Reviews by Christina Nordlander

vale of singing metals is probably the best Twiny Jam entrant I've played so far, and an excellent example of how to create a challenging game in Twine: by using links to create a maze. At first you merely want to find your bearings and explore. Later, you find an object and instructions on where to put it.

This is a straightforward concept, but vale of singing metals uses dream-logic and surreal, evocative sensations to guide the player through the maze. Saying much more about it would probably spoil it.

The colour scheme is enjoyable and works well with the dreamlike but calm ambience.

Strongly recommended to those who are interested in seeing the more game-like uses of Twine, or who want a poetic but decently challenging puzzle.

Computer games have widened their range of subjects. In the last few years, we've seen games dealing with serious topics such as LGBT issues, mental illness, or the morality of war. This has polarised critics. Supporters see this as the medium growing up: treating problematic or unpleasant topics, the way novels have done for centuries and films have done for decades. Detractors (the ones who are not just trolls) have pointed to a dilemma: is it possible to make an enjoyable game about an unenjoyable topic? If yes, isn't that distasteful: trivialising a real problem into a few hours' entertainment? If no - who would play an unenjoyable game?

Begscape by Porpentine is a game about a social issue, the plight of homeless beggars. It is also, in my opinion, enjoyable enough that I have come back to play it a dozen times.

It is extremely minimalist; it was only one of Porpentine's submissions for the 2014 IFComp, the other being the full-length, plot-heavy With Those We Love Alive. However, it never feels too bare. The game makes excellent use of randomisation to generate short but evocative descriptions of the villages, cities and citadels where you ply your trade, as well as brief glimpses of your travels in between. Despite the grimness of the subject, there is a good deal of beauty. You are in an insecure position and may be starving, but you're not blind to the port town of yellow wood and black seashells, or the distant sounds of singing as you approach your next goal. This feels true to life.

The gameplay itself is equally simple, but allows for a small amount of strategy. Each settlement has a certain cost of living. If you are not able to make enough money by nightfall, you will be forced to sleep in the street. If this occurs three nights in a row, you will die; a shorter period, and you will be reduced to a weakened state, from which you will slowly recuperate if you get food and board. Every morning, you have the choice to stay or move on (or will be expelled by the townspeople). There is no way of knowing whether the next town will have cheaper or more expensive costs of living. You have to take your chances, and there is even a slight random risk of an event during your travel impacting your health. Figuring out when leaving is worth the risk is the strategy that will keep you alive.

Keep you alive for longer, that is. It's hardly even a spoiler: the game is hopeless. I have come back to it evening after evening trying to beat my record in staying alive, but the ultimate outcome is never in doubt. And then you look at the final screen, and realise what it means that you're proud of surviving for 27 days.

So, as a game, Begscape works: it has good (if extremely spare) writing, and an addictive challenge. Does it work as social commentary? Hard for me to say: I already know that people begging in the street are human, I've never said "They just want money to buy drugs." Nor have I given any substantial amount - for reasons of personal economy, I would like to say, but also because what can I do? I already know that begging is hell, so I didn't need a game to tell me. Perhaps it has shown me what it's like in more detail. I would like to help, but like with any social issue, inertia and my own poverty will continue to hinder me. I'm lazy. I'm not equipped to help anyone in this situation.

Begscape sets out to do a certain thing, and does it flawlessly. If I give it four stars rather than five, it's because the minimalism does eventually become rather limiting. But it keeps me coming back and is well worth a playthrough, even just to see on which side it polarises you.

A final note: I read one IFComp review that mentioned that the lack of personal information served to dehumanise the "beggar". I'd like to offer a contrasting view: in this game, you simply play the classical faceless, genderless, ageless IF protagonist. We don't need to be told about the protagonist's reaction to being ignored or spat on, because they are us.

To start with, this isn't a game, or even fiction: it's a Twine document with musings ("reviews" would be too strong a word) on the IFComp 2014 entries.

