Ratings and Reviews by Spike

Intelmission is a long, choice-based, conversation-focused game made in Unity. You play as secret agent Selena Jones, gathering information at a party. You run into your archrival, Ben, who works for a different agency. Ben has a history of interfering with your missions.

And he messes this one up, too. The two of you are captured and thrown in a cell together. The vast majority of the game is a dialog between you and Ben.

Conversation-focused games aren't really my preference in IF, but it seems to me that they succeed or fail on the strength of the writing. Do the characters have well-defined personalities? Are the topics of conversation interesting? Does the conversation gating work, in the sense that asking certain questions leads to new, compelling topics?

Intelmission partially succeeds here, I think. The characters do have well-defined personalities. Ben is the stronger of the two: He comes across as that guy in a bar who's hitting on you and just won't give up. He's clearly full of himself, constantly asking Selena for affirmation that she thinks he's hot or that she's in love with him. He also frequently opines on his life philosophy and what's wrong with the world and with Selena. I found it a little hard to take him seriously: With all his flirting and negging of Selena, he comes across as immature. But he is well-drawn, with a distinct personality.

Selena isn't quite as strong a character; she's less sure of herself, and often she's merely reacting to Ben. I think Intelmission would have been a more interesting game if Selena's character were more of an equal foil for Ben.

Much of the conversation revolves around Ben's and Selena's relationship and past history. This was interesting, but it felt to me like it dragged on a little long. This effect was probably hindered by a couple of technical difficulties: I couldn't see all my dialog options sometimes. If there were three, the third one was usually hidden underneath the scroll window. Also, the trigger for the next piece of dialogue didn't seem to take into account the length of the most recent passage. This meant that some of the one-word dialog bits stayed on the screen for much longer than needed, while some of the longer ones went by quite fast.

As far as conversation gating leading to new interesting topics, much of the time the conversation felt like it was on rails. Many of the choices that I tried to skip kept coming back as options and sometimes as the only option, so I was eventually forced to select them. Overall, I couldn't tell how much my choices actually affected the story.

At the end, though, the game told me that I had explored 59/156 conversation topics and 1/24 secret topics. So there's a lot more to the game than I saw. In particular, my impression of the game being on rails does not appear to have been accurate, as there are plenty of probably interesting conversation topics that I missed.

If you like conversation-focused games, especially ones with flirty bantering, you might want to give Intelmission a try.

Bullhockey! is a massive, sprawling, old-school text adventure. (Think 1990s, not 1980s; it's not as old-school as Flowers of Mysteria or Escape from Dinosaur Island, two other games in IFComp 2018.) It reminds me some of Curses!. Both games start out with you in your home, in a relatively mundane and real-life situation. Then, as you play through the game and begin to solve puzzles, the story takes several twists and eventually turns into something odd, supernatural, and even - at times - surreal.

I loved Curses!, and there's a lot about Bullhockey! that I enjoyed as well. But I couldn't shake the feeling while playing Bullhockey! that I was watching an Olympic figure skater try for a triple axel with a double toe loop and just not quite nail the landing.

To me, Bullhockey! feels both heavily implemented and underimplemented. That may sound like a contradiction, but they actually go together. It's heavily implemented in the sense that there are a lot of objects - especially at the beginning, when you're still in your apartment - that appear in the game. However, only a few of those are actually relevant for solving puzzles or advancing the story. So, as the player, you spend a lot of time interacting with these objects but not making progress toward your current goal. Because there are so many objects, though, there's no way that the author can anticipate all the different things that a player will try. This means that there are plenty of reasonable actions that a player will take that aren’t implemented - or that just give the default response when the default response isn’t quite appropriate. Sometimes this means that the player is sent the wrong signal on a puzzle or runs into a guess-the-verb problem. To take a very early example, while you're still in your apartment one of your first goals is to turn off the ceiling fan that is annoying you. One thing I tried was
(Spoiler - click to show)
> THROW STAFF AT SWITCH

to which the game responds

Futile.

This is Inform's default response for this action, yet the action is not that far from the intended solution for the puzzle. Moreover, the act I attempted turns out to be the right idea for another quite similar puzzle, much later in the game!

