Reviews by Hanon Ondricek

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.

This is a clever one-room escape done in Twine. The room, it seems, is a hypercube/klein bottle of some sort and figuring out the physics involved with a button, a lever, falling, and meeting yourself present up a mystery. I didn't solve it after about twelve minutes and gave up. I'm curious if there might not be an ending, which would be valid for this walkthrough hypercube simulator.

I deduct a star for using the default display CSS because the text is so hard to read at minuscule size. But it is a neat little puzzle box and worth playing with for a bit. I'd love this sort of conceit expanded into a fuller experience.

I first read a PaperBlurt Twine story during the 2013 IFComp - his "Dad vs Unicorn" was a surprisingly slippery read. I was held on the wavering line of "This has some serious feeling in it, is this serious? He can't be serious. Oh my gosh this is serious. No it's not!"

I have several of my own stories that deal with the porn industry, so reading the blurb for this one I was totally invested. I was ready to see what the imagined golden years must be like for Ron Jeremy.

The text is immaculately styled, colorful, and the illustrations and typography make this a high class presentation.

Then I had the same experience as I did with Dad v. Unicorn, but this time I'm not sure it was so successful. I was expecting a slightly naughty tale with either feelgood or melancholy elements. I liked that(Spoiler - click to show) Rocky B. has had the life that every guy dreams of, but he feels like he's missing something. I was expecting a strange romance or a pornography comeback with all the humiliating and potential comedy that could entail. PaperBlurt has a great sense of humor, and I love the cell phone conversations with god and satan. Especially when Satan's response to "I want a kid" is an immediate hang up. I thought it would be a one-off joke, resulting in farcical embarrassment as Rocky came to his senses, or a comedic payoff that would be a pileup series of misguided failures which is what the game would be about. But that's the rest of the plot. You kidnapping a kid.

The game forces you to do it. You go to a store and have several chances to steal several different children. (Neither this nor DvU afford agency other than you can click on things in different order). I was still laughing along thinking this was one of those whacky episodes that would pay off. I skipped every kid and was rewarded with a whole entire sequence you will miss, which maybe has the one slight "puzzle" in the game. Escaping this forces you to take the next kid you see. And you drive to Tiujana with your charge sobbing in the trunk through a long and unskippable sequence.

All right, this is going to be some type of serious adventure. At the border you can choose to take the kid with you or drop him off with the border patrol. I'm thinking "of course I'm not going to abandon this kid in Mexico..." but if you choose to keep the kid, the story *makes* you do the "right" thing and leave them. The end. ? Abruptly. No resolution. So Rocky needed to...emigrate to find happiness?

So I know this game was written for competition. and I like the author's subversive sense of humor (The unicorn in DvU was reminiscent of and shocking as the Spanish Inquisition) but this felt sort of like a treatment for a longer independent film that just hit high points with none of the actual meat of the story. (Spoiler - click to show)Sure, justify the trip to Mexico because getting to the border with a kidnapped kid in your trunk is an amazing impossible puzzle setup that gets thrown away.

Something is missing. I think the game needs a conversation with the kid. The kid needs to teach Rocky something profound without realizing it. (Spoiler - click to show)Then he appreciates it so much, he takes the kid back. All said, I felt like I got an outline of a story with promise of substance that was left out.

I don't mean to be completely negative. PaperBlurt is writing surprising and very well executed scenarios that almost all feel worthy of an independent film plot. I hope to see his talent grow and develop!

This is Twine's default theme, but with a pink background where the text is tiny and still hard to read. (Spoiler - click to show)That is why the one sadly missing star. :( I *just* started futzing with Twine, and I am terrible at javascript and HTML, but even I found some default CSS templates and advice on the Twine forums to make my text bigger and take up the entire page. (Ms. Woodson: at least increase the font size and I will add the fifth star. Contact me if you need help or direction to resources!)

Okay, there's the bad stuff. MAGICAL MAKEOVER is delightfully written, wry, shot through with delicious prose and a knowledge of both vanity and the lack of confidence. Then the story takes off and actually goes in interesting places. A definite try if you're a fan of neo-fairy tales with a sense of humor. The title does not lie, the goings-on on display might be at first glance "girlish" but not just for ladies -- the author knows that and invites any reader in with unexpected cleverness and wonderful imagery.

