Reviews by Kake

This is a very short, single-room game with two fairly easy puzzles. The puzzles are both quite fair, and reasonably well-clued. I did feel that there could have been a little more to the implementation, though; for example, although the pillow's description practically begs me to hug it, when I try "hug pillow" I just get "You can only do that to something animate". It might also have been fun if things like "taunt donut" had been implemented.

This is a very short, one-room game. It's essentially the IF equivalent of a pun - even if you do manage to figure out the single puzzle, you'll end up groaning rather than laughing. If you like that sort of joke, you'll like this.

I had very high hopes for this one - the "packaging" looked smooth and polished, and despite a few typos in the scene-setting exposition, the quality of the writing initially seemed pretty good.

Unfortunately I couldn't solve a single one of the puzzles, and there were no in-game hints, either from an actual hint system or from responses to almost-right commands. I got through to the end by means of struggling for a while, peeping at the next few lines of the walkthrough, wondering how on earth anyone could possibly have come up with that solution unprompted, and then starting the cycle over again for the next puzzle.

After the first few go-rounds of this rather boring process, I lost all confidence that the remaining puzzles would be fair; the only thing that kept me going to the end was the thought that it would be unfair to give it a score before I'd finished it.

On the plus side, the plot's more interesting than the usual "get out of the room" one, and there's a definite sense of humour in some of the text (though it would really benefit from a going-over by a native speaker).

As a game, though, this completely failed for me.

All you have to do, as the bumbling sidekick of the gorgeous, muscular Captain McBrawn, is find the World President and warn him of an impending attack - but before you can even get started, you're captured by the Screaming Communists and dumped into a locked, barred room high up in a tower in a mediaeval castle. Unsurprisingly, your task is to get out - though this task isn't actually as simple or as trite as it might sound.

It took me a little while to get started on this one, mainly because of "guess the verb" problems - and these problems persisted throughout the game, making it harder, more frustrating, and less fun than it really needed to be. A little fleshing-out of the rather sparse descriptions of some of the items might have helped too.

The hint system also broke down at one point, giving me the same hint over and over again for a problem that I'd already solved, so I eventually had to resort to the walkthrough.

I didn't really enjoy this game, and that's basically down to the implementation. The constant "you can't do that" stuff made it really frustrating to play - so frustrating that I don't want to play it again to find the optional bits that I missed. This is a real shame; it could be so much better. I do hope the author makes a second release that addresses these issues, since there's a good game in here struggling to get out.

Bad Toast is essentially a puzzle game with a bolted-on and entirely irrelevant backstory. The title refers to a "toast" you made at a dinner party the night before - apparently your host took it the wrong way, since you've woken up in a dungeon.

Your task, obviously, is to escape. You do this by solving a single, very easy puzzle, and once you've done that the game essentially just stops. I gave it a second play-through, deliberately getting the puzzle solution wrong, and discovered that the solution is hardcoded (though it could have been randomised without too much trouble) and as soon as you make one wrong move the game is immediately over, so even if the puzzle was nontrivial you could solve it relatively quickly by trial and error alone.

There's pretty much no attempt to implement anything other than the five switches needed to solve the puzzle. There's very little of substance here at all, in fact. The best thing I can say about this game is that the spelling and grammar were mostly OK.

I really enjoyed this one. The hints are well-paced, the puzzles make sense, the implementation is sound, and there's lots to play around with.

The only bug I managed to find was a small one which produced a small amount of contradictory output, but it didn't spoil anything. The game did give me an unsolicited hint at one point, but that might have been because I'd just asked it for a few hints in succession, and to be honest I really did need it.

Would definitely recommend this game.

This is the first Rybread game I've played; it seems to be the kind of thing that usually gets described as "unique" and "like being on drugs". But it isn't unique, really; it's just the same old kind of thing that tends to result from the misconception that random absurdity is the same thing as creativity.

It did start quite promisingly:

Womb with a view
This is a room. You feel very comfortable here. Its got lots of space. But you feel a need for something more, something to fulfill your life. You can go north.

>n
No you can't, I lied. Try west.

