Reviews by Hanon Ondricek

I'm unable to download this from the link...is it on the ifArchive?

I thought this was yet another Twine simulation of the affronts experienced at the hands of men that are quite popular currently. Then I hit prose like this:

The massive industrial building pumps smog into the air at a breakneck pace. You can physically feel the disapproving, accusatory frowns of 21st Century environmentalists looming over you and your future workplace. You hear the sobs of orphans and puppies coming from throughout the area.

The prose is actually quite funny, and I enjoyed it a lot more once I realized it was a parody.

There are actually footnotes, and references, and art included to illustrate this poor pregnant protagonist with rotting teeth and a lagabout husband.

This would have gotten a 3-star, but the game crashed in the middle when I tried to get a job in the factory.

“Are you here to inquire about a job?”

“Yes.”

This opens a new browser window with a neocities site missing content. I'm just hoping this wasn't meta-humor showing the futility of factory work, but both the "Yes" and "No" options lead nowhere.

Gaming Pixie presents here a short Twine piece which I can possibly describe as "bisexuality simulator". Everyone's got a sexual identity, but there is an uncanny valley that many civilians don't comprehend that represents omnisexuality or bisexuality. It seems that heterosexuals and homosexuals can both agree that their identity is hard and fast and isn't going to change. Where does a person fit who is not so similarly signed in ink to prefer traits and derive pleasure from the beauty of only gender or the other? Within welcoming communities, those who "decide not to decide" are sometimes looked upon as untrustworthy, and possibly something to be shunned, despite the lessons learned from fundamental sexism one meta-level up.

Anyway. This game rings true, and is a quick and informative read with several interesting choices.

My outcome: Yay, I'm a lesbian.

Remember those carnival dark rides with all the lurid artwork on the sheet metal facade that looked like it was done by an artist who did both tattoos and album covers? They promise chills and thrills within, but once inside the bumpy cart and crashing through the doors, the flapping tent doesn't keep out the daylight, and you're supposed to quiver in fear at some random blasts of air, a buzzer in the dark, an air horn, and an occasional brief illumination of a halloween mask by a bare bulb? The outside suggestion of what goes on inside proves to be the most interesting part.

Shadow of a Soul purports to be a sexually and violently explicit tale of the afterlife. It is written in Twine, however the text is not styled, using the ugly and way-too-small default white on black format. The game does contain some images and some well-chosen music.

So you've made a deal with dark creatures for a long and happy life. It's not immortality, but it's more than a hundred years, which seems reasonable for this kind of story. You're allowed to choose or not choose your gender, and also specify what gender attracts you the most. This is nicely done and the text varies to adapt to this.

So instead of just going to hell, you are pressed into service by a dark minion to "release" seven souls as a pre-quest before going to your final reward. Your performance here will determine your ultimate fate; whether you are kept as a pet by this minion, or turned over to the minion's "sibling" who is purportedly not as nice.

This is a great setup, and suggests a dark and gritty scenario rife with geysers of blood and lava, horrifying creature fights, and some down and dirty sexual scenarios as well as some soul-searching and some insight into the human nature of mercy and punishment, pain and pleasure...all the the trappings of an imaginative take on Dante's Inferno.

What happens next is barely a skeleton of that idea. You fight seven identical creatures. Even the art for each one is the same. A few are differentiated only by the words "this one looks stronger". You get the choice to stab them with your knife or feed them your blood, and every time this happens, it is described exactly the same. There seems to be a slight bit of randomness in how many times you stab or how much blood each creature requires, but this is arbitrary and involves no strategy. When you give blood, you can give "a little" "more" or "a lot". Twice you can perform sexual favors to replenish your blood, and these encounters are described with only the slightest bit more detail that wouldn't even come close to making a soccer mom who's read Fifty Shades tingle even a bit.

It's a horribly missed opportunity to show off some amazing creature art, and some disturbing sexual and violent prose. The story as told doesn't go far enough for all its suggestion of afterlife prurience. And the "battle" game part isn't fun or strategic or varied enough to make up for the uninspired descriptions. Once you stab a demon, you can't retreat and offer it blood. It's about as pulse-pounding as a solo game of Battleship.

