Ratings and Reviews by Hanon Ondricek

I wish I knew how to program in Undum, because the default format is so beautiful to read, and is richly textured like a fine parchment map in a leather library of some sea-captain's abandoned manor.

Sam Kabo Ashwell adds to the legacy of Stiffy Makane in the CYOA format that he (I can only assume from his exhaustive analysis of classic works) is very fond of. I played this some time ago and I must have taken a short branch, because I didn't get to any of the major story parts I recognized from Stiffy Makane. The other day I tried again, reveling in Undum's beauty and Mr. Ashwell's unique and intriguing illustrations, and I found the longer path, which got me to my favorite part.

(Spoiler - click to show)When you get inside Pamela's abode, the FUCKHERFUCKHERFUCKHERFUCKHER! suggestion is repeated and spills outside the bounding box on the page. That made me giggle.

It's categorized as AIF, but the high-minded parodic style verges more on tidy suggestiveness rather than explicit perversion, which is well-done. This is the SM story told the way it needs to be if it's appearing on unfurling aged parchment in a library with brass fixtures and a butler that serves brandy.

Enjoyed.

(Spoiler - click to show)Why don't more people write in Undum? My excuse is the documentation is a bit thin and assumes you are completely conversant in html and CSS. If this thing had a Twine front-end, I'd be all up in that like Stiffy Makane with a doughnut.

I understand what this game is trying to get across, and I genuinely sympathize with anyone who is exploited or harassed.

My only wish is that the game went another step and offered some actual sensible advice on how to maturely deal with sexual harassment instead of automatically assuming that the only option someone has is to retreat to their home and despair in solitude. Perhaps it's a limitation of Twine which can only offer the reader options that the author includes.

(Spoiler - click to show)Your Workplace

At the office one of your male co-workers keeps finding excuses to come over and stand near your desk. You realise it's because he's trying to see down your top.

>STAND UP

You get out of your chair. Your annoying co-worker Dexter is here.
>DEXTER, HELLO

"Good Afternoon, Dexter," you say, now at conversational height with him, breaking his direct view down your cleavage.

"Oh, hi," he replies, looking around at the attention this is attracting from the other cubicles. "No need to stand up on my account."

>ASK DEXTER ABOUT WHAT HE WANTS

"Did you need something? I noticed you hovering, and I'm certain you're not just standing over my desk to ogle me, because that would be quite embarrassing for the both of us."

Dexter glances around, tugging at his collar. "Oh, no," he says. "I was going to ask about the TPS report..."

>TELL DEXTER ABOUT GROIN PUNCHING

"Oh, good," you reply. "You might want to be careful sneaking up on me like that, though. Last guy who startled me got socked right in the goodies. Didn't mean to. Pure reflex, on accident. Can't control it..." you say, flailing your arms out in several jerky random directions.

"Oh right." he says, stepping back. "Hey, do you want to get coffee over lunch?"

>DEXTER, NO

"No, I have lunch all planned out. But thanks for the offer!"

>GIVE TPS REPORTS TO DEXTER
(first taking some TPS reports)
You hand a half-inch thick stack of TPS reports to Dexter. "Let me know if you need any more."

Dexter goes west.

The Coffeeshop

It's busy in the coffee shop today. While you're standing at the counter a man tries to squeeze past behind you. He puts his hands on either side of your waist and brushes the full length of his body up against you.

>DROP COFFEE

You release the hold on your latte, and the pasteboard cup explodes on the floor, splashing still-pretty-hot liquid on the creep's shiny shoes and the hem of his trousers.

"Whoopsie," you say cheerfully. "Oh, sorry about that, you startled me! Might want to be careful rubbing your junk on against a stranger while she's holding hot liquids!"

"It was an accident," he says, staring at his shoes. "You ruined my Italian-"

>TELL HIM ABOUT COFFEE

"And you wasted a four-dollar cup of coffee! I think we'll call it even."

>ORDER COFFEE

"Can I have another one please?" You turn back to the guy, handing him a stack of napkins. "Good thing this one didn't go higher, they do serve their coffee hot!"