Now I thought that was funny — and there were a few other genuinely amusing moments in the game too, but a lot of it was just tedious. I found the "interview excerpts" particularly tedious; page-long infodumps with the tired premise of taking absurd things seriously.

(I do realise that this game is nearly a decade old as I write this, but I'm sure this kind of thing was pretty old even then.)

If you want to see "weird" done well, I'd recommend you try Deadline Enchanter instead.

I only played this because I'd heard you need to play it in order to enjoy Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle. It turns out you don't. If you like one-joke games, play this; if you don't, don't.

This game must have as many authors as it has unique responses (and I do wonder if that was the point?)

Anyway — it made me laugh a couple of times, and it didn't annoy me, and that's good enough for three stars in my book. I don't think you need to play Aisle first; but if you like this game, you'll definitely like Aisle.

Urban Conflict situates you in a bombed-out building in the middle of a war. You've sustained a serious injury, and your only companion in the building is sitting opposite you in possession of an assault rifle — and definitely isn't on your side.

I didn't feel this was really a one-room game so much as a conversational game along the lines of (the obvious comparison) Galatea. I couldn't interact with anything in the room, and I couldn't figure out how to move around within it; I got as far as standing up and sitting down again, but I couldn't work out any way to move towards or away from the NPC.

I'm not a great fan of conversational games — I didn't particularly enjoy Galatea either — as they make me feel as though I'm expected to read the author's mind. I actually managed to spoil the power of this one's ending by stopping my line of questioning slightly too soon, moving on to other topics, and then accidentally triggering the ending somewhat incongruously.

It's worth playing, though, especially if you already know you like this kind of thing.

The title kind of put me off this before I even started; it needs some punctuation, for one thing. The writing of the opening scene isn't great, either. Parts of it sound like bad goth poetry — "The fireplace is as empty as my heart" — and some of the descriptions are clumsy; why does the bed have "a blanket wrapped around it"?

The initial exposition ends strongly, though: "My remaining life can be measured in heartbeats. I must act!" This pulled me into the story and made me eager to get started.

And this game is worth playing. The story isn't particularly original, but the puzzles are reasonably fair and I did feel satisfaction when I finally managed to solve them all. It doesn't really have much replay value, but I quite enjoyed the two playthroughs that I needed to solve it. I would have preferred it if there had been some accommodation for alternative methods of solving the puzzles, even if it was just along the lines of letting me know why the object I was using was unsuitable (instead of just showing the default "you can't do that" response).

Having to type "story" to see the backstory was a bit odd. I'm still not sure if I liked that or not. The game is written from the first-person perspective, and the player character hasn't suffered any memory loss, so it seems odd that I-the-player have no idea what's going on at the start of the game — and it's entirely possible to play through the game without ever checking the backstory.

There is a turn limit, but it has a sensible justification (albeit one hidden in the backstory).

I'm not too keen on the way the game infers quite a lot from my commands; for example, if I type in "look at <thing>", I don't expect the game to have the PC start rummaging about in it.

One problem (which may be related to the above criticism) is that there are at least two items in the game that show me an interesting and useful description the first time I look at them, but on subsequent examination give me only "I see nothing that will help me", which is clearly untrue. So it's worth keeping a transcript that you can refer back to.

This game really has no plot at all — it's basically just a series of rather unvaried logic puzzles, the kind of thing you find in IQ tests. The ending was a slight let-down; it basically just stopped, which is a shame, because there were some reasonably effective attempts at building up atmosphere as I progressed through the puzzles. I didn't not enjoy the game, but I found it rather unsatisfying.

Trial-and-error seems to have been guarded against; you have to have seen your clue before you can input the puzzle's answer. The answers are randomised, too, so you can't just get a cheat sheet and plug in the answers.

I got stuck on one of the later puzzles, and because the description of the object I'd been using to solve the earlier puzzles had changed to "You see nothing special about <thing>", I thought the next clue would be elsewhere in the room. This was, in fact, a bug (and one which has now been reported to the author). I managed to get through it, though, since "hint" told me to examine things that were in the now-nondescript object, and sure enough this was where my clue was.