I did think the music worked well and seemed to follow what was happening, providing a smudge of the atmosphere I wanted in the prose, if it wasn't in the monster art. The scream when a demon dies by the knife is a bit humorous though.

(Spoiler - click to show)I believe there may be different endings besides the two extremes that I played to (all blood, all stabbing). When you reach one, you pretty much are given the fate that was promised, without irony, nor an endgame twist, which was disappointing.

I so wish this worked better, because it's a solid skeleton for a game, but it's a plastic skeleton illuminated by a red bulb accompanied by buzzers and air horns instead of being a ghoulish and decadent dive into depravity promised by the painted facade.

It's really a shame this author didn't polish this another week and submit it for the Adult Interactive Fiction Competition.

The Fuzzy Little Adventure is another story by PaperBlurt which attempts to capitalize on the shocking humor of cognitive dissonance. Framed like a children's book, the gushy narration talks of happy rainbows and sharing, but the three furry animal characters in the story are only interested in making a drug deal, shouting at each other in threat-laden, profanity-stuffed invective that wavers between creatively original and boringly overblown.

If this sounds groundbreaking to you, stop reading this review right now and play this story. You may get a few laughs out of some imaginatively overblown methods of anatomical torture and punishment, (these are all discussed but never actually happen, so it's essentially that Saturday Night Live skit with the catchphrase "I hate when that happens!")

There's no real interaction, save for a couple of choices at the end, and you spend most of the story clicking on an ellipsis that I couldn't find when I originally tried reading this on my phone. The reader does not participate in the story but makes a couple of choices that slightly alter the finale.

The concept of portraying an adult Quentin Tarantino-ish plot using the trappings of a children's story has been done before and better by several programs on Adult Swim, such as Robot Chicken which never subjects the viewer to any concept longer than a minute, and South Park which has practically run every permutation of dissonant humor while almost never losing focus on telling a story. Even Family Guy knows that shocking humor shouldn't preclude things like plot and characterization (thin though they may be.) The initial humor of fluffy animals making a drug deal is amusing at first, but beyond that, the story has no original ideas and doesn't develop in any surprising ways. I expected the narrator to turn on the characters, but this story isn't ambitious enough to attempt a second humor trope.

PaperBlurt's previous Dad vs. Unicorn saved the joke for the end, and did not overstay its maudlin welcome. The Sadness of Rocky Barbato had some plot aspiration and the germ of an original idea. Despite some mild amusement at the audacity of this concept, this unhappy badger is sad to report that this fuzzy little adventure contains no adventure at all.

The last episode of ZWotA [TWEEdledeedeedleeDEEDLEdee] cast you as a dead wizard on a bus trying to find the correct random path through a series of death-ends. This episode makes great strides to playability - there's still a tree of random deaths, but they are extensively written and imaginative, then take you right back to make another choice. This makes me much less grumpy about the game.

Once again, some surprisingly witty and puerile humor exchange fluids like promdates. Here you get to choose where you went to school by flipping through ever-more-ridiculous choices. Some of the dialogue gave me Guybrush Threepwood vibes, which isn't a bad thing, along with a bit of Thornton's Mentula Macanus.

I will definitely play more of this if it continues, and can manage to remain specifically funny without devolving into a rehash of gross-out humor that's been done before. So far, at the short chapter lengths, it is just enough of a bite of ridiculous lunacy that doesn't overstay its welcome.

This is an ambitious multimedia prose piece (only interactive in that you click the highlighted word to continue) in Quest by an author not writing in the native language. In a way, some of the strange English constructions work in its favor, describing some of the detail in the images a very oblique and fascinating light. I commend the author who does a good job with some very evocative turns of phrase and shifts in perspective.

On the other hand, there are passages that are over-written and I might have appreciated one clear image or metaphor rather than a long paragraph explaining that this person is my father and this person is someone named Emma and ... There are a lot of different people involved in this, and something tragic has happened. Someone fell out a window and I think I'm supposed to feel very maudlin and affected by this, but I've got so many random people suffering I don't know which one to identify with.

There is also music, which is very Soundblaster Midi sounding, which synchronizes with the passages. Some is helpful and appropriate when plaintive in the background, but there was one cue that was so 60's Suspense Organ Sting that made me grin and think of Doctor Who, which wasn't what the author was going for, I think!

