Reviews by Tabitha

I've been reading up on the IF Art Show recently, and was particularly interested in playing some of the games (pieces?) from the "portrait" category (besides Galatea, which was one of the first parsers I played). This one... didn't work for me. It does little to capture the personalities of the individual animals (the eponymous Sparky and Boots, a dog and a cat respectively), instead creating a rote mechanical exercise of "feed, pet, throw ball, repeat" (only, more frustrating than that because these actions must be done a certain number of times and in a certain order to make progress). Having a score system seemed antithetical to the spirit of the Art Show, driving me toward completing a goal instead of meaningfully interacting with the subjects--and there wasn't really any meaningful interaction to be had. So unfortunately, for me this fails as both a portrait and a game.

This game really hit for me emotionally, partly because it captured some feelings/experiences that I remember from childhood but also because it's just well written and evocative. The magic of a beach vacation, friends you see once a year and don't have any contact with otherwise (us millenials may be the last generation to have that particular experience), uncertainty about the way a friend feels about you... it's all conveyed so well.

As I played through the first time, I completely forgot that there was any state tracking going on, but when I remembered at the end I was impressed by how that aspect worked. There aren't a lot of choices throughout the game; more passages end with a "next page" link than with a choice. But the five or six choices you do have, determining what you said to Caspian at certain moments in several childhood flashbacks, what direction your adult life has gone, and one action you take in the present, subtly interact to result in one of at least three different endings. After playing through the first time and getting a very satisfying, fitting ending, remembering that I'd brought about that ending through my choices made it all the more meaningful.

Playing through several more times revealed that the game is also subtly responsive to your choices throughout, in ways that heighten the emotion. So all in all, this is just what I look for in a narrative game: a good story that the player is able to help shape.

This is a simple game where you play through several different lucid dreams the protagonist has over the course of the night. I enjoyed the descriptions of the dream worlds and their variety, but what really got me about this game was the mood. There's a strong sense of loss as the protagonist continually reflects on how their experience of their lucid dreams has changed: once, they had such control in their dreams that they never wanted to wake up; now, sleep is a source of stress as they deal with insomnia and something like sleep apnea. There are also hints at tension in their marriage caused by these issues. So the game has a pervasive sense of sadness, which I appreciated as an enjoyer of a good melancholy, wistful tone. And there is the possibility of a happier turn at the end.

That's the other thing I found impressive about this game--it's quite polished, with the implementation overall being quite good (I just had a few struggles with (Spoiler - click to show)the rope), and there were a decent amount of non-essential actions/responses coded in, including two different possible endings. A great little game!

The implementation in this game was frustrating throughout and made it very rough to play. I was able to finish only by reading the spoilers in MathBrush's review; before that I was hopelessly stuck on how to open the sarcophagus. Some other issues were the game telling me "this painting looks like the other one you saw" when I hadn't yet seen another one, and (Spoiler - click to show)being able to put the fuse in the junction box despite the box being closed and locked. I think this could be an enjoyable escape room game; it just needs to be made more player-friendly.

This was a fun idea and I enjoyed the "switching between worlds" aspect. Unfortunately, that part became unfun by the end, as I was left with a single multi-step task to do in one of the worlds, but I could only complete one or two steps at a time before being shunted into a different world and having to make my way back to the one I needed to be in. The commands for that task were also unintuitive and somewhat at odds with the rest of the game (e.g., (Spoiler - click to show)while you have to read each piece of text you encounter instead of having "examine" tell you what it says, for the coffee-making task, trying to take the beans out of the roaster doesn't work; you have to type "grind beans," even though the grinder is in a different room).

I think there was also a bug with text firing at the wrong time; at one point, the "score" command was giving me both "Your muscles are ready to spring into action" and "You feel too tired and lethargic to move" at the same time. I also think there must be an intended order to do things in that I didn't follow, because I (Spoiler - click to show)made the coffee last, and got a message pointing me to the gardening tools, but then as I tried to walk to them I woke up and the game ended.

Basically, I think this is a fun premise with some fun gameplay that just needs a bit more polishing to really shine.

Having just played (and loved) The Gostak, I looked up other games by the author and found this one. It's a speed IF game, so it's quite short and simple, but even in that small space it had me laughing more than once. Recommended if you're in the mood for a tiny, amusing game!

This is a fun follow-up to Advent Door. It's shorter and simpler than that game, but features a different twist on navigation that makes for an enjoyable small puzzle. Again, the brief environmental descriptions, especially given the core mechanic--(Spoiler - click to show)there's a second version of the map that you can enter through a mirror, which seems to be the same place at a much earlier time period--are a highlight.

I don't have much more to say than what's in the title--this was a quick game with a clever mechanic that required mapping and doing some careful thinking to figure out how to achieve what I needed, and it was very satisfying when I succeeded! The bits of worldbuilding and descriptions keep it from being too abstract. A nice way to spend a half hour.

I found this game to be an effective argument that the fear that games may be hiding secret hateful content is silly, because games don't need to do that in order to send ideological messages. While in the accompanying essay the author writes that he "decided to take out all the Nazi stuff," just because the hidden mode is gone (or at least, has been rendered inaccessible via the originally intended method) doesn't mean the game is suddenly perfectly innocent. We're told that the PC took bus 88 to get to their destination, which is Muranowska Square, and our task in the game is to seek out the hiding places of frightened rabbits--which given this context takes on a deeper, more sinister meaning. A child playing this game might never understand or pay attention to these references, but an adult can see that the game is not, as it claims, simply a cute story about bunnies.

This game is an effective illustration that messaging can be baked into games in far more subtle ways than via a "hidden Nazi mode", and for that reason, vetting games for objectionable content is never going to be as simple as glancing over the source code and verifying that it doesn't contain any slurs.

I had fun with this game and found it a lot easier than the prequel, To Sea in a Sieve. But I wanted to note that it contains some insensitive material, with (puzzle spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)Cherokee smudge sticks used to ward off an Egyptian curse. The cursed mummy itself is a tired, rather culturally insensitive trope IMO, and the idea of mystical Native Americans is also based in othering stereotypes. Of course this game is over 20 years old, but I wanted any future players to have a heads up.