Castle of the Red Prince is a short puzzle-box game. Your goal is to kill the Red Prince. He knows you have studied the arcane arts, but he's not particularly worried about your ability. Your ability is that you don't have to trudge N, S, E, W, U, DOWN. The player simply imagines where they want to go (by examining a location you can see or know about) and -zap= there you are. The entire game world is in scope for you to discover and peel away.

It's a very simple, not particularly complicated plot, but this game mechanic places your focus on examining everything. The prose is simple, direct, and well-written without florid verbosity. This gives CASTLE OF THE RED PRINCE's player and PC a refreshingly objective perspective on the actual goings-on. Who cares about directions when you needn't even bother with walls? You can go right to the Red Prince and stab him in the face. It won't work...but that's the game.

I find myself sometimes with very little patience for some IF. This one was direct enough to grab and hold me to completion. I did cheat by sleeping a lot, which essentially hands you as many next steps as you need to get you back on the right path. It took me about a half an hour, but it can be played longer (perhaps like a crossword puzzle for very experienced if-readers) if you avoid sleeping and figure it all out yourself.

I encountered only one place where I struggled with the parser and implementation: (Spoiler - click to show)In my dream I knew I had to place dynamite in the cave at the castle's weak foundation point. I was skimming the list of steps provided in the dreams perfunctorily, and I spent a while trying to PUT DYNAMITE ON FOUNDATION. The foundation is a container, not a supporter. True, the hint steps spelled this out, but I thought "on" was reasonable for placing dynamite on what I pictured as a timber beam.

Yes, it's short and yes, it has all kinds of potential in a larger game. I could see this approach being taken to tell an epic with the breadth of ZORK or STAR WARS or A GAME OF THRONES within the manageable size of a Infocom-ish length work.

This story reads like a prologue to the original System Shock from the point of view of one of the doomed colonists aboard Citadel station. If you've played SS, you remember the absolute unreal amount of gore and viscera and fragments of bodies that litter the hallways, all examples of the experimentation that the mad AI Shodan wrought upon the crew as she created her army of cyborg warriors that were your enemies in the game. This gives you a first person perspective of what that was like. Very gory, very visceral, very adult and would almost qualify as good enough to be one of the original computer logs in that game.

This story succeeds as an example of otherworld dystopian Science Fiction. Horses are not horses, but weird creatures with a carapace and tentacles. The protagonist is obsessive to the point of self-ruin to win what comes off as a parody of animal-judging competitions. You groom your horse as you like, enter the competition, and win (or lose I suppose - I did not play a second time). A neat read, but I'm not sure I care to play again and do things wrong to lose...as I'm not sure I could make the story turn out better.

I actually turned on the music as the game said to, and the game lasted exactly as long as the song. At the beginning the lyrics onscreen went right along with the audio. This was a neat little sort of textual music-video experience of a game, though ultimately forgettable unless you are a huge Ke$ha fan.

I actually like the idea of using Twine and screen effects as a parallel experience/multimedia to a song. There might even be somewhat of a gameplay element/rhythm game in keeping up with the lyrics. Interesting idea.

I played Murphy's Law for the IFComp, so a couple of the minor problems I had may be worked out in subsequent versions.

This game reminded me of some old school Infocom in a good way. The descriptions are relatively terse, but the author did a great job implementing pretty much everything described,(Spoiler - click to show)(except for the robbers in each corner of the bank) and little details abound. The writing is full of very subtle humor; your goal is to pay your last mortgage payment so you will own your house free and clear. In the process of doing so, things go wrong, and the whole affair becomes more complicated. It reminded me quite of bit of BUREAUCRACY, the infuriating puzzler by Douglas Adams, but isn't nearly as complicated as one would first think given the concept. I was never unsure of what to do except during one major bug:

(Spoiler - click to show)
>get in car
You get into your station wagon.

>close car
You close your station wagon.

>start car
You'll need to get inside first.

>get inside car
I only understood you as far as wanting to get inside.

>enter car
But you're already in your station wagon.

>start car
You'll need to get inside first.

>put keys in ignition
You put your keys into the ignition.

>start car
You'll need to get inside first.

>enter car
But you're already in your station wagon.

>get out
You can't get out of the closed your station wagon.

