Reviews by Joey Jones

Neat use of the constraint, gives appropriate advice for each draw, draws seem appropriately random, pictures are a nice addition. A small concept expertly realised.

This is bathetic Lovecraftian horror-comedy in much the same register as Hunger Daemon. The replay-to-get-all-the-endings structure isn't as tedious as in some games as the work is very short. Ideally, the different section's text would be dependent on the order of selection so that the acts more organically lead up to the various endings. But for what it is, it's competently written and the different endings were all about equally engaging. (Spoiler - click to show)I liked the conceit of the ritual being so unclear as to have wildly different results depending on how its performed.

If you think this might be your cup of tea, then it's definitely worth playing.

The Book of Living Magic is a short and easy graphical point-and-click adventure game with a zany fantasy setting, aimed at a younger audience. It's chief draw is the wealth of examinable discrete scenery objects, rewarding exploration. The over-arching plot is sweet, if a tad ham-fisted at times. The conversation system could do with being more organic: typically, you can talk about most things before knowing why they're relevant. The tone of the piece wavers around the zany/sentimental border, with slight nods to the macabre (especially with the cat). I don't regret playing it.

Myriad steps towards the kind of branching story I always wanted to read: to hell with merging nodes, I want full bifurcation, 24/7; and Porpentine obviously also heard the sirens of unreasonable work-load calling and dove into the pools of unending possibilities and dragged out this strangle-weeded narrative, a pocket of infinities. The quality is high, mostly consistently so; for most of it I was thinking 'Yeah, this is pretty good, I can see what she's doing here, blah blah, blah,' but then I played the scorpion queen section, which borders on being a puzzle, and it was okay; BUT THEN, then afterwards the denouement hit me like the well crafted metaphor that it was and I felt compelled to give it a write up pronto-like.

[So uh, don't waste time not reading Myriad when you could be reading Myriad. For me, (and I love-hate star ratings) this would have been a five star experience if my jaw hadn't taken four play-throughs to drop.]

The Algophilists' Penury must take the award as the most arcane and prolix of interactive fictions, and I've played a bit of Gamlet. Jon Stall has a vocabulary almost equal to the greatest of verbose authors (Mary Shelley and her perquisitions and purlieues comes to mind) and he employs it in the most prevaricatory of stories. The protagonist of his tale is a strange collective who are looking back (possibly from beyond the grave) on their time when they were woefully poor and engaged in depravities.

For a game ostensibly about masochism, it does a very job of punishing the player. Foremost, there is the viciously opaque language that forces all but the most erudite of players to struggle to put together meaning. And then what little of the scant gameplay there is pushes the player to fully embrace the role of the algophilists. In the end, they are a collective formed by all those that play the game.

Unfortunately, the game as it is is very short with low implementation. It leans heavily on the novel default past tense first person plural responses offered by Ron Newcomb's custom library messages extension. Also, where it says 'soubriquets' in the text (a just about acceptable variant), the game actually only understands 'sobriquets'. Jon has released the game into the public domain along with its source, so perhaps we'll see some Algophilist remixes in the future.

A Minimum Wag Job is charmingly executed for a game probably written in less than two hours. The game sort of presumes that you clear each room in an east to west order- and lays down clues to help you build a picture of what to do at the game's conclusion. As such, given the sparsity of possible successful actions in the game, it does a good job of signalling what sort of thing would be successful.

This is a Speed IF in which you may well die several times before completion, and the nature of the death is such that you have to restart the game each time. This is no great hardship as the successful solution can be achieved in less than a minute.

As a game qua game, I couldn't give it more than 2 stars, but as an example of the Speed IF genre it's a solid 3, especially in its clever integration of the conceits of the Speed IF challenge.

Also, I'm definitely using the word 'flugulate' in my everyday speech!

(''flugulate'' (floo-gyu-layt), v.i.: To run about wildly in an attempt to catch a piece of paper that has been caught up in a breeze)

The text is consistently sparse, which creates an arid environment in which every word has fuller resonance. The game layers its unpleasantness, so that when the eponymous baby tree arrives it has a much creepier effect. Unfortunately, the ending in its comparative wordiness(Spoiler - click to show) and the less-than-compelling 'you die' message, somewhat undermines the effect of the rest of the short piece by pushing it beyond the narrow boundary between the unsettling and the ridiculous.

Fingertips: Fingertips is a first class little multi-layered cryptographical puzzler with a richly evoked science fiction setting that neatly makes the one move requirement make sense.

It's the kind of game that you need to write notes on (or uh, at least I did), and has different solutions such that when you find the better solution, the work involved getting there has made it that much more satisfying.

The best part of the game is the fun riff it has with casual gaming themes like achievements, meters and bars for all sorts of things. There are great jokes here. I recommend playing the game for a half dozen turns and just look at the status bar.

The game itself is difficult in unsatisfying ways: it's often thinly implemented and it requires arbitrarily trying out commands from a long list of possible commands. Despite it being an escape-the-room game, the set up fails to give any particular motivation or direction for doing so.

The only npc exists only to annoy you, in which it is fairly successful, and what with its constant jabbering and the swarm of useless info on the status bar and humongous text dumps all over the place, the game feels very claustrophobic and cluttered. Which you'd think would be good for an escape-the-room game, but as the whole thing is so unmotivated, the clutter doesn't serve any narrative or thematic purpose. It's just sort of painful.

That all said, the creative use of the status bar throughout is inspired, and it's possible that there's a compelling game underneath all the clutter. Maybe it would appeal more to those well steeped in the conventions of escape-the-room games.

You've got to give the author some credit for taking part and producing a game for the amazing Apollo 18 tribute album. Without noble folk stepping forward and taking on responsibilities, all the game slots wouldn't have been taken. He gets an honorary star for that. Unfortunately, Hypnotist of Ladies isn't a very good game. In fact, in terms of implementation or lack thereof, Hypnotist of Ladies reaches almost MST3K-worthy depths.

I quote:(Spoiler - click to show)
>talk to ladies
The ladies beam in heartfelt appreciation and eagerly await your next move....which is to hypnotise them.

[Your score has just gone up by one point.]

>hypnotise ladies
That's not a verb I recognise.

On the bright side, it's not very long, and if you also play every single other Apollo 18 game you'll have a wonderful sense of achievement.