Ratings and Reviews by Hanon Ondricek

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.

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.