Reviews by matt w (Matt Weiner)
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Mostly I'm posting this review to say that there is currently (Jan. 2020) a working link for the game on itch.io. The new link is under "Web Site."
Anyway, this is a funny game about (maybe?) being a duck who brutally murders other ducks, who honestly isn't that good at it, but who can often get away with it because the victims are ducks.
in which I break this game's perfect record, October 21, 2019This is a blatant troll game, yes. But it's an excellent troll game, with a fair amount of care put into making sure that you can do what there is to do in the game--which is enter various toilets--and that you get to see the prose in it--which is full of self-conscious TODO notes, rooms named things like "FirstToiletFirstToiletFirstToilet," and sentences like "You can see mineral deposits on the walls, like the sort of mineral deposits that would result from years of flushing hard water with a mineral content at or above 0.5g/L, which is the typical sedimentary limit for residential water supplies."
Not on the level of Pick Up The Phone Booth and Die or Annoyotron, but a worthy addition to the troll genre.
not your average game, but a delightful bit of randomness, January 29, 2015You Were Here doesn't give you any interaction options and doesn't make any attempt at coherence. If you go in expecting some normal sort of IF interaction, you will be confused and disappointed.
What it does is present a mashup of text from the introductions of IF games published in 2014, and I enjoyed seeing the juxtapositions. Here's a nice one:
(Spoiler - click to show)You can go west. Once there was a girl called Catherine Apple-Ninja Denise Yarmilla van Houten. Once upon a time there was an old man, shrouded in mystery venturing across the land living his life. The list for the hundred-year Convent of Evil was published and you were eleventh on the list.
And here's the next one:
(Spoiler - click to show)Congratulations! Laughter tastes bitter in a burnt mouth, and yet that's what you're continuously doing with this girl at the bar. Having murdered his brother-in-law, Orrin Brower of Kentucky was a fugitive from justice.
So, if you like this sort of procedurally generated juxtaposition, enjoy! If you don't, you probably won't enjoy.
(Review applies to Inform 7 version of game.)
Less Awful Than You Might Think, November 17, 2013This is a Crap Underimplemented Game. That's pretty much its genre. There's never a description where "You see nothing special about the X" will do, and you're lucky to get that. This isn't a good thing; it necessarily limits immersion, occasionally gets in the way of understanding what's going on, and breaks any trust in the author one might have thought of having.
But "The Chronicler" is not entirely lacking in merit. For one, despite what the author says about its unfinished state, it can be played to an ending. For another, it's actually reasonably possible to get to that ending. The puzzles are fair -- no guess the verb that I can remember -- and, unlike many a better game, they revolve around a consistent central mechanism that's rather clever: (Spoiler - click to show)You can travel back and forth between two moments in time, and changes you make in the past affect what you can do in the future. This isn't the first game to use this mechanism, but it's reasonably well implemented and reveals itself fairly.
In the end, I found the mechanism engaging enough that I played the game all the way through and got a half hour of decent diversion from it. This is more than I can say of some objectively better games. The author ought to spend a lot more time polishing things, implementing scenery, and either finishing the things he's left unfinished (some alternate endings and a hint of plot) or excising them from the game completely. But I didn't find it a complete waste of my time. That exceeded my expectations.
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