Couple of typos/spelling mistakes, nothing major. The game also let me strip naked without comment.

I'm afraid I really didn't like this game. It's very puzzle-based, but the puzzles aren't IF-like puzzles; as far as I could make out, they're riddles and word games and number puzzles. Although I managed to find plenty of objects and clues, I couldn't figure out how to solve any of them (bar the weighing machine puzzle, which just gave me another incomprehensible clue as a reward).

When I was pondering what star rating to give this game, I decided that if I was rating it on how enjoyable I found it, it would barely get two stars. I nearly decided to give it three, because I didn't think it was really fair to vote the game down just because I'm too stupid to get anywhere with it, but then I figured I was overthinking it. So it gets two stars. This doesn't mean there's anything significantly wrong with the implementation; it just means I never ever want to play this game (or anything like it) again.

This is a fairly lightweight, fairly light-hearted puzzle game. None of the puzzles are particularly difficult, so it's slightly annoying that the NPC calls out unsolicited hints from time to time. Some ambiguity problems, but only one typo that I spotted ("petit fors"). Admittedly this is explicitly a one-room game, but it still felt quite insubstantial to me.

This was great fun! I don't normally enjoy puzzle-oriented games, but even though this one is pretty much pure puzzle, I liked it a lot. I've not previously enjoyed games with very tight timing (for example A Change in the Weather), but All Things Devours gives plenty of feedback when your plan goes wrong, so the level of unnecessary frustration is very low.

One criticism: I would have preferred it if the hints had been included in the game, rather than placed on a website — the URL given in the game doesn't work (the correct one is http://www.amirrorclear.net/flowers/game/devours/) and so I ended up hunting around on rec.games.interactive-fiction instead, slightly spoilering myself in the process. I would have given this game five stars if it had included an integrated hints system. (NB: I did inform the author of this problem, and he's going to see if he can get the URL given in the game working again.)

This is a parody of Matt Barringer's Detective, a game famous for being really, really bad.

It might be because I'm not American, and have never watched Mystery Science Theatre 3000, but I just found this kind of boring. I didn't think anything the commentators said was particularly witty or amusing, and I had to force myself to persist to the end — a problem I didn't have with the original game they're making fun of!

Although this game is famous for being really, really bad, I did kind of like it. Knowing that it was written by a twelve-year-old kid did help, mind. I think what I liked most about it was the energy and sheer gung-ho of it — although the plot makes pretty much no sense at all, you definitely get the impression that the author found it tremendously exciting, and it almost doesn't matter that nobody else would feel the same. In a game written by an adult, this would be kind of embarrassing. In a game written by a pre-teen, it's not at all inappropriate. I honestly don't think that I'd be embarrassed to have written this game as a kid.

It's silly, it's fun, it has a monkey in it, and the goal is to make soup. What more could you want? (It's Speed IF, so don't expect it to be typo-free.) Effectively puzzleless.

Although there are some very good ideas behind this game, it had far too many technical issues for me to continue playing it.

First of all, I was put off by the quality of the writing. I haven't seen any other reviewers bringing this up — and one or two have actually said they thought the prose was good! So maybe my standards are too high, but I felt the writing was stilted, unpolished, and entirely lacking in any kind of style. (I did actually wonder whether it had been written by a precocious child or a very young teenager, but apparently the author is in his mid-twenties.)

Mainly, though, I didn't get very far through because I gave up in disgust when I discovered (from the walkthrough) that something the parser had been refusing to let me interact with — or even look at — was in fact vital to further progress. This wasn't an isolated problem, just the most egregious example. I'm not going to spend time playing a game that I can't trust to be fair with me.

This is a very short game, solvable in a handful of moves, which takes place in roughly the same universe as Savoir-Faire (which is rather longer and more involved).

There are several ways to solve most of the puzzles, and a number of possible endings. Some endings are acceptable (you survive) and some unacceptable (you don't), but some "acceptable" endings are better than others. It's worth noting that the end message doesn't differentiate between the different acceptable endings; so if you felt dissatisfied with the way things turned out, it's worth having another go even if the game tells you you've won. (Replay is quite rewarding in general.)

