Ratings and Reviews by Tobias V. I. Langhoff

This game is the exact same concept as the first one, except with four more games. They were perhaps a bit less scary, but it seems like more work was put into them, perhaps. The callback to the previous game, with the in-game Ryan Veeder finally having thought of a question for his favorite author, was the best part. At Veeder's suggestion, I opened the website Rainy Mood in another tab to get into the correct mindset while playing this anthology. At some point during the third game, under the sounds of rain and thunder, birds started chirping! At first I got angry, since this didn't inspire the right state of mind - but then I thought, on the contrary! It does. It's a perfect metaphor for Ryan Veeder's balance of darkness and light in these scary but funny stories. Also it's spring right now instead of Halloween, so the birds seem apropos.

In this horror anthology, my favorite story was the one about blood, which made me laugh out loud. The individual games might have lacked a little of Veeder's usual polish (several verbs and nouns were unimplemented, for example), but as short and mostly on-rails experiences, that wasn't a big problem.

Chronologically, this game is the direct sequel to the first The Little Match Girl game, even though it was not released directly after it; this is one of the many complications in the continuity of the Little Match Girl lore. This game tells the story of how the Match Girl got the revolver that she wields in later games, and this is achieved with the same kind of gameplay and structure as in the first game: From a hub of one single room, our heroine travels to four different places and embarks upon a a Zelda-esque trading sequence where she trades rare and expensive things for complete trivialities, which I think is supposed to say something about virtue, which this game is also about. I award this game 4 out of 5 stars because it is very good but not quite as innovative and exciting as the first one, it not being the first one. But it is very good.

This is a touching and funny twist on a well-known fairy tale (at least it's well-known to me, who am a Scandinavian, although I understand Ryan Veeder wasn't familiar with it before making this game). Mechanically it's a light puzzle game where you need to travel between places and perform a sort of Zelda-esque trading sequence. Thematically it's an interesting take on selflessly killing people and helping people with their needs, and the twist on the original fairy tale's ending was very funny.

This is a small, unfinished game. It is, however, the only game by Ryan Veeder on IFDB that doesn't have any ratings or reviews, so I decided to write the first one.

The goal of the game is (or seems to be) to find orchids and DRAW them in your sketchbook, which does not display a nice drawing of the orchid or anything. There are no rewards in this game. Games don't need rewards. (The game does contain one reward, in a way: The solution to a fairly simple puzzle in Ryan Veeder's Authentic Fly Fishing.)

You can explore two islands. Besides orchids, you can also find mysterious items and ruins that hint at a deeper backstory. Perhaps some of them hint to connections to other Ryan Veeder games. In fact, his game A Rope of Chalk hinted to this game, by containing a book called Orchid Species of the Erastian. So anything is possible.

Due to the game not being finished, I feel I can only rate this game 3 stars, which IFDB suggests could mean "An average game; or a mixed bag, with some real strengths but some serious weaknesses". If this game is ever finished, I hope to amend this review.

This is not a game, but a text file describing how to solve a game which sounds interesting - an old school text adventure with concepts from A Link to the Past - but which, ostensibly, doesn't actually exist in real life.

Or does it? Knowing Ryan Veeder, writing a walkthrough for a fake game is definitely something he would do. But putting a game in that text, or even making an entire text adventure game that you can only find by solving a puzzle in a text, is also something he would do. So I'm not sure. I'm not smart enough to know if this text is a game.

But as someone who wrote a lengthy GameFAQs walkthrough for a Mega Man game as a kid, with a lot of "now fall down the only chute to the right" and "shoot the enemy that appears", the genre of prose in this possibly non-interactive fiction appeals to me nonetheless.

This sprawling game is the result of nine authors making one game each, and then smacking them together (with magic), creating somewhat disparate pieces of an island adventure that reminded me of continually swapping out the five CDs of Riven in the late 90s.

The result is in many ways an old school (with bells and whistles) puzzlefest, one of the few modern games that has made me feel like I'm in a vast, confusing Zork-like world where there's lots of lore that seems made up mostly to have fun. And that's great! I've missed that.

The fact that each area is a separate game feels a little unnecessary from a player's point of view (although it obviously made it much easier for the writers) - it's rarely used to enhance the player experience, although the parts that do are cool. It does cause a few awkward inconsistencies, general verbs that work in one are but not another, but these are few and far between. Items are mostly confined to one area, and the player drops them when moving between areas and picks them back up when they return, which works fine, but seems a bit contrived since some items span all areas, cluing the player in on the fact that they're supposed to bring that item from one area to another, a clue that is never spelled out (you'll need to check your inventory to know what was brought over).

(Disclaimer: I was a beta tester on this game.)

This is probably my favorite interactive fiction experience of all time. As a game, it's very abstruse, but the presentation and conceit invites you to come back to it again and again until you peel off the layers.

This is a very short and enclosed game, without a clear goal at first. After a bit of milling around, you'll realize how to progress through the game as you start receiving tasks to do; this worked very well, even with the later complications that crop up.

After a while, the tasks get stranger and more specific, and as this happened, I ended up progressing by trial and error. For such a compact and otherwise well-realized game, it's strange that it doesn't respond to the specific items/tasks on your list, and so it veers a bit much into "guess the verb around the general vicinity of items referred to in the tasks" territory for me. (For example, when I was asked to (Spoiler - click to show)"unclog the shower drain", the way I eventually managed to trigger that step was with "take shower", and I also had major problems with removing the package from the kitchen storage.)

Despite that, the game works almost all of the time. The story is interesting and vague, and although I felt it became a bit too silly by the end, it's a very good example of a creeping feeling of dread that really only IF can give you.