Ratings and Reviews by Cody Gaisser

Anchorhead is a gothic horror (weird fiction) text adventure inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft. The story focuses on a couple who inherit a house in a spooky little Massachusetts fishing community and slowly uncover the town's dark secrets. It's considered a classic of interactive fiction, and with good reason. The setting is atmospheric, the scenarios are memorable, the writing is effective, and the puzzles are mostly of high quality.

The story takes place over the course of 3 days, with each day escalating the difficulty. Day 1 is a breeze, mostly exploring and learning about the town and the house. Day 2 is complicated, with a lot of things to do and puzzles to solve, but with little to no threat of botching anything permanently. Day 3 is much more tense, mistakes have consequences, and it is very possible to get something wrong. More about that...

Anchorhead may be a masterpiece, but it isn't perfect. It possesses some of the flaws stereotypical of adventure games: verb-guessing, reading the author's mind, some poorly signposted objectives, timed puzzles where you can trap yourself in a fail-state, and even the possibility of losing or misplacing a key item that is needed to complete the game (so SAVE your game often, especially once Day 3 begins). Thankfully, tips and walkthroughs are readily accessible on the internet.

Most of the game isn't that taxing, however, and I'd argue that Anchorhead is worth the potential trouble in order to experience the incredible narrative (which is one of the best in any interactive fiction I've played). This is a must-play title for fans of Lovecraft, horror, and interactive fiction more broadly. Just be sure to play it with your "90s adventure game" goggles on.

Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die is based around one simple joke (see the title). There are two endings, each funny but neither hilarious. The game is famous within the interactive fiction community and gets referenced a lot, so play it if you want to understand the references (it's so short, you might as well).

"fin de sickleberg" is an interactive gothic short story about a man undressing for bed after a night at the opera. It is incredibly brief, takes place in one room, utilizes a limited set of verbs, and has three possible endings, each revealing a little more about the player character than the last (if reached in their intended order). To say much else would spoil the story.

I thoroughly enjoyed the prose, and the limited verb set kept the possibilities manageable enough that finding all three endings was relatively easy. That is not to say I had no issues with the endings...

The first ending came easily enough; following the most logical course of actions got me there quickly. My second play-through was a bit more awkward though; I ultimately resorted to trying every verb on every noun, which resulted in my reaching the third and juiciest ending ahead of schedule. On my third play, I wanted to see if the sequence of events had any effect so I (Spoiler - click to show)jumped straight ahead to the command that had yielded me the previous ending; this took me straight to the second ending, which was a bit more vague and inconclusive than the third. I was a little disappointed that endings 2 and 3 were so closely related and reached in such a similar manner, especially considering the brevity of the story. Reaching them in the wrong order probably deflated some horror that should've escalated instead, but oh well... I found the first and third endings sufficiently creepy anyway.

I'd recommend this if you like gothic/horror/weird fiction and/or short text games that can be experienced in a few minutes.

The Secret Of Nara is a pretty little twine game about a day in the life of a deer, told from the deer's perspective. The story branches in multiple places and results in several endings. The writing successfully lured me into the protagonist's world and gave me a sense of what it might be like to experience the wilderness from the perspective of an animal, so I'd call that a job well done.

Don't Push The Mailbox 2 And Aisle is an homage to a game called Pick Up The Phone Booth And Aisle (itself an homage to the joke game Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die and the one-turn game Aisle); it is also the sequel to Don't Push The Mailbox (itself an homage to Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die).

The original joke of Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die was good, but not so hilarious as to warrant endless sequels, parodies, and homages. Its humor was mostly in its simplicity, and that simplicity is lost even in the best of the imitators (Pick Up The Phone Booth And Aisle).

Don't Push The Mailbox 2 is just way too many degrees separated from the original joke.

Don't Push The Mailbox is an homage to the joke game Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die. Mailbox is more complex than Phone Booth, with more things to do and more ways to lose; but it lacks the simple absurdity of the game it imitates.

Pick Up The Phone Booth And Cry is a parody of Pick Up The Phone Booth And Dye, which itself is a parody of Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die (a very simplistic joke game). Pretty much all the humor has been bled out by this point.

This is a parody of Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die, which itself was a simplistic joke game. The puzzle is slightly (and I do mean slightly) more complex here, and there's an added pun; but the personality of the original is missing.

This is an expanded version of Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die. There's more to do, but I couldn't figure out what to do to solve it... Or whether it was possible to solve it. Is that the joke? I dunno.

What if the simple two-joke game Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die worked like the one-turn multi-ending game Aisle? What if, instead of being under-implemented like the original, it was overly-implemented instead and every conceivable command the player could enter led to some sort of weird ending? That's what this is.

I'm going to go against the popular opinion that this game is vastly superior to Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die. I'm going to say that the original joke worked better because it was so simple, and the lolrandom chaos added to this "remake" just makes the game waste more of the player's time. Both of these Phone Booth games are amusing in their way, but neither is as good as Aisle.