Ratings and Reviews by Spike

Sunless Sea is a wonderfully captivating exploration-and-trading game, set in a Lovecraftesque watery underworld. You'll visit ports; buy and sell goods; uncover secrets; and run errands for groups ranging from the Admiralty of Fallen London to a monkey kingdom to an underwater monarch to a colony of spiders. You'll encounter devils, revolutionaries, cannibals, and an island that's gone postal. You might earn the wrath of the Storm God, install spies in other ports, propagate mushroom creatures across the sea, witness nuns engaging in martial arts, and found your own colony. The sheer variety of things to do in Sunless Sea is astounding, and the game has kept me engaged for dozens of hours.

The game's arch and witty writing is a treat to read. To take just one minor example, there's a subtly menacing character you can meet who has a keen eye for fashion. The mouseover text for her picture says, "She has no difficulties with blood. But she very much dislikes bloodstains."

Sunless Sea reminds me of a much, much more in-depth version of Superluminal Vagrant Twin. It's graphics-based, though - not text-based. You'll spend much of your time piloting your ship around the Unterzee.

Out of all of the games I've played that are listed on the IFDB, Sunless Sea seems the least like IF. Although the writing is strong, and you (as the player) are effectively telling interesting stories by the choices you make, it's not a text-based game. Thus I'm omitting my rating from the game's average.

But the most important thing about Sunless Sea is not the label you place on it; it's that the game is a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

Linear Love is a short and sad love story. It is, as the title says, quite linear. You navigate through the story by pressing the arrow keys or the WASD keys. The walkthrough says that clicking will work, but it's counterintuitive (you click in the direction opposite that of where you want the text to go - see the next paragraph) and so kind of hard to use.

The navigation is unusual and took some getting used to. You're essentially moving the text "Reader One" around on the screen, even when that text appears to remain stationary in the middle. Thus, for example, in order to make the text look like it's moving down, you have to press the up arrow key.

You don't have choices to make in Linear Love, as far as I can tell. You interact with it by pressing the cursor keys to (effectively) scroll through the text.

The love story is interesting, but there's just not much to it, or much interactivity.

One of the most intriguing aspects of this game, though, occurs when (Spoiler - click to show)you right-click on the screen and select "Escape." This opens an interface of some sort where it appears you can play with snippets of other games written by the author. These all involve using the arrow keys to navigate through pieces of text, with different events triggering when different pieces of text come in contact with each other.

I played with one of these for a while and eventually found a hermit in a desert cave, and then a story about killer plants. After that I jumped off a cliff in order to die and be resurrected and obtain eternal life. And then I stopped.

I do not know if this was an intended Easter egg or a bug, but it was kind of entertaining. Also, it's a really neat mechanic and one that I hope the author makes more use of in the future.

This short, choice-based game feels to me like someone baring his soul, with all of the accompanying awkwardness, pain, and poignancy.

The story is about Michael, a lonely, shy gay man, recalling his first junior high crush - ten years ago - on a straight boy, Billy. He reflects on the intensity of his feelings for Billy, the things he did to impress Billy, the poetry he wrote for Billy, Billy's smile. He wonders what would have happened if he had ever confessed his feelings for Billy.

So, they're both adults now, and Michael decides to go visit Billy and tell him about the crush that he had all those years ago. Michael seems to want closure or acknowledgement - or maybe he just wants to prove to himself that he's a braver man than he was back then.

A story like this could come across as maudlin, but Time Passed did not feel that way to me: The continual self-reflection and raw honesty of the prose save it from that. In fact, Time Passed has my favorite writing out of all the IFComp 2018 games.

There's only one real choice that I can tell. It's (Spoiler - click to show)not Michael's but Billy's, actually. As the player, you get to choose whether Billy claims to remember Michael. Remembering Michael is the more interesting of the two options and spools the story out longer.

The ending text for the longer of the two options captures the self-reflection and raw honesty I mentioned earlier:

(Spoiler - click to show)"On the walk back to my parents' place I try to keep my thoughts blank, but soon enough one comes to me anyways: I wish I'd told you earlier. But of course I don't. If I had, if you had kissed me in our youth and dissolved my pain, so many things in my life would not be where they are now, and I'm happy now. I'm in a good place. I wouldn't want that to change.

"Then I scold myself. I don't have to think about the sequence of events. I can wish you'd kissed me and want to keep my life the way it is. I'm allowed to have uncomplicated regret. Aren't I?

"Aren't I?"

I really resonated with Time Passed. It reminded me of unrequited love, the times I said something, the times I didn't, the times I wondered whether I should have said something, the times I second- and third-guessed myself. It even reminded me of the times when I've had someone confess love to me and I had no idea they felt that way, leaving me wondering "How do I respond to this?"

