Reviews by Joey Jones

This game is very buggy and at least some of the room descriptions were written using ChatGPT. Still, it's a very characterful romp invoking a specific time and place and kind of social scene, and for all its many rough edges in implementation, the game is not hard to interact with and have an amusing experience.

This game has an interesting relationship to mimesis. It’s very much a game of two halves. The first part is a puzzleless tutorial about following cultural rules; the second part is a series of puzzles with little cultural rule following (other than observing the priest’s ritual).

In the initial tutorial section at the inn, the player’s action is entirely dictated by what is culturally expected of the samurai character. For example, the player must take off their shoes before entering the inn. The game throughout is richly researched, though written very much in an edutainment register.

In the second half, the player does three of what Roger S. G. Soralla, in his seminal essay “Crimes Against Mimesis”, called “Puzzles Out of Context”. The player has to solve a logic grid puzzle, a Nurikabe puzzle, and a maze with room names all alike (this isn’t a spoiler, the game’s main page explicitly warns you that these are coming). To Garry Francis’s credit, all three puzzles are somewhat embedded in their setting, though their presentation in each case quite literally takes you out of the game. In the two logic puzzles, you go away from the game and fuss about in an abstract grid and then go back to the game and enact the solution; in the maze, you’re encouraged to make a map. Map making is a time-honoured adventure game tradition, and one of the game’s goals is to teach players somewhat to play adventure games, so I can’t really begrudge this one. However, the overall effect is to repeatedly step out of the story and think as-a-player, rather than as-the-character. And this is in sharp contrast to the initial, more setting-grounded, section.

In the second half, the social rules have mostly been forgotten about, the player needn’t remove their shoes before entering any of the huts (though perhaps those rules don’t apply to commoners).

There are a lot of period-appropriate details in The Samurai and the Kappa, and the game invests the most detail on three of them: the specificities of the strange myth of the Kappa, Kami temple rituals, and inn-based child prostitution. The first two are intertwined with the game’s puzzles and plot and make the game a distinct experience. The third is a period detail that the author was especially interested in exploring but has no impact on the plot or puzzles, though maybe we can say that it is used as a way to teach new players how to use the parser.

Both halves have their merit, but tonally they make for an unbalanced experience.

This is an excellent first chapter that uses Twine in a really elegant way. The story of an enhanced eugenics movement is told quite cleverly through bunking off school and exploring a county fair(Spoiler - click to show) (i.e. being the very delinquent that is called unfit).

My hope is the project hasn't been abandoned as this is such a great concept well executed.

This starts out unpromising, in the ultimate entry in the My Crappy Apartment genre, as you awake in a grody underimplemented squat. But it soon picks up. The game is played entirely through going places and talking to your friends— all fellow anarchists. It essentially has two short scenes: before and during the rally.

The core themes— ineffectual action and anxious micropolitics of an activist group— are underdeveloped and gestured towards. You can gather from the notes before and after the game ends that completing the game was a heroic effort by the author and much was left undone. From the bold use of colours, and the menu-based interaction, it's a shame Brendan didn't have Twine to use when he wrote this, as he would have been able to implement the whole thing much more smoothly and would have had more time to explore his narrative vision.

I think the original comp entry was quite buggy. I didn't have any real issues, and I thought the implementation of the conversation system was surprisingly elegant (e.g. you can use a two-letter shortcut command to switch between NPC conversations).

Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country is a parody of AIF in general, especially the sort epitomised by the original SM, which had the MS3TK treatment. It also parodies the genre of XTrek (erotic Star Trek fan-fiction). The AIF plot structure and the Star Trek setting form the loose structure upon which to hang the jokes. And jokes there are aplenty!

This game made me laugh out loud several times and also exposed me to a surprising amount of cybertextual ergodic literary theory. I didn't expect to learn anything from this game, but I did. The funny parts for me were the sendups of people adjacent to the interactive fiction sphere at the time. The Trek/Star Wars jokes are very tired by now, 20 years on, though they probably weren't that great then either, though there was one standout moment with (Spoiler - click to show)the force ghost of a Space Moose and his timely advice.

There's a good bit of genre subversion going on, with the normal AIF skeevy dynamic of the protagonist-as-subject/NPC-as-winnable-object eventually inverted.

As well as being amused and intrigued, I was also disgusted at several junctures. It's an emotional kessel run. With music! And graphics! And very silly sound effects! Actually the multimedia elements really did add to my enjoyment here (except in one very specific instance— if you've played to the end, you know the one).

The puzzles were fair and made to be more amusing than difficult, with a particularly funny sequence where you almost have the right thing in a fetch-quest several times. I completed the game readily without any walkthrough or hints (I don't think either exist).

(Note: it deserves every one of its multiple screens of content warnings. Some parts of it really are gross.)

Brief interaction with a traditional healer, with presumably authentic medicine names. It feels churlish to rate and review something like this, especially as the context of the jam it was submitted to may have been to encourage this sort of entry, but there's really nothing much to it.

As the game blurb says, this is unfinished and not worth playing. From as far as I could get with it, it would have been a neat idea, but this was not the way to implement it.

A few years before this came out, there was an explosion of Twine games around mental illness, and the trans experience. This is a game in this mode, with a range of adroit textual effects— mostly cleverly arranged sequences of links. At their best, these effects help you enact the protagonist's experience and mindset.

There are some sets of imageries that seem somewhat derivative of early works like Porpentine's, and the whole writing approach is to raise many more questions than it answers. Overall, it's well worth playing for a few well-crafted microscenes.

There's a whole genre of magical apprentice games: you're left to your own devices in a wizard's sanctum, a tower, or castle, with a lot of puzzles to solve in aid of furthering your magical education. The Apprentice is a game in this genre, with something of a story— very cod fantasy but still, a bit of a mystery and some motivation. The various puzzles tend towards breaking apart the scenery and using bits in various ways. For the time, there's some player friendly elements to make it a little harder to get stuck.

Of its kind, a good example, though it has now been surpassed.

Technically beatable maze for someone with a lot of patience and/or bloodymindedness.