth are as strong as the concept itself, but they work well enough to get the point across.

The game's biggest puzzle is a bit underclued -- I had to look at the walkthrough for one step of it -- but it's well integrated: it serves to teach some rules of this story universe that you need in order to understand the stakes of the final scenes.

There are some polish issues. The parser is not fabulous. It's using an earlier version of Alan that gives some unhelpful responses to now-standard kinds of interaction. And I ran into a couple of bugs if I did things out of the expected sequence, but these flaws really weren't serious enough to impede the progress of the game; a few descriptions that were out of sync with the world state, but nothing that made it impossible to continue.

As an aside: there are points where I got stuck because I just needed to WAIT. It's worth giving that a try if your situation seems to be uninteractive.

HOLY ROBOT EMPIRE is a short and easy puzzler built around the premise that robots have become dominant over humans, not just technologically but spiritually as well. The new theology is based on a robotic comprehension of the universe, which they will sometimes deign to communicate to humans. Your protagonist's goal is to kiss the ring of the Robot Pope, though as there are a lot of other humans who want to do the same, you'll need to solve some puzzles in order to get close enough.

This premise feels silly and is mostly handled in an amusing way, but there are a few darker or more serious moments: a musing on the nature of faith towards the end, the relics one finds of human religion, the suggestions of an Inquisition, and the treatment of some of the human NPCs. These give the worldbuilding a little more heft than it might initially appear to have.

The puzzles, meanwhile, are on the lighter side in terms of difficulty. They mostly involve finding objects to fit spaces or locks, but there are a couple of nice twists in which the player may find her expectations inverted. Solidly implemented and fairly clued.

Though HRE is a Shufflecomp game, built using song suggestions submitted by other members of the IF community, it does not require any familiarity with those songs to play.

10 Second Defence is a single-puzzle game about laying out a booby trap for someone you know is coming after you, using a combination of objects found in your one-room apartment. There is a tiny amount of backstory about how you got into this situation, but really not very much: the game isn't so much interested in telling you a story as in setting up a replayable challenge.

When a piece is primarily about inventive uses of objects, implementation becomes extremely important. 10 Second Defence is a mixed success in this department. It doesn't always offer implicit actions that ought to be obvious ((Spoiler - click to show)such as picking up the glue before gluing something to the wall). Some of the actions are a bit surprising or require finicky wording ((Spoiler - click to show)I had to experiment with several phrasings before figuring out how to fill the syringe from the capsule), and one solution requires things to behave in a way I found a bit implausible ((Spoiler - click to show)it was hard for me to believe that even a very strong glue would affix the knife to the wall in a way that would successfully stab the hitman).

On the other hand, there are multiple uses for most of the objects, and the replay concept worked pretty well for me. I found that each playthrough gave me some ideas about what might work better next time, without being entirely obvious about it.

I was able to replay to a successful conclusion in about five tries, and enjoyed doing so.

Into the Open Sky tells a big sweeping story: after many generations, an interstellar empire is brought down by internal betrayal, the great starships that defended the Empress turn against one another, and access to the Imperial time vortex, the Palace of Mirrors, is lost. There are many additional pieces of lore: love stories, myths, bits of imperial history, and hints of the protagonist's own complicated and storied past. Many of these stories and pieces of information are presented through database entries and diaries that can be unlocked, in a way faintly reminiscent of (but less disciplined than) Christine Love's Analogue: A Hate Story.

The gameplay aspects of the piece are not up to the scale of the narrative conception, however. There are a few key scenes of present-day dialogue or combat, but these are delivered as cut scenes; when it comes to the aspects under the player's control, they involve tasks like swapping out power couplings and giving predefined commands at particular starship consoles. There are a number of minor polish issues, as well -- for instance, descriptions that describe a particular object being a particular place even though the player may have already picked that item up.

The structure of the game also gives somewhat the impression that the author significantly scaled back his initial plans. There are some doors that never become openable through the whole game, and others which open only during an epilogue sequence at the end, when the player is told to wander around gathering as much data as she likes, then quit when she's done. So in this portion one gets the impression that the author originally intended a longer sequence of gameplay to introduce those rooms and objects organically, but perhaps ran out of time to make that happen.

Despite all this, there were some striking and vividly imagined pieces to the story, which kept me interested enough to play through to the end.

I came away thinking that perhaps the author would have had an easier time with choice-based rather than parser-based IF: the larger sections of non-interactive text would have flowed more naturally in that context, and some of the puzzles could have been implemented in a more streamlined way, allowing the author to focus on the expansive lore-telling that seemed to interest him most.