Even decisions that aren't about romance - that job I might have taken, or that chance I had to move to that city. We all do this kind of thinking back and wondering "What if...?"

A short, awkward, raw, and poignant piece of IF.

OH, MY WORD. I'm tense by the third screen or so of this game. I'm still a little tense, having played through it twice now. I'm so glad I played this game in the morning. I think it would have given me nightmares if I had experienced it right before going to bed.

Bogeyman is a choice-based horror game. Horror is one of my least-favorite genres. When horror doesn't work, it usually just feels dumb to me. If it does, then why am I reading fiction or watching a movie, just to be scared? Real life is scary enough as it is (just glance at a random day's headlines); why should I seek it out? But I'm playing through the games in this Comp and trying to give feedback, so I played Bogeyman anyway.

Maybe because I don't seek out horror in fiction much I'm more sensitive to it. Whatever the reason, I am still tense, even though I'm now three paragraphs into this review. Okay, deep breaths. I'll try to be objective from here on.

The blurb and cover hint well at the menace to come, especially the tagline: "You can go home when you learn to be good." Then you start the game, and you're faced with basic white text on a black background. This, the simple font, and the spare writing together just ooze menace. Something about the choices being in all caps enhances it, too.

I don't know that I want to say much about the content, other than that it is terrifying. For some reason (Spoiler - click to show)the prayer at the table, "We are truly grateful for what we have," was one of the worst moments. I suppose it's that effect of "Not only can I make you physically experience these horrifying events, I'm going to twist your soul so much that you'll be thankful for the horror." Then combine that with the fact that it's being done to children, in a perversion of a simple act of gratitude that many of us daily choose to make... Shudder.

The absolutely worst thing I've done in IF - ever, in any game - in terms of how it made me feel, was (Spoiler - click to show)eating Grace. Eating Grace! After saying grace! It would be kind of funny if it weren't so awful.

Despite my dislike of horror as a genre, I don't think I regret playing this game. Even while I'm feeling what I'm feeling, I'm thinking, "Wow. What an amazing piece of art, to be able to produce this reaction from me."

My conclusion: Bogeyman is an excellent horror game. Play it, and experience it for yourself. Just not right before bedtime.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

I wrote the above review on the authors' forum during IFComp 2018 right after playing Bogeyman. It led to a discussion among several of us about the themes in Bogeyman, as well as horror in general. I had always thought that the primary (sole?) purpose of horror is to frighten or disgust people, and those are not experiences that I've ever been interested in seeking out. However, the authors' conversation convinced me that horror can be used effectively in the service of worthwhile artistic goals.

For example, Chandler Groover argued that Bogeyman does an excellent job of making the player feel what it's like to live with an abuser. It's not a pleasant experience, but it's true, in the sense that there are people who do live under an abuser's power. It's important that we know this - and that there is art out there like Bogeyman that can dramatize it for us.

So, I no longer stand by my dismissive comments about works of horror in the second paragraph of my original review. Horror is still not going to be my go-to genre, but I have a much deeper appreciation for it than I did before I played Bogeyman.

That makes Bogeyman one of only a handful of works I've experienced that have been integral in changing my view of an entire genre.

Anno 1700 is a long parser game written in ADRIFT. Its cover, title, and blurb together combine to make it sound like time travel (backwards, to the past), pirates, and romance will be involved. I was envisioning something like Plundered Hearts meets The Outlander.

This turned out to be only partially correct, though. There's definitely time travel and pirates. However, Anno 1700 features much less romance than the cover art seemed to imply to me.

Anno 1700 is quite ambitious. It's not only long; there are also some complicated puzzle sequences (one in particular in mid-game), as well as an interesting setting and story.

Unfortunately, however, I ran into several implementation issues early in the game. For example,

(Spoiler - click to show)I floundered around for a long time trying to figure out exactly the right phrase to tell Susan that I had arrived for work. TELL SUSAN ABOUT ME, ASK SUSAN ABOUT JOB, ASK SUSAN ABOUT HOTEL, TALK TO SUSAN - none of these worked. Finally I got SAY HELLO to work.

After obtaining my room key from Susan I then went upstairs and had trouble getting the game to let me enter my room. I tried UNLOCK DOOR, UNLOCK DOOR WITH KEY, and UNLOCK ROOM 101 WITH KEY before finally achieving success with UNLOCK DOOR 101 WITH KEY.

Inside my room I successfully managed to take the crack in the closet and carry it around with me.

I wasn't sure what to do next, so I went downstairs to talk to Susan again. SAY HELLO a second time just returned the command prompt.

