Reviews by Emily Short

This very tiny game is an optimization puzzle about what you can fit into your knapsack, given weights and values for the objects in front of you. It's reasonably entertaining (if you like that kind of puzzle to start with) but not very ambitious -- there's nothing there besides the one challenge.

The interface has been simplified to accommodate the parameters of choose your own adventure-style interaction, so you only have to type the numbers of treasures in order to add them to your holdings or drop them again.

One of my favorite introcomp entries of all time, Hey, Jingo! has an oppressively present jungle setting and sinister hints of some horrific mystery going on.

That said, it is an introcomp game, and no finished version was ever posted -- so what's there is brief and short on gameplay, and the cliffhanger is necessarily disappointing. Not really a game in its current state, just a stub of something that might've been pretty nifty.

Piracy 2.0 takes a not-especially-novel premise about a ship attacked in space (see also Orevore Courier, Across the Stars, et al.) and makes something better-than-average out of the results. As the captain of the Ceres, you have to escape the brig and find a way to regain control of, or at least neutralize, your ship before the pirates have a chance to use it as a pirate vessel.

What makes the game a standout is how many and interesting are your options once you've escaped confinement. The ship has a lot of different features -- weapons, navigation, abilities to shut off parts of the ship from one another, etc. -- and there are a number of different ways to use all those features to produce different outcomes. So the main part of the game feels not so much as though you're working through a stack of set puzzles, but as though you're really coming to grips with a complex system and then inventing ways to use it against the pirates. This is hugely satisfying. To make this work, the Ceres has been designed in a lot of detail (feelies for the game include a very classy-looking diagram of the ship, which is useful).

Detractors have noted some lack of polish in certain areas (actually, the game gets sturdier after you leave the first couple of rooms, contrary to the general trend of IF games), and there appear to be a couple of puzzle solutions that produce buggy results. (Spoiler - click to show)In particular, trying to escape in the lifeboats may kill you even though by rights you ought to be getting away, or so it seems -- and you can still be killed by the pirates in person if you rig the sleeping gas then escape by lifeboat, even though you should have left them far behind. With luck, these aspects will be improved in a future release of the game.

Even with more polish, Piracy will always be a bit derivative as a story. The world-building relies a lot on tropes from popular SF, and at that it's more Star Trek than Firefly. Your crewmates get some passing attention, enough to make them seem less like ciphers, but you won't be interacting too much with most of them.

But then, story isn't the main point of this game. It's meant to be fun and challenging, and it is. I found myself constantly on the edge of getting stuck... and constantly having that "well, let me just try THIS ONE THING" thought before I completely gave up. Despite some gameplay remnants of a much earlier age (an instant death room, randomized combat sequences), overall Piracy 2.0's design works very well. I would love to play more games that had a similarly rich, open-ended challenge -- one that didn't really feel like a "puzzle" (with all the artificial implications) at all.

It should not surprise anyone that a game by Eric Eve is meticulously tested and player-friendly -- or that it allows a wide range of options in a spacious environment -- or that it features Biblical references and an elusive, unsettling female character.

I think Nightfall works better than Elysium Enigma, though: the atmosphere is more consistent, the puzzle elements more plausibly suited to their setting, the story is ultimately more thematically coherent and focused more deeply on personalities. The essential premise is hauntingly tied to things actually happening in the world, and the abandoned spaces feel plausibly chilling. Moreover, Eve takes full advantage of his medium. Implied time limits rush you along, built-in pathfinding allows you to navigate a city that the player character knows much better than the player, and a host of small design choices guide the story without making it feel too linear.

Nightfall is a competition game, but deserves more than two hours. The basic mystery of the game can be resolved in a single playing, but to understand the characters properly, and to get a happier ending, will probably take a second try, with more exploration. In a way, it is like the inverse of Varicella: where the player of Varicella must play many times in order to achieve the perfect Machiavellian plot, the player of Nightfall starts off in the middle of a situation planned by others, and may need to replay in order to escape it.

The game is not perfect. I was not always completely convinced by the motivations of the characters, who have to do some fairly extraordinary things. Nonetheless, it's a creepy and memorable work displaying superb IF craftsmanship.

I wanted to like this curious little game: the opening situation is surreal but described with a certain amount of appeal, and one-move (or fake-one-move) games are an interesting subgenre with more room for exploration.

Unfortunately, the prose in Phoenix Move is full of errors and infelicities -- some of them as simple as it's/its errors, some of them more complicated abuses of English idiom. It wasn't always clear where the author was trying for a deliberately poetic or peculiar description and where the language had just gotten out of hand. Soon I found the effect off-putting enough that I stopped playing.

There were also some rough spots where quite obvious actions (most surprisingly, GET EGG) were unaccounted-for.