I thought that the optimal way of dealing with the book seemed a little unfair and slightly implausible, but in general I thought the puzzles were quite fair.

I did like the way that even though the game is timed, things like looking and examining didn't take up time; a nice way of making the player hurry up without penalising exploration.

Jane is a puzzleless, story-driven piece with multiple narrators. It takes maybe about 10 minutes to play.

The subject matter of this game is domestic violence (not a spoiler — the author tells you this up-front); this makes it slightly tricky to criticise, since it feels a bit like criticising a charity for the wording of its mailshots. The author's heart is clearly in the right place, and the text certainly isn't badly written, but I never really felt drawn in to the story. It also didn't tell me anything I didn't already know.

I'd have liked to have seen a bit more individuality in the characters; they just felt like stereotypes to me. I think the message would have been more powerful if there had been something to the characters beyond their specific roles in this specific narrative.

Aw, this is brilliant! Excellent attention to detail, and an awful lot of fun. It's well worth playing around and trying silly things that have no chance of advancing the game, just because the responses are so funny (e.g. try taking your pants off in company). Besides that, the implementation's solid, the puzzles make sense, Grunk and the pig both have a lot of character, and the ending is quite uplifting.

I gave this game three stars after I first played it, intending to come back to it after reading a few reviews and giving it a few more plays, to see if I thought it really deserved four or whether I should stick with three. Unfortunately, additional attempts at play made me so frustrated that I almost ended up dropping my rating down to two. Even though I knew exactly what I needed to do to complete the first part, I ran out of time and died four times trying to get the timing to work; doubly frustrating as I'd managed it straight away the first time around, when I'd spent a lot more time wandering around the ship then. Resorting to the walkthrough, I found that the problem was caused by my having a mistaken mental picture of certain items.

Throughout the game, I didn't think the puzzles were particularly well-signalled; what I mean by that is that while they weren't difficult in the sense of needing a great amount of intellect, they were difficult in the sense of the circumstances around them not being very clearly explained. I also felt that the huge info-dump of made-up creation myth in the second part of the game was very off-putting.

Basically, I'm still annoyed with this game, and I'd be unlikely to recommend it to anyone else, particularly someone new to IF. I did like the fact that there were multiple solutions to some of the puzzles though.

I didn't think I was going to like this game when I started playing it, but now I'm extremely glad I gave it a go. I played it over again as soon as I'd finished it the first time, and enjoyed it as much if not more on the second go-round.

A number of reviewers have mentioned the sketchiness of the implementation, and some have suggested this may have been a purposeful choice, or at least one explainable within the world by the narrator having been in an understandable hurry. Now, given the backstory of the game, I have absolutely no problem with most nouns and actions being unimplemented; the problem I had was that when I got a reply from Inform, rather than from my narrator, it was jarring. Something as simple as a comment in the narrator's voice, rather than letting it fall through to the default parser response, would have alleviated this - just something that kept me immersed in the world.

Also, I didn't find the implementation sketchy so much as inconsistent. In some places, examining things brought the reward of another section of the story; in others, it was just pointless and frustrating. I think if the responses stayed in the narrator's voice throughout, it would make players more likely to examine things, rather than just mechanically work through the in-game-provided walkthrough.

And clearly this author can write! One excellent example, after you see the narrator do something that a human would never, ever do: "It hurts, but it also feels like someone is stroking your hair." (Actually, that doesn't look so great in isolation. It's better in context, but I don't want to give spoilers.) Also - "slickening"? Best portmanteau ever.

I thought the ending was disappointing. The random, nonstandard prompts were interesting, but the actual ending (well, endings - two are possible, but both have the same flaw) was generic to the point of meaninglessness. (And yes, I did notice the cues that explained who both the people in the final scene were.)

I want to make it clear that I did like Deadline Enchanter, and I do think it's worth playing; I wouldn't go on about the flaws at such great length if I didn't like it. There were typos, but I actually didn't care, for once. I just really want to have been able to give it five stars, but the inconsistent implementation and the disappointing ending meant I couldn't.

