Ratings and Reviews by OtisTDog

The only other review for this game (at least, at the time that this one is being written) frames this work as an experiment of dubious value and inconclusive results. Both Pirate Railroad and that rewiew were written in 2011, a year before Twine arrived on the scene. We'll skip over the immediate years following Twine's arrival and note that here and now, fifteen years later, the situation (as memorably phrased by Mike Russo) is that the Twine wars are over, and we can all benefit from the peace dividend. One of those dividends has been the large number of experiments with new models of interaction seeking better control of pacing of the play experience, and this short piece would seem very much to be a precursor to those.

Pirate Railroad is unapologetically a subversion of the dominant parser model of its era. The player is quite heavily railroaded through the accelerated, nonsensical vignette of a pirate attack on a train traveling through the desert of New Mexico in the late 1800s. The player character saves a damsel in distress, flees a horde of pirates, is saved from certain death by authorial convenience ex machina not once but twice, is ushered through a micromelodrama of tragedy and comedy with a dash of plot twist and a near-instantaneous mock romance -- all in the space of about 10 or 15 minutes of play time. As Kenneth Hutt notes, the player has no real control and the "correct" moves are telegraphed so strongly that playing along is as easy as turning a page.

But still, it's a bit different from static fiction, isn't it? The need to enter a short command is like a little lock on each page, one that asks the player to confirm with just a tiny bit of effort that there is a desire for the story to continue. It's a little more effort and a little more engagement than would be required by a press-any-key-/click-this-link-to-continue interface, and to me this is the right way to create a fast-paced sequence in parser IF. Though trying to step off the rails causes the game to exhort you (somewhat monotonously) to play along until you relent, the experience of cooperating with the plain-as-day prompts sure beats trying to mindread one's way through a gauntlet of false choices that result in a "death end" whenever a wrong one is picked.

The author deploys a limited conversation system that is used for clever comedic effect in at least a couple of instances, and this, in conjunction with the finely-balanced writing required to sell the absurd premises just enough so that the player can have some genuine snack-sized fun with the scenario, convinces me that Utkonos was an interactive fiction author of some nascent skill. The only other work by the same author, The Duel in the Snow, seems to have been released earlier and to be somewhat better known, but so far as IFDB is concerned, this game was the end of a brief yet promising career.

This one is well worth the investment of the small amount of time required to play, best experienced when in the mood for something pacy that is inherently silly but played straight, as seen in games like Moonbase Indigo, A Matter of Heist Urgency, Fine-Tuned, or the like. Would-be authors can dissect the writing for clues about how best to "herd cats" along a railroaded sequence in a relatively congenial way.

If you are a completionist who happens to encounter this game, then you will find the title to be 100% accurate: The end is your escape from this muddled, nonsensical mess.

I agree with Paul O'Brien that it is "rather disconcerting to be thrown into this environment without even a halfhearted explanation about what was happening," but unlike O'Brien I never found The End Means Escape to become absorbing. The first fifty moves generated only hostility from the talking objects in the first puzzle, after which came my first use of >HINT and then a brute force "exploration" of oodles of combinatorial unproductive responses.

After working out that it's possible to (Spoiler - click to show)>UNLOCK DOOR WITH SCISSORS (which seems to accomplish nothing), I looked back over the various responses and tried (Spoiler - click to show)>BALLOON, RUB FLOOR. All well and good, and then I got the balloon to pick up another object. Then another fifty moves without progress, at which point >HINT tells me that I need to... do exactly what I've just done (which had no effect). And won't give any further hints until I do that. I don't know whether the issue is a consequence of the context sensitivity of the built-in hints or a bug in the program logic, or both. The only solution I found was a restart.

Several reviewers cite this first scenario as the game's high point. Should you somehow plow through it, your reward is another completely ungrounded scenario, this one featuring moving words around. This is an interesting mechanic, but here, devoid of useful context, it is reduced to a mere tech demo. You can try to "solve" this, if you like, but my suggestion is to just use the walkthrough.

Past this, we get to even weirder interactions with dead bodies of a type one reviewer (Danielle) called "creepy" and another (Tina Sikorski) deemed "icky." Enticing, huh? Even the walkthrough notes: "Ewww...That was gross."

