Ratings and Reviews by Christina Nordlander

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.