For a game this size, (and Bullhockey! is huge) it also feels undertested. (There are only two testers listed in the credits.) I'd say another five testers willing to play through the entire game would have resulted in the removal of much of the underclued feeling with certain puzzles, parts that felt underimplemented, or places where the default response was misleading.

I feel like I'm being more critical than I am with most of my reviews. This is because I think Bullhockey! has the makings to be one of the great puzzlefests in the old-school style, and I love puzzlefests in the old-school style. It's got wacky, clever puzzles that... just often need to be clued better. It has delightful responses to many actions I tried, but... with other, equally-reasonable actions it doesn't recognize them or just gives the default response. It has complicated sequences that lead you along just right in places... but then has other places where I would have never gotten through without the walkthrough.

Maybe "polish" is the word I'm really looking for here. More polish, and Bullhockey! could become one of those diamonds of an old-school puzzlefest that many of us in the IF community still relish.

Now that I've critiqued Bullhockey! for a while, let me mention a few things I particularly enjoyed. Many parts of the game are quite funny, like the scoring system. There's a sly running joke about various locations that you attempt to enter that I enjoyed. Also, exchanges like this one:
(Spoiler - click to show)
> GO UP.
Maybe you should try flapping your wings?
> FLAP WINGS.
I was being sarcastic.

Some of the puzzles are total Rube Goldberg machines that once you see how they work you have to sit back and marvel at which you've just done. Two of the most prominent are (Spoiler - click to show)the literal Rube Goldberg machine in the science museum that's being built (and I mean the entire thing, including the trampoline on the men's clothing store and the fact that you end up back in your apartment!) and the extended sequence that starts in the amusement park and ends with you in jail. Several of the other puzzles have this feel as well.

I also really enjoyed the solution to the puzzle where you are standing at a dot. I'm not sure it's an entirely fair puzzle, in that it requires outside knowledge, but I loved the solution - and am a little proud that I got it without having to resort to the walkthrough. :)

If you like old-school puzzlefests, you will probably enjoy Bullhockey!. Just don't be ashamed to have a walkthrough handy.

(As a final note, I was pleased to read that the author is planning a Bullhockey! 2. I look forward to playing it.)

In LET'S ROB A BANK you must assemble a team of three accomplices to help you, well, rob a bank. Each accomplice has different attributes that may or may not mesh well with those of other accomplices. Each playthrough is short, encouraging you to try combinations of accomplices, as well as choices once inside the bank. As can be expected, there are lots of different endings. The game gives you "stats" with most of the endings, too. These tell you
(Spoiler - click to show)1. Whether you successfully robbed the bank.
2. Whether you successfully escaped.
3. How many accomplices you had left at the end.

One of the accomplices reminded me a lot of (Spoiler - click to show)the title character in last year's movie Baby Driver. I'm guessing this similarity was intended.

One thing I particularly appreciated seeing was how often the accomplices would get into fights with and/or double-cross each other. For me, this gave the game some darker overtones than the sort of light comedy feel it might have had otherwise.

While the game does some interesting things with combining the accomplices' different skills, some of this could have been fleshed out more. There were two characters in particular, (Spoiler - click to show)Amy Hawkins and Lucy Honeysuckle, whose descriptions implied more interesting interactions than I was able to uncover. (Well, for the latter, there is one very interesting and amusing effect, but it appears to be the only effect you get when you choose that character. This means that 1/3 of the possible combinations for your team only have this one ending.)

LET'S ROB A BANK isn't trying to do anything other than entertain you for a while, and it succeeds at that. Each playthrough is probably between 5 and 10 minutes long, so it's definitely worth playing.

Strap on your meta-goggles, indeed! In Re: Dragon you play as long-suffering IFFComp organizer George MacBraeburn. A lawyer representing a group of dragon oracles is threatening IFFComp and its parent organization, the Interactive Fiction Technological Freedom Foundation, with a lawsuit. The offense: "the outrageous and vile misrepresentation" of the dragon oracles' professional activities in a game from last year's IFFComp, The Dragon Will Tell You Your Future Now.