Next: a maze with an unusual solution but not one I enjoyed. And finally, a metaphor for... who can say for sure? Fortunately, this last segment is quick enough even without hints.

There appears to be no raison d'etre for this work -- it's just a pile of detail implementation utterly lacking in story or any other observable coherence. As Adam Cadre summarizes it: "... goal, please?" One reviewer suggests that the unifying feature is that "each [tableau] has as its basis understanding or at least discovering the nature of something," but that's a core basic of puzzle-oriented interactive fiction, not something novel to this work.

A smart person that I talked to about this game noted: "Surrealism isn't a pass to make no sense and then pretend it's more meaningful." Other reviewers delicately dance around the point, but I will not: When not actively repugnant, this piece is at best a waste of time.

The End Means Escape is clearly the product of a lot of genuine effort on the part of the author, and it just barely manages to claw its way out of one-star territory (i.e. "no redeeming qualities") by virtue of a few mechanical parts worth a closer look for their effect on mood and tone. However, don't expect to enjoy this one even if you choose to study it, and my advice to pure players is to steer clear.

The blurb for Bill Belichick Offseason Simulator claims:

Any fun you may have, or amusement you may find, while piloting this simulator is purely accidental, and should be reported as a software bug.

If that is to be taken seriously, then I am sorry to report to the author that this work is riddled with bugs.

It seems certain, however, that this tongue-in-cheek warning is not to be taken seriously. BBOS is a short-form absurdist comedy that can't even take itself seriously as a lampooning of Bill Belichick, who at the time was head coach of the New England Patriots. "Serious" is not a word that applies to this endeavor.

I know nothing about the Patriots or Mr. Belichick's career as a football coach. Author Jon Bois is a sports writer of some note about whose career and work I'm similarly ignorant. Knowledge of these things is almost completely unrelated to enjoying this game, which draws the bulk of its tropes from text adventures, adventure games, RPGs and popular fiction, all of which are blended together in a base of pure author id.

There is a slight unifying framework to this game that involves collecting cards in order to design the perfect offensive play. It's pretty incidental to the play experience, which is more about having fun with a series of pixel-animated vignettes featuring everything from an encounter with a "roving rock music gang" to a visit to a hardware megastore to being summoned to another dimension by a wizard to interrogating an NFL player about favorite music and recipes.

BBOS is a great choice for a lunchtime or commute "snack" game (though you may need to make use of its bookmark feature to complete it across more than one session), or as light entertainment for a rainy afternoon. If you're on the fence about this one, give it a shot -- if the first five minutes amuse you, you can expect to enjoy the rest.

This game is a remarkable achievement, full of cleverly devious (or deviously clever?) little puzzles that are suitable for both kids and grown-ups. The fact that it's written in a custom system that seems every bit as full-featured as any of the major parser systems (like Inform 7, TADS or Dialog) is just icing on the cake.

The simple premise of an apprentice's fetch quest in a land of sweets really undersells the difficulty level of this game. I tried it by myself and never got more than 12 out of 16. When I suggested it to my play group, everyone was quickly hooked by the game's central premise of a decomposable/recombinable set of magical wordlets and had a blast working out all of the ways that they could be exploited.

The fact that there is no checklist of items to gather means that finding all sixteen will require some lateral thinking; part of the puzzle structure is figuring out what things might be convertible into the special ingredients that you've been sent to find. The very British-style approach to descriptions of locations and items means that, though the information provided is sparse, almost every bit of it is relevant in some way or another.

My playgroup was able to obtain all 16 points in the course of a two-hour session, with only a few nudges from me based on previous experience. In a few places there are hints of guess-the-verb in that one must intuit that a particular action can be applied to objects, but with multiple people playing it was never very long before one of us came up with the right idea. The biggest headslapper from my perspective was discovery of two magical ingredients (both flans) in an unexpected location -- it's a bit of a joke on experienced players, but the game was quite fair about this in its hinting. (Spoiler - click to show)In the cottage, there's a remark about desk drawers that you shouldn't forget!

This is a great game for introducing newcomers to parser IF, and well worth the time for anyone looking for some fun with a neat magic system remniscent of Suveh Nux. My hat is off to author Nils Fagerburg, whose impressive talents are on display here.