For the most part, this *feels* like a linear story, but (Spoiler - click to show)I got an ending marked with something like a 3a, so I assume there are different ways through the plot. Most of the interaction that is not just "click to continue" seems to be how you approach the makeover at the beginning, perhaps in choices and order you choose them, and what apparel you get dressed in, so I assume it's setting some variables of some type that affect what happens later.

Recommended.

(do not) forget is practically a graphical adventure created using twine and its choice-based systems, including (I believe) SugarCube for a save system. Beyond this it's like no other twine you've seen with full screen graphics, and downtempo sort of trip-hop music. Although the world is not really manipulable and consists of sprites moving around backgrounds which illustrate the simple story, it lends a huge dose of originality and weight to a game that would probably suffer without them and fall into the pile with every other short, zany twine story.

The writing is both witty and on occasion, crudely perverse. I've heard the graphics described as "Minecraft" and the simple cubic backgrounds and characters do resemble that game, but this also seems to be a parody of both FEZ and the ANIMAL CROSSING types of games which are filled with crocodiles named Crunchy and more is going on than you suspect. You're a bunny rabbit on a vision quest. Every animal, even in short appearances, has personality and a line you will probably remember, and the entire game plays in the self-aware jokey arena. It's not for everyone, especially if you don't like meta-snark, but I found it very worthwhile to see another thing that Twine is capable of, and I got a kick out of the animals arguing over their scientifically described behaviors.

I encountered one glitch where (Spoiler - click to show)I got stuck on one of the staticky "color of the sky" screens, and I hadn't used the save system. I don't know if it would have worked if I had since I played directly online, however, using my browser to go back and then forward again seemed to kick the HTML back in gear and the game proceeded. If it had not, I would have interpreted it as a strangely abrupt ending. The actual ending is slightly like that too. I thought "Am I done?" and had to wait a bit, and then I was. It fits the story pretty well though.

The text gives you two viewpoints almost simultaneously, and seems to respond mostly with the one you react to. Like Schroedinger's cat, you're in two states until you resolve by observation and reaction.

It's a neat concept which has been toyed with in stories such as My Name is Tara Sue. On my play-throughs, I was only able to get the non dreadful ending. I don't know if there's a way to change that.

I was afraid it would be overwritten as the first paragraphs are a little overwhelmingly complicated in construction. It either gets better or serves the game, as I didn't notice after the first couple screens.

(Spoiler - click to show)It may just be comparing and contrasting roaming packs of college kids out partying with packs of college kids rioting and being beaten down by the police in areas such as the Ukraine. That may have been the point possibly - that we as Americans might consider violence in other countries but really it isn't forefront in our minds, considered and forgotten as we seek "another bar." I could be way off.

This game purports to simulate a PC with Alzheimer's disease in a city that caters to Alzheimer's patients. I thought this was a cool concept. I played through pretty quickly. The text is nicely styled to avoid the annoying tiny print white on black. It appears there are multiple paths, and the Twine does that "switch word when you click" thing. Due to the concept, though, I wasn't so much in control as I would have liked or needed to be given the status of the PCs health. Worth a play.

This game was written for a Ludum Dare where the theme was 10 seconds. The author does an interesting thing in letting you play one second out of a relationship in consecutive different time periods, which is a pretty cool idea. 1 AM on your first move might zip you to 1 AM a year later for your next. It's like a more built-out version of Aisle where you get a follow-up to your one move.

While this is a really cool concept in theory, this game only glances the surface of making good use of the idea. I played a couple of times, and even with such a small work I felt railroaded. This could be a prototype for a longer game. I almost wish this were in a parser language like Inform so the decision of what to do could be more open. Since the concept would limit you to ten moves, I'd like to see the resolutions actually seem to make some difference like some of the wildly divergent denouement seen in Aisle. Or even Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle if it had a similar sense of random chaos.

This is a sparsely-implemented but well-written piece in Playfic. It feels like an example game, but contains Veeder's usual wit and noodles around with the PCs identity and inventory in a way that could be interestingly fleshed out in a longer piece. Any more description would spoil. Worth a look if you have ten minutes.

I'm a Wonderland nerd, so I enjoyed this immensely. I would love to see the entire text done with some creative styling similar to what this falling sequence does.