This single-room game is a good old-fashioned mystery story, in which you, as a groom in the service of a Victorian gentleman, hunt through your employer's study to discover the truth behind the death of your sweetheart.

I'm not usually all that good at puzzles, but I found most of these easy yet satisfying, right up to the very end where I found myself utterly baffled — not by what I should try next, which it turns out I had right, but by how on earth I could persuade the parser to let me try it. Given the number of other reviews that have mentioned this problem, I have no doubt the author will fix this up in the next release, so I've not taken any stars off for it. I would, however, advise waiting for the next version if you don't want your immersion in the story to be interrupted by a bout of frustration right at the most exciting part.

The rest of the game was very polished. I couldn't find a single unimplemented noun; some descriptions were shared between nouns, for example the bookshelves and the books, but this is perfectly sensible and absolutely fine. (I know some people don't care about this kind of thing, but I feel a little bit more writing effort put into the parts of the scenery that people are likely to look at really makes a difference to whether a game feels solid or fragile, and I don't trust fragile games to have fair puzzles/solutions.)

Similarly, I liked the fact that it was possible to discover details of events prior to the start of the game that, while irrelevant if your goal is only to get to the ending, added colour and interest to the whole story.

My main disappointment was that what I would have seen as the optimal ending seems not to be implemented.

This isn't really a game, and as the author says in the ABOUT, it isn't really a story either: "All I can call it is a Thing." There is very little interactivity; your agency basically consists of what order to look at things in, and your conversational choices make pretty much no difference to the story. There are reasons for this, particularly as regards the conversations, but I did find it a bit frustrating sometimes, as if I was being made to type meaningless strings of characters before being rewarded with the next section of story.

The writing and characterisation are both very good, and Rameses does seem to be very well-regarded, but it just didn't do it for me.

A very, very brief playing experience, but it did make me laugh. (Though the laugh was about 50% groan.)

Excellently sarcastic NPC, and quite a reasonable backstory for such a short game. It's hard to believe this was actually speed IF.

Being Andrew Plotkin probably makes a good deal more sense if you've watched Being John Malkovich; so if you haven't seen it, you may well enjoy the game a lot less than I did. I'd definitely recommend watching the film first, if possible, since a fair bit of the amusement I got from the game came from remembering similar scenes in the film. I don't think playing the game first will make you enjoy the film any less, though; and I don't think it counts as a spoiler to note that it's certainly not a direct transplant from screen to, er, screen — and the ending is quite different.

Great, fun little game. The premise is that you're a chef in a newly-opened restaurant, but you're facing a few problems tonight; all your staff have called in sick, supply problems and technical issues are conspiring against you, and a hugely influential food critic is coming to dinner.

I really enjoyed playing this, especially once I realised that (despite the well-managed sense of urgency) I wasn't going to be forced to start over just for taking a while to figure out any of the puzzles. I also liked the fact that a fair few of the "silly" things I tried when I was stuck gave me amusing responses.

I couldn't find a way to put the game in an unwinnable position, and the bugs noted in the competition release seem to have been fixed in the latest one (apart from a couple of output bugs that don't affect gameplay at all). Very few typos, if any.

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.

To give some context here, the main attraction of IF for me is the storytelling - I enjoy the odd puzzle, but not half as much as a well-told story. The storyline of Shrapnel is interesting but not ground-breaking; Shrapnel's strength lies in its medium. The choice of IF over paper and ink pulled me forcefully into a narrative that I might normally have dismissed as "not my thing". Moreover, it's a story that I plan to read again, or at least skim.

I approached Floatpoint as a story, rather than a puzzle or a game, and it met all my expectations and more. I'm fairly sure that even if I'd been reading it as a linear, fixed narrative, I'd still have enjoyed it; but the fact that I could influence the ending (towards what I felt was the right thing to do) gave it an extra dimension.

For context, I'm a great fan of short stories, and of the kind of science fiction that focuses on how the snazzy futuristic situations affect the people who find themselves in them. Floatpoint hit all my buttons. I just wish my memory was less vivid, so I could play it again sooner and try for a different goal!

(I should also note that in contrast to Valzi's review as of 27 October 2007, I didn't encounter any bugs.)