I appreciate the effort, and hope the author continues to write.

You are the Zombie Wizard of the Apocalypse! (which should be accompanied by tweedleedeedly electric guitar riffs by a fifteen year-old) in this very short chapter of what is likely to be an epic tale of Wizardry and...zombie...ness.

Essentially this wants to be a raucous and bawdy deconstruction of the day to night "life" of a young lich (which at least in my definition is a zombie wizard). The writing is actually good and shows a spark of keen wit, but I kept having to back up and rewind every time the story would end by taking a choice that makes no more arbitrary sense than any other: a diarrhea spell should stop *any* approaching human guard in his tracks.

I'd suggest in further chapters that the number of "game over" dead ends be completely reduced or eliminated. (Spoiler - click to show)I'm a zombie lich king. If I want to walk through radioactive water and discover my remaining flesh is melting off, I should be able to deal with that. Instead of "game over" you offer a number of solutions and rejoin the main branch of the story. Right off the bat I'm given the option to "shave my beard". Apparently this is the connective tissue holding my body together because I died when I didn't stop. Your life meter would seem to be the pain state of a boil on your ass. No really.

So this is a brief introduction to a world that the author wishes to continue in a longer work. I like the idea of the every day life of a zombie wizard, but I'd like it *fleshed* out...as it were.

This is less a game and more a paper-thin photo-narrative of a photographer at a hot South Beach party taking candids. Each click you make gives you a real-life picture of some very attractive people. I've never seen this done, and I assume the photographer has the rights to use everyone's image. The photos are of party-happenings and very sexy ladies in swimsuits (and a few cute guys). While you might not want to play this at work, it doesn't go racier than most pool party photos with a few that are zoomed in on a (clothed) cleavage or butt. At the end the entire set of photos is displayed (along with a "to be continued") as far as the story goes.

The thin shred of a story is that you're looking to meet up with Martina, who's famous but very hard to pin down because she's so busy and everyone wants to talk with her or get her to do something. I'm not sure this even matters. Other than one or two seeming branches (do you want to catch the DJ who just started mixing, or follow the girl in the bikini?) you're essentially always just clicking the link for the next photo. While it's by no means innovative drama, it was a clever way to give some context to a photo set that might otherwise just be a slideshow with a next button.

NOTE: I have not completed the game yet due to hardware limitations (Mac, online only) but I wanted to call attention to it.

This is one of the best examples of a non choice-based Quest game I've seen in a while. Even though the story obviously pulls inspiration from several sources (Infocom spell-fests, J.K.Rowling) the writing is clever and at the level where it feels like one of Infocom's old-school fictions, perhaps aimed at the WISHBRINGER crowd. The female protagonist returns to her not-Hogwarts magic school a day late to find everyone missing, frozen, or worse. The game touts five re-usable spells and from the section I played seemed tightly coded...

Except I *ached* for this story to be in Glulx or Tads with a more robust parser. I'm on a Mac, and therefore cannot play Quest games offline, so each turn takes from half a second to about five seconds to register, and while that doesn't sound like much, it's like walking through sticky mud. Also, many of the standard modern conveniences such as word synonyms (READ BOOK? Nope. READ SPELLBOOK) and some pronoun handling (TAKE BOOK. EXAMINE IT sometimes failed to catch what I was talking about) are noticeably absent from the interface. Fortunately Quest provides an inventory list and a list of exact items in scope so that's not a huge deal, but it felt clunky to type TAKE CAKE. (whoops) TAKE CUPCAKE frequently. I did enjoy some Quest features, such as a colorful automatic map and a compass rose showing viable directions at all times.

The author is quite on the ball (loved the trashy romance novel excerpt) and has included some original art as well. I'm almost certain she would be conscientious about synonyms and the like if Quest made it easy. I'm not vastly experienced with Quest, but I know creating a parser-style game on the order of one this fully-implemented is quite a huge task involving advanced scripting concepts despite the language's "easy" trappings which is why many of the games that come out using it (unlike this one) are relatively simple or CYOA.

I hope to continue this, which means I'm going to have to register for the Quest site (I'm sure I have before, just don't remember it) in order to save my progress. Definitely worth a look if you are on PC and can download the off-line Quest runner, or have a lot more patience than I do.