>start car
You'll need to get inside first.

>open car
You open your station wagon.

>start car
You turn the key, but the car only makes some pathetic whining noises before falling silent.


This type of game setup is a classic babel fish puzzle - All you have to do is press the button to get a babel fish, but it falls through an unseen grate. Blocking the grate causes cleaning robots to steal the fish...and so on. A simple task turns into a picaresque affair.

That said, I didn't think the game went far enough with it's machinations. There is one timed puzzle (boo!) at the beginning where you can die. The finale seems to set up an uber-puzzle that is thrown away by going nowhere. (Spoiler - click to show)You stand in a relatively short line at the bank and when you get to the window, masked men enter and stage a robbery, setting up would could be an intricate DOG DAY AFTERNOON type scenario, with four guards each in one corner of the bank, prompting me to think I would need to work out a four-way manipulation puzzle, or that each one would need me to do something for them to give up on the lead robber - IE the situation is rife with possibility and I could see how your mounting frustration through the game could wind up in a comic catharsis as you attempt to thwart the bank robbers...(Spoiler - click to show) but all you need to do is wait and the robbers are paid, they leave, and the bank continues normal operation. Even if this resolved as it does, I would have loved to have seen the bank teller report "All our money and paperwork is gone, so I can't do anything with your payment..." sending you off on another branch of the adventure, perhaps to a wacky post office. As written seems just a tad short and anticlimactic. However, I thought the denouement was great and just right, I just wasn't *frustrated* enough by the game for it to pay off like it seems it should.(Spoiler - click to show) The protagonist is pretty unfazed by this, and I believe the "frustration" is supposed to build up in the player. If there had been a little more backstory about how you've grown to *hate* this house and through the process something better had opened up, say a way to escape to the robbers' hideout in the Cayman islands with your wife and live happily ever after...or something.

That said, it's a great short game that shows promise and has lots of room for expansion into a moderately longer game.

This CYOA is very nicely written with Inklewriter, which I tried out and gave high praise to. Inkle works well for moderate-sized conversation-based stories, and that's what this mostly is. A piece has gone missing from a code-breaking/encrypting machine and you might be responsible.

The bulk of the game is an interrogation, giving answers to questions that are posed to you. You often will get yes/no agree/disagree, often with a choice of lie/truth. The only downside to this is on your first playthrough you're the dumbest person in the room. Several crucial plot points are known to the protagonist and antagonist but the reader only learns what's actually happened after several random stabs at answering the questions. This is not an amnesia game, and the story does not shift based on your answers. It feels like a really good conversation section from a Mass Effect game if it were set in WW2. If this were an endgame to a slightly larger scenario it might not feel quite so trial-and-error.

I never did get the best ending, which might be a testament to the potential of inkle and CYOA, or it may mean that I tired out after giving the same sequence of yes-no-no-lie-yes-agree-yes-no to get to the part of the story that actually branches out and will not let you double back.

It's worth a try - I played this on a lunch break on my android device, and the text is very nicely formatted and readable with large finger-sized buttons for your choices.

This is a nice short game that is written in a very hyper! manic! STYLE! It almost reminded me of a Japanese commercial or a muppet short.

It's about delicious breakfast, and gives you a lot of things to make DELICIOUS BREAKFAST! So you eat delicious breakfast, and many people think delicious breakfast is difficult but they are over thinking DELICIOUS BREAKFAST.

(Spoiler - click to show)Once I got the idea that the game was kidding about everything it laid out and I didn't have to prepare anything, and the entire game is solved by eating, I almost was disappointed that (Spoiler - click to show)the game didn't go to it's logical conclusion and have you eat every single thing within reach including the silverware and the curtains and then yourself as if you were an oruborous.

Definitely worth a quick play. It made me laugh with its manic intensity at the end.

Molly knows how to write, but I swear to goodness, I know nothing more about Rocky Stampede than I did at the beginning of the game. Things like the fortune cookie he mentioned and his shoelace that he keeps tying are unimplemented. His deafness, his band, his song, new stuff, his career...he couldn't hear a word of what I asked. Perhaps that's the point.

This is a great effort at a first game, but I'd love if the conversations were a little deeper.