Reviews by Kake

I've had a few goes at this game now, and although I've managed to reach a couple of unsatisfactory endings, I've not yet been able to complete the storyline I'm aiming at. It's not as though I'm obviously in a failure situation, either; I'm just stuck at a point where nothing I do seems to progress the story. So I can't really write a proper review. Also, I occasionally found myself guessing at the correct syntax, something that shouldn't really be necessary in a well-tested game.

I do want to say that I like the way you can ask characters about other characters (and indeed themselves), and I like the way the story's told in the past tense.

Short and fairly uncomplicated game, with a nice feeling of "oh noes" as the problem keeps escalating. It's worth persisting even if you feel that everything's got completely out of hand.

Full of typos, and I couldn't figure out what I was meant to do. Also, the parser was constantly getting the cigar and the cigar case mixed up, for example:

>drop cigar
Which do you mean, the cigar or the cigar case?

>cigar
Which do you mean, the cigar or the cigar case?

>cigar
Which do you mean, the cigar or the cigar case?

I really liked this one. The juxtaposition of the two storylines, the non-linear time progression, the use of different voices — all excellent.

The main story is a moving one; but the moment that I felt was the strongest, in the sense that it made me stop and go "oh wow, oh wow, oh wow", actually occurred in the story-within-a-story. It was a small thing, but it really got across one of the reasons why I should care deeply about the main character.

Aisle is rather unusual in that the game ends after a single command; the command you choose to type determines any or all of the story, the backstory, the other characters, and your own personality and motivation. I rather enjoyed it. It's certainly worth a go, since at minimum it demands only a few seconds of your time.

Very short game – well, it is a Speed IF entry, after all. Reasonably amusing, no glitches that I noticed, only one typo. Possibly more fun if you're familiar with New Orleans.

I've not played much Speed IF, so take my rating with a pinch of salt.

Bronze is a very user-friendly and fairly entertaining take on Beauty and the Beast. I was never once frustrated by syntax or by tedious tasks, and I really enjoyed the way that the backstory was revealed as my wanderings through the castle triggered memories and reflections of the time my character had spent there before the events of the game.

You may find that you need to draw a map, though the layout's not incredibly complicated. (You can't really get lost, thanks to the very useful "go to" syntax, which will take you back to any room you've already visited, but I found that the map helped me keep track of where I had and hadn't explored.)

The only thing I didn't like was that with at least one of the multiple endings, I felt that I'd been "cut off" from continuing, simply because of the order that I solved the final puzzles in.

Although I really like the premise of this, and I had a fair bit of sympathy/empathy for Galatea-the-character, I don't feel I really enjoyed the game, despite around twenty replays. It may be my playing style, but I found it very easy to fall into repetitive dead-ends, and I never managed to find an ending that I thought was really satisfying.

I very much don't want this review to put anyone else off playing Galatea, though; the time spent on playing is a worthwhile gamble.

I'll say first off that one of the things I liked about this game is that it never puts you in an unwinnable position (there should be a tag for this, but I'm not sure what to call it); and I'm glad that other reviews told me this, because it made it easier to immerse myself into the mindset of the story.

The tension-building is well-timed, as are the hints - I never felt as though I was off the hook for a moment, and I never felt overly frustrated. I did find the ending slightly confusing; I'll give it another go some time to see if I can make it make more sense.

It's a game; it's a puzzle; it's a very, very good depiction of an alien universe from the perspective of one of its inhabitants.

The reference is to the sentence "The gostak distims the doshes", which is used to illustrate how syntax can convey meaning — we don't know what a gostak is, nor what distimming is, nor what doshes are, but we do know that distimming is something a gostak does to doshes, and we know that doshes can be distimmed by a gostak. As you play the game, you uncover meaning-in-this-sense, and you learn how things are related to each other; but there is no perfect one-to-one mapping of the gostak's language to English, and I have a strong feeling that the gostak's universe is very different from ours.

I "completed" the game a few days ago, but there's still a lot to discover and speculate on, so I'm still playing it.