Now that that's out of the way, is it any good? Well, the central conceit is cute, the writing is good if not outstanding, and I laughed out loud a number of times, which is more than most IFComp reviews pages get from me. On the downside, this isn't really what I look for in IF criticism: I enjoy reviews that are meaty, discuss the techniques used (both technical and artistic), and provide at least enough information about the game to make me decide whether I want to give it a shot. Some of the pages in IF is Dead are one sentence long, and not a particularly generous one. Even the longer ones assume that the reader has either played every entry, or has read enough other reviews to have at least an idea about them.

An enjoyable way to waste fifteen minutes, but I don't know whether I'll remember it a week from now. Give it a read if you want; there's nothing bad about it. Just don't let it be your first introduction to the 2014 entries, or you'll just be confused.

Patrick is a simple but intriguing short story, very well written. (Especially the ob/gyn doctor's vaguely nightmarish monologue stands out as excellent writing.) There is a sense of there being more to the story than is visible at first sight, and the conclusion is surprising and appropriate.

While playing, I wondered whether the story and the protagonist's name were a reference to American Psycho. Patrick doesn't have any of that novel's gruesome content, but both works are about a businessman named Patrick who keeps getting mixed up with other people. Intentional? Hard to know, unless you're the author.

The illustrations are only stock photos, but the way they form a full-screen background to the text creates a visual dimension that is rather rare in Twine games, making it feel more like a Japanese visual novel. It's probably a taste thing, but I enjoyed the effect.

While I enjoyed this as a short story, I'm not sure whether the interactivity adds much. The blurb teases us with the possibility of an alternative ending, but I haven't found one. Apart from that tantalising secret ending, Twine gives us an (Spoiler - click to show)interesting but cosmetic randomised element, and the choice whether to read or skip a part of the protagonist's story.

In short: low on the interactivity, but well worth a read for its plot and stylistic prowess.

Ultra Business Tycoon III is what life as a corporate executive looks like after half a gramme of cocaine. It's set in a surreal world, overtly inspired by the aesthetic of early 90s video games, where cops are gigantic multi-limbed hulks of muscle, and business consists of wanton theft and murder without even a token attempt at negotiation. Just to drive the point home, the famously anti-capitalist Porpentine has placed herself in the game as PorpCo, your first enemy.

This sounds disgusting, and it is, but it's also fun. Immoral behaviour tends to be attractive, after all: why else would anyone engage in it? Your desk contains a seemingly infinite number of randomly-generated business cards in sensuously detailed materials and textures, which serve no in-game purpose other than aesthetic pleasure. The setting is ugly and hostile, but also vibrant and (unsurprisingly, given that this is Porpentine) utterly unique. You get to engage in seemingly hour-long gunfights and use rare tycoon powers. Even when you kill yourself to escape justice, you look like a badass.

Ultra Business Tycoon III claims to be a port of a 90s business simulation game, and does a great job replicating in text the aesthetic of 8-bit games and our nostalgia for them. It's an aesthetic I love: bright reds and purples, white streaks imitating reflections, the cyberpunk jewels of nocturnal cities. Of course, Porpentine put words to it better than I ever could. There is even an intentional glitch sequence.

This absurdism and exuberance is filtered through a story-outside-the-story, the story of the player of Ultra Business Tycoon III. Unlike the Tycoon (whose sex and name you can choose), the player is not customisable. She (I believe she's female, but I think some passages could be read both ways) is a teenager, hiding from abusive parents in the power-fantasy of the game. She is transgender: ironically, PorpCo would be her ally, not her enemy. She has a strained relationship with her older sister. She is also a memory: some of the italicised passages mention her adult life, implying that she got out of that prison eventually.

The game was apparently Porpentine's most extensive work, at least at the time, and it shows. Twine works often get the "not a real game" label, but that doesn't apply here. The puzzles are excellent, and occasionally difficult enough to leave me stumped for months (again, like the generation of games that inspired this). The one that stumped me for the longest time was finding the password to Oasis Zone VI.

