Reviews by Hanon Ondricek

...I appreciated ULTRAMARINE, and though I think I made only two or three actual choices, I got a numbered unsatisfactory ending, so it appears I could go through again and try for another ending using the SKIP function (I didn't bother to save) but I think I can infer the other branches of plot I didn't discover. Though this is listed as a "full length" game - mostly due to the expository water-treading - I felt like I was being somehow hastily brought up to speed on a much more expansive story in a bigger world than shown here. I'd love to see at least some of this happen over some still art or kinetic concept drawings to break up the characters just do-si-do-ing their positions while facing the audience and describing the off-stage action.

I appreciate the effort here and the writing and thought behind these characters studies which feel very "now" - but these are the kinds of revelations that are usually justified in turning us on our head after sucking the player into a "fun" fantasy world where we already have formed a worldview and have a basis of uninformed choices to build upon. Here, it feels we've skipped the revelatory turn (No! This fantasy world is our own!!!...!) and the game just handwaves all that.

But not in a bad way! After I rolled my eyes, I enjoyed the busy-work, almost IF Sudoku vibe of this. The STATUS command is helpful as a quest-log and was it not for an extremely helpful graphical MAP, I might not have seen this through to the end.

UPDATE - This game is apparently still in development. See comment below. This appears to be an "abandoned" game concept. It was greenlit on Steam in 2015 and hasn't been updated since. The steam page says it's being "retired" which is unfortunate.

This is a 3D adventure made in Unity, but the novel utilization of words and typing in a cleverly old-school presentation will likely interest a lot of people in the IF Community, at least on a conceptual level.

This game cheats a bit with its gimmick. Words make up the entire world, but it also uses surfaces to build the environment, and the surfaces declare what they are "stone" "wall" "torch" with "firefirefire" glimmering out of it. This gives a bit of feel that it is a pre-render with temporary textures, but after exploring a bit, this is surprisingly intuitive and tactile. I had to approach a surface to read what it was made of. It's almost what playing an ASCII roguelike in 3D would be.

The player can sprint, jump and crouch, and (at least in the demo) this wasn't too challenging. So far the game does not seem to want to overwhelm you by requiring twitchy reflexes.

Getting close to an item lets the player interact, and gives a description. Walking near a chest, pressing E or enter to interact, and typing OPEN reveals "stuff". The text tells you there is a scepter, then you can TAKE SCEPTER.

Combat has a "typing of the dead" feel that I really appreciated, and was very clever.

I bounced off this a couple of times because it does things I don't usually care for - I had to download a thing for my specific system, the text types out - in full words at least instead of letter by letter.

But I finally got time to sit down and relax with this and treat it as an almost cinematic experience, and I was not disappointed.

At first, I thought I was looking at a fancy background movie, but I think the game text plays over a live rendered 3D environment and that's why you download a thing. I could be wrong, but if so I was fooled expertly. I watched the sparks and they never seemed to repeat, bouncing off the floor and drifting in antigravity.

The sound design is oppressive at first and it took me several tries to get along with it. The text and choices are displayed with different metallic banging sounds that pace the work and create a background texture along with the smoky popping of that aforementioned wire. And other sounds.

The story (Spoiler - click to show)combines the loneliness of vast space with existential dread and oppressive hopelessness of inhabiting an environment you aren't built to survive long in. Then there are rats. I'm not really afraid of rats. I've never had a bad experience with them. There are no actual pictures of rats in the game (and, respectfully, no jumpscares).

But you will remember the rats.

This is a quiet, nonlinear, brooding horror with a diegetic, musique-concrete background score that builds and works its way into your psyche along with the words. And other things.

At first, I was critiquing as a designer and thought, "Why did I need to download a thing to look at one room?" By the end, I was convinced. Meticulously and thoroughly designed with words and multimedia, this is what Bruno Dias excels at. It even earns the Dutch angle.

I wish I'd written this:

Ser Leonhart poses like a titan holding up the sky. His hair dances in another breeze. "Not even the Impenetrable Keep can stop the heavy fist of justice. All you need is confidence, my timid tenderfoot, and you can accomplish that which your heart most desires."

You're a pig by the way, and your job is to lead quite a large number of people around to complete the quest and save a Princess from an Evil Wizard. Your hint system is fleas behind your ear, but one tells the truth and one always lies... Love it.

This is an incredible game with so many moving parts, good puzzles, and hysterical writing.

A stellar follow up to Oppositely Opal.

I got stuck because there was a link that was in text that ran off the side of the screen and I had to minimize the sidebar so it would show up. Perhaps it's my display settings (large TV, low rez, bigger letters?)

Very nicely-styled Sugarcube (I assume due to the save controls, but you won't need to save) Twine with atmospheric sound. Short mood piece.