I went back to my room, and the text said that after entering I dropped my suitcase on the bed and quickly changed into something more comfortable. But I wasn't carrying the suitcase anymore; I had left it in the closet before going downstairs. I had also changed into something more comfortable my first time in my room.

At this point, remembering the blurb's IFComp 2018 estimate of more than two hours, I decided to pull up the walkthrough and just follow it for the rest of the game. Which was kind of a shame, because there are the makings of a really excellent piece of IF here: I enjoyed the story, and the setting is strong. Also, the author has clearly put a lot of work into designing the flow of the plot and constructing some intricate puzzles. But Anno 1700 is unfortunately marred by its implementation, as well as some underclued puzzles. Having another five testers to play all the way through the game, find bugs, and suggest synonyms or better clues would have gone a long way to helping Anno 1700 achieve the potential that I think it has.

Finally, a couple of things I particularly enjoyed about Anno 1700:

(Spoiler - click to show)The graphic of the parchment is really, really well-done. It was quite a pleasant surprise to type EXAMINE PARCHMENT and have that graphic appear. My only suggestion here would be to display it with the READ PARCHMENT command as well; I almost missed it.

Also, I liked being able to find the secret passage behind the closet in the present-day as well as when I've gone back in time. In general, I found the connections between the hotel in the present and the hotel in the past to be thought through well.

I played The Addicott Manor on Halloween, and it was a perfect selection: a solo visit to a haunted mansion!

In terms of gameplay, The Addicott Manor is choice-based. The choices are given to you in list form after a piece of text. Then you have to click on the number that corresponds to your choice. With the interface that this game features I suppose this is the only way to do it, but it feels a little more immersive to me to click on my choice itself than on a number that corresponds to that choice.

The title page tells you that there are six treasures. I played through several times, but I never did better than escaping the house with two of the treasures. This is a game with a good bit of replay value.

Overall, The Addicott Manor worked for me in terms of creating that horror vibe of slowly exploring a sinister, ominous mansion. I could feel my pulse rising a little while I played. And I wanted to find the treasures: I kept playing and playing until I had achieved a small measure of success.

A few minor critiques: There is a lot of text at the beginning, which made it a bit hard for me to get into the game at first. Once I got into the mansion the ratio of text-to-choices worked better for me, though. There are a few too many grammar mistakes; more proofreading would have helped. Also, occasionally the game presents a choice to you that's actually unavailable. This may be a function of the program used to create the game, but it would have felt more immersive for the game to list only those actions that are actually available.

Fun fact: The PC drives a Ford Fiesta, making this one of three games in IFComp 2018 to feature a character who drives a Ford Fiesta.

More than any other game in IFComp 2018, The King of the World resembles a classic fairy tale. The game begins with a father telling his two sons a legend about three powerful stones that were once combined in a crown, giving the ruler power over earth, water, and sky. The ruler was betrayed, the crown was broken, and the stones were separated. After the father finishes telling the legend, the story reveals that (Spoiler - click to show)he has one of the three stones, and he plans to pass it down to the older son.

There are four chapters in all to this story. In classic fairy tale fashion, you (mostly) play as the the younger son. You goal is to find the crown and the three stones and potentially become the king of the world.

The King of the World is choice-based, but there aren't very many choices. The vast majority of my clicks were to "Continue" and give the next few paragraphs of the story. As far as I can tell, each chapter has just one choice or one collection of choices. The choices do affect what happens later, although I'm not sure how much. In particular, there's a place in Chapter 4 where (Spoiler - click to show)the older brother saves the younger brother. If I had made a different choice in Chapter 1 I suspect this might have turned out differently.

The game tells you explicitly when it prints text that depends on a previous choice, which is an interesting mechanic. I'm not sure what I think about it. I like knowing that my choices mattered that much, but it does make the story feel less immersive.

A few quibbles: There's a maze in Chapter 3 that could have been made smaller or cut without sacrificing story. Also, the event that leads to the choice in Chapter 1 seems like a small thing to have such a huge effect on the game's later events. My main critique, though, is that I would have liked to have had more choices in this game.

If you're looking for a classic fairy tale with a few interactive elements, then you'll probably enjoy The King of the World.

Some games start off strong but become less interesting the more you play. (Too much of the same thing, in many cases.) I had the opposite experience with En Garde; it got more and more interesting the more I played. Part of that is baked into the design of the game. You can't tell exactly what's happening at first, and you slowly learn what's really going on as you play.

In fact, I think En Garde does a very good job of capturing this experience. At first, you're just lumbering around, and you have a limited set of actions. But you don't know exactly what those are; they're represented by colored buttons. By experience you learn what clicking on each one does, and you have to remember.