The thing is that there really was a game entered in last year's IFComp called The Dragon Will Tell You Your Future Now. I didn't play it, but apparently it was a bit of a joke game: You can't progress very far in the game at all - and you certainly can't have the dragon tell you your future - because you can't get through the dragon's office doors. No wonder the American Association of Professional Draconian Oracles is upset!

As can probably be told from this setup, Re: Dragon is a comedy that repeatedly makes reference to the IF community. It is, in many places, hilarious.

The gameplay is mediated through George MacBraeburn's email account. It's well-done technically, using Inform and Vorple. I'm quite impressed with one feature in particular, the fact that (Spoiler - click to show)you can actually play The Dragon Will Tell You Your Future Now within Re: Dragon itself!

While it's fun to catch the references to IF and the IF community, Re: Dragon sets its parody sights on other targets, too: gossip magazines, lawyers, weather forecasts, even those forms they make you fill out at the doctor's office.

Some of the funniest parts of the game are incidental to the plot. Make sure you read MacBraeburn's "junk" and "sent" folders. The email to Lorentz Umbert is a masterpiece.

Overall, a little comedic gem that's worth your time, even if you haven't been in the IF community long enough to catch all the references.

When I started up Railways of Love I was taken aback by the game's old-school graphics. Then, on my first playthrough, it didn't feel very interactive to me. There were only a few times I was provided a choice that would affect the story of protagonists Abel and Juna on their train ride, and most of the actions I could select were actions like "The attendant comes by" or "The light blinks" - actions that Able and Juna couldn't take for themselves. The primary exception was that each time I was given a choice one of the options was for Abel or Juna to confess their love. However, when I tried to select that option, Abel or Juna always found an excuse not to confess their love, and the game forced me to select another option. So it wasn't clear to me who I, the player, was supposed to be. The author of their story, I suppose, but an author with some rather severe restrictions on the story I was writing. I wasn't that impressed at first.

But then at the end of the story the game encourages you to play again and try to change Abel's and Juna's fates. The game was so short I thought I would try it. And here's where Railways of Love really starts getting interesting. You can replay the story multiple times, with each playthrough revealing more of Abel's and Juna's backgrounds and often giving you a different ending.

And these endings are not the kinds of endings you come to expect from a work with the word "love" in the title - if, like me, you're an American. This is not a game with a Hollywood-style "true love conquers all" sensibility. Railways of Love is more mature than that, displaying an understanding of what it means for two people to commit themselves to each other long-term and all of the costs to careers and other relationships that go along with that.

I found it beautiful and poignant.

So, my recommendation is: Don't stop with the first playthrough of Railways of Love. Don't even stop until you've seen all the endings.

Tethered starts with an adrenaline-pumping premise: You, Charles, are climbing a snowy mountain. You are roped to your partner Judith, when she slips and falls into a crevasse. What do you do? Well, there's really only one thing you can do. Then the game proper truly starts.

Most of Tethered takes place in a cave on a mountainside. This is a classic IF setting and so can often feel stale, but the premise of Tethered makes it come across as natural and fresh - more of a nod to IF's roots in Colossal Cave than something derivative.

Gameplay-wise, there are a couple of clever puzzles involving a rope that can be stretched between multiple rooms. One of these puzzles has an alternate solution that I found by looking at the walkthrough after I finished the game; this alternate solution may remind some players of a prominent puzzle in a prominent game from last year's IFComp. Also, I love the game's solution to the problem of navigating a cave in the dark: It's completely intuitive yet fairly original from an IF standpoint.

Like several other games from this year's IFComp, as you play Tethered further you realize that there is more going on here than appears at first. The ending is poignant and moving - and it adds a powerful twist on the game's name: "Tethered."

Make sure you check out the game's response to XYZZY.

Finally, a word about the language: Tethered is the first game in the author's new IF-writing language Dialog. It looks impressive to me so far. In particular, the rope-between-multiple-rooms feature is apparently a difficult one to implement in most traditional parser languages. The fact that it works smoothly in Tethered indicates something about the complexity of Dialog.

Overall, I found Tethered to be yet another of the many strong dramas in this year's IFComp.

Playing Cannery Vale is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without the box top, where each new piece you place makes you realize that the picture in your head is wrong - and so you must rethink how you view the entire game.