So this might be something fairly evocative, but it might be a good idea for the author to collaborate with a native English speaker to check through the text.

Considering the source, one should expect this to be very old-fashioned -- and it is. Descriptions are minimal. The setting is stark and lacks atmosphere. There is no particular explanation for how things got to where they are. Combat is randomized, and is affected by the weapons the player happens to be carrying when he attacks a monster, but otherwise uncontrollable once it starts. There's also not much one could describe as a puzzle here. One wanders from room to room, picking up treasures and killing monsters, until one reaches the far side of the castle and has one's final score totted up.

Looked at another way, the whole game could be an optimization puzzle, to find the best route through the game to collect all the treasures and kill all the monsters while spending as little as possible on supplies and rations. (Hunger is implemented in this game, but in an unusual way: instead of counting down per turn, the player loses strength each time he travels from room to room, and can regain it only by eating rations, which cost $2 each.)

Personally, I didn't find it enough fun to want to play over and over in search of a best path, but some people might.

If this were a modern game, I'd give this two stars; considering the source, I'm leaving it unrated.

A silly and rather far-fetched scenario about how you get rolling again when your car breaks down in Portugal. I give it three stars only because it is quite a small game, with only a couple of puzzles: this one is good-natured and charming, with some sly humor. It is roughly the size of a speed-IF, but more coherent and better polished.

The game is also written accessibly enough that non-native speakers of French will probably not find themselves too baffled by slang or idioms. For those who can follow along but get stuck figuring out what to type, standard IF commands in French can be found in PDF form here: http://ifiction.free.fr/fichiers/Introduction-IF-fr.pdf [look for the page with the puppet on it]. Many standard English abbreviations also do continue to work in the game alongside their French equivalents. Since the game also includes contextual hints and a complete solution on demand, it is unlikely to leave the non-native speaker stranded.

I had high hopes for this, since I enjoyed both the book and the board game from which it takes its inspiration. In practice, though, I find it completely bewildering. During the first part of the game, there's not much to do other than sleep and attend holy services; there's some interesting coding at work here so that whenever bells ring for Matins, Lauds, etc., the player will automatically zombie-walk to the church to attend, but that makes the game somewhat uninteractive at the beginning.

After a couple of services, one of the monks turns out to be missing, and I'm directed to look for him. I assume (given the premise) that he's supposed to turn out to be dead -- but I can't seem to find a corpse, nor do any of the other monks seem especially concerned about looking. So the game continues for quite some time with my aimless exploration of the abbey, interrupted by service after service. (Time passes quickly here, with the result that one is called back to the church extremely frequently. While this mechanic makes some sense in the original board game, it's frustrating in IF form.) At this point I've used up nearly a whole day without having found any clues or having any better idea what I'm supposed to be doing than I had at the outset.

On the one hand: a reasonable amount of work seems to have gone into animating the characters and programming the player to return to the church on schedule, and there are a number of touches where the author seems to have done period research in order to flesh out the settings with appropriate furniture and room descriptions. I'm all in favor of historical IF, so this is nice to see. And from the evidence of the other review, there is obviously *sometimes* more to see than I got a chance to experience.

On the other hand, the gameplay is either buggy or very badly-directed. The story side doesn't do much better, either. The game encourages the player to go around asking the characters about one another, but quite often they have almost nothing to say; responses such as "I don't know him well" are common, which is strange given that this is a very small community of monks who live and work together, and who would be likely at this point to be all too intimately aware of each other's personality quirks. Furthermore, characters show no discomfort discussing third parties who happen to be in the room.

In short: this is an interesting concept that deserves a better execution. "An Act of Murder" shows that the randomly-selected-murderer scenario can work in IF; "The Abbey" doesn't appear to have pulled it off, though.

Ecdysis is a compact bit of horror. Summarizing the plot too much would only ruin it, but it's worth knowing that this is one of several games based on snippets from H. P. Lovecraft's "Commonplace Book", and that the premise is a weird and disturbing one.

Ecdysis is fairly linear up until the late stages of the game. I found that the first release of the game had some awkward moments, but the later release is smoother and easier to play. Puzzles are mostly a matter of figuring out the one next thing you can do, and are not too hard -- but all the same this does make some good use of its interactivity. Worth a look.

This is a short-short horror game, surreal and suggestive without quite coming out to say what is truly going on. The plot might appeal to people who also liked, for instance, All Alone, or the entries in the Commonplace Book Project. It also shows a certain amount of effort and care, especially for a first-time outing: it comes complete with hint and help menus and cover art.

The main problem is that it hasn't been tested as much as it should: missing synonyms, some sensible actions not accounted for, and so on. The room descriptions also sometimes feel rather minimal. Better pacing of exposition and exploration would make the game more suspenseful and deliver the story better.

A future version of the game could improve on many of these things, leaving a substantially stronger effort.