(Warning: This is a major spoiler.) Then, (Spoiler - click to show)you eat a mouse's brains. Which is weird. You get access to the mouse's thoughts and begin to think in a mouse-y way. Then you find a dog, and you eat its brains. Which gives you a few more abilities, and now you have the mouse and the dog in your head. By this point you have nearly ten colored buttons to click for actions, but you still have to remember which button does what. I felt like I was an animal being trained in some experiment: Click the right button, and earn the right action (the reward) from the game.

Then you find a slice of brain that turns out to be human. At this point I'm thinking, "Am I a zombie?" Then eating the human brain slice gives you the words that go with the buttons, and the room descriptions improve. Now I'm thinking, "This game is World War Z meets Flowers for Algernon." And sure enough, that's exactly what it is!

I really enjoyed En Garde, but a couple of things stood out:

1. The PC's progression over the course of the game, especially (Spoiler - click to show)watching the room names and descriptions change.

2. The dialog between (Spoiler - click to show)the various consciousnesses going on in the PC's head.

The cover of En Garde is a parody of the cover of the old Infocom game A Mind Forever Voyaging; its title is a bilingual pun.

En Garde was the second fun, well-written Inform/Vorple gem by Jack Welch I played in IFComp 2018.

Border Reivers is a parser-based mystery set in Scotland in 1495. I didn't know what the "border reivers" were, so I looked them up. According to Wikipedia, they were "raiders along the Anglo-Scottish border from the late 13th century to the beginning of the 17th century." This gives me a setting I had not seen before in any book I've read or IF game I've played.

At the beginning of Border Reivers you are summoned by your father to help solve a murder, that of the son of one of the local lairds. The opening text says you have suspicions that something is going on in addition to the murder.

Gameplay mostly consists of asking various characters (and there are over a dozen of these!) about each other, the murder, the castle, and various other related topics.

I think Border Reviers is particularly strong on setting. The writing is also good, and the implementation is solid. Perhaps more of the default responses could have been changed, but then again that doesn't matter a whole lot in a conversation-focused game like this one.

I think the game is weaker when it comes to the investigation of the murder. I would have liked more clues to discover and analyze. As it stands, there are a few conversation topics that function as clues, but other than those there is only one physical clue in the game (that I saw, at least).

Border Reivers also has a particular crucial event occur after a certain number of terms, potentially revealing who's guilty before you've actually figured that out. This limits the game's replay value.

Overall, strong setting, good writing, and solid implementation, but more physical investigation and an alternative method for having a particular crucial event occur would have made Border Reivers more fun to play.

Ostrich is a choice-based political thriller. You work for the government's "advertising corrections" team. A right-wing populist leader with strong fascist tendencies comes to power. As the story progresses you have to decide how much you want to continue to support the government's increasingly restrictive rules on what is allowed to be printed and how much you want to support the movement protesting the government.

I had two strong, opposing reactions to Ostrich. One had to do with the gameplay, which I found to be quite good at conveying the feeling of participating in a repressive regime. For example, the mechanic of slowly adding more and more restrictions was particularly effective. The cumulative feel of all of that censorship was overpowering in ways that I think were intended. Also, the game has one particular location be the source of more and more events that illustrate the consequences of the new regime's oppressive policies. Some political issues can feel abstract; showing how one's daily routine is actually influenced by political decisions is a good way of dramatizing those decisions. In addition, the PC's continual notice of whether the trains were on time or late was interesting. I kept thinking of that old saying about Mussolini that at least he made the trains run on time, which I'm sure was the intent here.

The other strong reaction I had was to the game's political voice. My preference for art that tackles political issues is for them to engage multiple perspectives. I think it's fine to take a strong stand on an issue, but (in general) I think political art should at least show that it understands why people may think differently on that issue in addition to taking that strong stand.

And I don't think Ostrich does a good job with that. The kinds of policies that a repressive government attempts to force on its citizens can fall all over the political spectrum; all you need to do is look at 20th century history to find repressive left-wing regimes and repressive right-wing regimes. The new government in Ostrich, however, feels to me to be repressive in exactly the kinds of ways that a 2018 progressive most fears. It's like the embodiment of a left-wing nightmare. At one point the text even gives you the option of choosing "progressive" vs. "dangerously unpatriotic" in a newspaper article that you're editing, with the clear implication that "progressive" is good and anything else is bad. This feels too easy to me. Since it seems the primary intent of Ostrich is to give the player the experience of being complicit in a repressive political regime, I think the game would have been stronger if it were more universal and not so clearly aligned with one side of the political spectrum.

Of course, other players' mileage may vary on politics in art, as well as on Ostrich's political voice.

In sum, I found Ostrich to be a technically strong political thriller whose effect was somewhat marred by the fact that it only presents one side of some important political questions of the day.