(Spoiler - click to show)Eventually, with some hints from other reviews, I realised that you're supposed to type in the serial number from the NFO sheet Porpentine created for the game. At first, I was a bit disappointed: the developer has a password field, the ultimate puzzle; she could have dropped any kind of clever hints in various parts of the game, why just hand us the password? Then I realised: the puzzle is to think like a capitalist. You need to have the capitalist mindset --to have, yeah, bought into it-- to realise that the game will reward you for merely buying it legally rather than filesharing. Like Sierra's King's Quest III, which gave you more points for following the copy-protection instructions than for the puzzles you legitimately solved.

I have some nitpicks, like I always do. As far as I'm aware, the game cannot be placed in an unwinnable state (bad endings will kill you and let you respawn back at the hub, which is nice and merciful), but it is still possible to end up playing several iterations of an ending that requires clicking through non-interactive screens before you respawn. In my experience, even the best prose (and this game has darn good writing) loses its lustre if you read it a few times in quick succession. The ending is -- not bad, but a bit unbalanced.

(Spoiler - click to show)But then, I guess that is the point. The old sim game only gives you a bald "YOU HAVE WON" screen. Our player gets something at least hopeful.

I could probably go on about this game for page after page: the layers of irony in providing a capitalist "buy this game legally" message in a freeware pastiche that has never been for sale, for example. But I'll leave with this:

The video games that my generation loved and are shaped by were created by corporations to make the maximum amount of money. So is most art, of course, but video games make it blatant: they intensify stimuli, rewarding us with visuals and music and expanding storylines, making us work for more stimuli, making us feel guilty for putting the game away in frustration. It's manipulation. If I were to write a story where the main character is as influenced as I was by, for example, Zelda or Final Fantasy VII, it would come off as product placement. And yet, that dreamlike experience of exploring new worlds is equally true.

HyperCapitalism and sense of wonder. Ultra Business Tycoon III shows where they intersect.

As a story, my father's long, long legs is original, weird (in the Lovecraftian sense of the term), and excellently scary. It is the kind of story I will need to mull over for a while, (Spoiler - click to show)especially given the lack of a conclusive ending. The writing occasionally feels a bit lacklustre, but when it is good, it is very good. The concept is excellent and uncanny.

As a Twine creation, I'm in two minds about it. Visually, it's very good. The grayscale background is a subtle, superb touch: representing the dwindling light falling into the father's basement; brightening or darkening depending on the events of the story. However, once the novelty wore off, I ended up feeling that the Twine format was a gimmick. The story is static; the vast majority of segments only have one link to click to get to the next one. The narration didn't even use the simple trick of second person to give the reader a sense of agency. I enjoyed the story, but I felt I would have enjoyed it equally if I'd read it in print or on a static web page.

(Spoiler - click to show)Then I got to the final section, and the story unleashed all Twine's possibilities: a more game-like structure with several possible actions, sound, and a spotlight effect I've never seen in Twine before. All these factors do an excellent job building atmosphere and creating claustrophobia. The music at the end is perfect.

I give my father's long, long legs four stars on account of the story, mood, and some excellent use of Twine's possibilities. However, players who prefer some agency in their IF might want to look elsewhere.

Not on an intellectual level: the plot makes perfect sense once you get to the end. However, the fear that underlies the story in this game is alien to me. I'm sure that sounds insensitive, and that's not my intention - when I read the blurb, I was expecting gender dysphoria, which is something I know of, even though I'm lucky enough to never have experienced it. Not to spoil anything, the body dysphoria in Staring at a Single Face Forever is something different, and I can't really connect with it.

That said, the game is well implemented, and the writing is top notch. Especially the desert sequence is jealousy-inducingly well written.

In short, a good story and stylistically beautiful. It just didn't connect emotionally with me, which is a bit of a problem when reading an emotionally-driven story. Other players may very well have a different experience.

Even if not, it's well worth a playthrough.