This short game is a sheer delight, beautifully illustrated and implemented with sound effects and music. Snarky and hysterical fun you'd expect from people involved with The Stanley Parable (but in Twine form.)

I even sang along when instructed, and I never indulge in audience participation.

(note: gratuitous swearing)

WttMCatIRS|HStLPD:0 is essentially a short story masquerading as a CYOA but is meant to be read from beginning to end as nearly every choice leads to the subsequent section, and it becomes patently clear that Z is the death-end. It gets extra stars since I enjoy this kind of snark, but is not really interactive. The author lampshades this more than once.

The humor is pleasantly amusing and an effective parody of classic Choose Your Own Adventure fare chronicling your adventure as a human getting a rash checked out in the medical bay on a space station. The setting is a casual riff on Douglas Adams and the satire gets across that, yes, seeing a doctor is difficult, but none of it bites due to a lack of actual "bureaucracy" since you slide right through the choices and experience much less hold up than an actual patient would.

It's short and doesn't overstay its welcome, reading very much like a clever tutorial-walkthrough that Infocom would write for the reader as an introduction to a longer CYOA. This would also be a good short example for people who want to know how choice-narratives work without actually committing to reading a long one.

I was asked by the author to review this game. I'm going to be explicitly critical because I think Rakovich is an excellent writer who could be an extremely promising IF talent with a little more experience regarding how to skilfully exploit the conventions that interactivity has to offer.

AFD:C1 is a "psychological horror" piece in Twine. The game is beautifully formatted and does a very good job of pacing the amount of text between choices. I never got bored waiting to click, and I didn't skim until text started repeating. I played through in maybe twenty minutes, only getting slightly stuck once. This is very obviously a first game, but not the author's first writing. The prose is short and direct, with some nice imagery. It never verges into awkwardness. A lot of people will enjoy reading it.

Where it falters a bit is in the structure. Twine excels at emotional interactivity where words lead to other words and authors can construct a mindscape of hyperlink-synapses that is not dependent on logically physical mapping as a parser game with rooms and objects and inventory usually is. Twine games can be very successful using these conventions, but the author needs to do more work to pull it off. It's a bit disappointing in Twine to read a block of text followed by a list of bare choices "Go North" "Go East" "Go West", especially when the setting is a dreamscape that one might not expect to conform to a map grid, and when Twine makes it an easy matter to make any words in the prose a hyperlink which might give an indication of where the click might lead.

It also does the thing where the map doesn't just require you to go "west", it requires you to go west three or four times to reach a destination with no descriptive reward for doing so except a sentence-fragment description at each click: "a hollow log" "a mossy rock". Luckily this game isn't tremendous, so the extra map isn't egregious. The author does do a good job with hub-structure where the player might focus in on a tree and get a series of choices, then be able to back away from the tree to choose a new direction. There's an inventory (which unfortunately cannot be displayed if we forget what we picked up) and some slight puzzles of the "if you have the thing then a choice to put it in the other thing will appear in the right place" and sometimes there are multiple options offered. I was stuck for maybe four minutes by doing the most obvious thing and then when presented no path forward, doing the other illogical thing the game offered. This isn't a hard puzzler, but there's a lot of wandering around revisiting nodes to see if new options show up. I didn't know I needed a pitcher of water, but I found a stream and a pitcher and...why not. I encountered no real bugs, and puzzle solutions seem logical once you do what's required, but there's not a lot of actual motivation initially to accomplish what author wants except that...it's a puzzle.

So that's the real problem here. There's nothing wrong with a simple game, and there's nothing wrong with simple find-the-key puzzles and dividing a game into chapters, but I really don't feel I accomplished anything when I hit the chapter break. I wasn't horrified—I moved around putting an eyeball here, a jawbone here, tucking in a millipede... It's meant to be a nightmarish foresty-dreamscape where I don't know who I am and in all the wisps of parental recollections and nicely-written imagery there was one sentence that intrigued me: (Spoiler - click to show)The protagonist recalls one parent becoming angry that s/he was gifted a book about serial killers by the other parent. I've crossed a river with a Charon-like boatman, so I can only guess I'm journeying to Hell for my sins? I really also liked the image of (Spoiler - click to show)blood pooled in the creases of your palm, and a swarm of fireflies eagerly drinking it up.

I'm interested to see more of this, but I'd wish for a better "hook" in the first chapter that motivates the puzzling and perhaps some solid characterization instead of the worn-out "you have amnesia and your character will be revealed in bits" beginning since I don't have any idea what all this imagery logically connects to.

The end of the game links me to an author website promising chapter two and displaying some nice icons for some of the objects in the game. I know Twine doesn't easily make clear all of the multimedia capabilities it has without a lot of research and tweaking, but I would have loved a sidebar with these icons to remind me what I was carrying as an inventory!