Firstly, I'm fairly obsessed with The Stanley Parable, so I was thrilled to find an IF tribute to it.

So. The Larry Parable isn't nearly as rich or complex as the original (partly, of course, because it's just a demo so far), with only two choices per scene (if you're lucky). However, the Narrator's voice is pretty spot on and a very entertaining constant throughout your little adventure. While some of the humour is a bit too silly for my personal taste, there are several hilarious lines: the response to repeated button-pushing, for instance, and several others which I won't spoil.

The game seems a bit unpolished. It seems weird to list your options in plain text and then have the links below, but I can't figure out whether that's a coding error or intentional.

To sum up: shallow and silly, but should provide a decent amount of entertainment, whether you're familiar with The Stanley Parable or not. If it gets made into a full-length game, I'll play it.

I give this two stars because the writing is pretty good, in its self-imposed succinctness, and the story ties together well. But the premise is hardly original, and this isn't even a CYOA: there are no choices.

Disclaimer: I spoiled myself for this game by reading some IFComp reviews, which gave me hints for how to solve the final puzzle, as well as some ideas of what the plot may mean.

The House at the End of Rosewood Street is very well-written. The descriptions are beautiful, the only problem being an occasional (but only occasional) reliance on clichés. Most of the characters aren't particularly deep (though I believe there is a reason for that; see the spoilered section below), but fairly memorably sketched. The antagonist is vague in terms of motivation, but an enjoyable character. There is a special ambience to this story, a mystery that doesn't try too hard to be scary, and the plot... well, I'd be lying if I said I understood everything that's going on in the plot. Though I have a couple of reservations, I do like it.

As a game, however, it's a mixed experience. It's mostly puzzleless; OK, that's not a problem in a post-Photopia world. But puzzleless IF still needs a hook to keep us going. Photopia itself has the exploration of the science fiction settings and the player's desire to piece together Ally's story; Galatea has a different kind of exploration (the drive to discuss various topics with the title character), and so on. The House at the End of Rosewood Street does not have any kind of exploration. Until the end of the game, you will be doing the same routine of delivering newspapers and carrying out odd jobs for the residents, without finding any new areas or points of interest. A couple of new characters show up, but your interaction with any of the characters is not deep. There is not even a progression in the mood of the game: your dreams get creepier, but the ambience of your daily work stays the same. The repetitive tasks fall somewhere between "soothing" and "boring", for me. I occasionally got the feeling that I would have enjoyed this more as a static fiction story.

Technically, all this is well implemented. Sometimes, it felt like the implementation was a bit sparse, but I didn't run into any "guess the verb" moments.

Then you get to the puzzle - arguably, the only puzzle in the game. Further discussion of it, and of the plot of the game, will be spoilerfied.

(Spoiler - click to show)I am in two minds about the puzzle. I can agree with those reviewers who found it underclued, given that the wrong action will send you back to the start of the game. On the other hand, I like it, because (and what follows is only my interpretation) it requires the player to understand what exactly is going on on Rosewood Street: the PC is in a coma, the other residents are shards of his/her psyche, and the mirror is said to contain your soul. You need to collect all your constituent parts (except for Caius, who is in some way the force keeping you asleep), and only then will you be able to wake up.

And there we have it: another coma dream story, along the lines of Madame Spider's Web. This isn't a particularly new storyline in IF, but apart from the fact that it's been done before, I think it's well done here. I found Elisabeth a bit too obviously the good guy, and, to a lesser extent, Caius a bit too obviously evil, but I can live with that.

There are still many things I don't get (and man, I hate it when readers say they don't get my writings. Mr. Thomét, I apologise): is Caius just another part of you, the one that doesn't want to wake up, or some malignant entity? What exactly is the connection of Lisa to the PC's story? Given their similarity of names, you would expect Elisabeth to be some sort of avatar of Lisa, but if there is a connection, I don't see it.

All in all, not a flawless game, but it does what it does very interestingly, and the writing is high quality. I might require another playthrough to see whether I can make more sense of the story.