You start out playing as a man who drowns, and then the game yanks you back: No, you're not drowning. You're an author reading through a draft of his novel, and he's only gotten up to the point where the man is drowning. These two scenes encapsulate the gameplay: You toggle back and forth between playing as the author and as the main character in the author's novel. As the author, you keep rewriting what you've written so far. You also explore the hotel (TheLovecraftInn) where you're staying and interact with the somewhat odd but eager-to-please innkeeper. As the main character in the novel, you effectively live out the author's latest draft, but your actions also create new storylines for the author to try. It's a very clever game mechanic, although I confess it took me a little while - probably longer than it should have - to realize exactly what was going on.

Some of your actions in the inn (as the author) also parallel what happens in the novel. On example: (Spoiler - click to show)Losing my finger in the police station as the character in the novel and having my finger injured in the mousetrap as the author. This is part of what writing is all about, of course, but in Cannery Vale you experience it from both inside and outside the story.

The game is self-aware in places. At one point I thought I had found a bug: I clicked on an option, and I got a "passage not found" error. But then I went down to the lobby (as the author) and discovered that one of my dialogue options with the innkeeper was to ask about the "passage not found" error!

Near the end of the game the two storylines begin to merge, and the character in the novel gains the ability to affect the author's life directly. I'll leave it to other players to find out how, exactly.

There's a lot of provocative imagery going on here - (Spoiler - click to show)the couples who are murdered in the haunted house tour, only to reappear later unscathed but with different personalities; meeting Medusa in the apartment of the woman I hooked up with and being turned to stone; my finger healing miraculously; the Poe-themed inn being turned into a Lovecraft-themed-inn; working in a meat-canning plant that is clearly using human body parts... to name just a few things.

I had wondered if the game might reference Steinbeck's Cannery Row, but if there were any such references I didn't catch them. It does, however, allude strongly to Dante's Divine Comedy. (Spoiler - click to show)At the end, you realize that the town is actually built like the mountain of Purgatory, and so the character in the novel is working his way up and thus out of Purgatory, just like Dante does in The Divine Comedy's second book. However, unlike in Purgatorio, it's not the earthly paradise that awaits the main character at the top of the mountain. Also, depending on the author's choices, the author escapes the innkeeper-as-Satan and must climb his way out of hell, using language that sounds almost straight out of Dante: "wailing hypocrites serving as footholds, detouring through freezing waterfalls and waist-deep rushing pools past broken mansions..." Then, at the very end, the author's Beatrice helps him with the last bit of his escape from hell.

The game's blurb hints at the Dante theme - it's not obvious, but once you know it's there it's hard to miss. Also, try entering the names of various famous authors as your pseudonym. This reviewer found several that produced a quote from that author - most having to do with hell.

On a technical note, I found the visual "feel" of the game to be strong - particularly the changing colors of the sidebar image as you progress through the game. Also, the audio is excellent - both the sound effects and the background music greatly enhance the playing experience. The author clearly put a lot of work into the audio and visuals.

Cannery Vale is an impressive game with a lot going on. I have continued thinking about it, even though I played it over a month ago.

Basilica de Sangre is a medium-length puzzle-based comedy. You play as a demon trying to rescue your mother, who has been captured and held prisoner by a convent of nuns.

It reminds me a lot of the other game of Bitter Karella's that I've played, last year's Guttersnipe: St. Hesper's Asylum for the Criminally Mischievous. Both games were written with Quest. Both feature the same irreverent sense of humor that pokes fun at authority but never comes across as mean-spirited. Even the puzzle styles felt similar. I did manage to solve Basilica de Sangre without hints, though, and that wasn't the case for Guttersnipe. I think that's partly due to the design of Basilica and partly just good fortune on my part.

To continue the comparison, while I enjoyed Guttersnipe, I do think Basilica de Sangre is a better game. The puzzles are a little better-clued. Mainly, though, I think Basilica is better because of the main puzzle mechanic: Since you're a demon, you can possess any human character you meet in the game. This means that many of the puzzles entail figuring out which character has the attribute you need to achieve your current goal. It's also fun to speak to all the other characters while in the body of particular character. The responses are amusing and often give you clues about the puzzles.

I'm a fan of a simple puzzle mechanic used in multiple ways, and Basilica's primary mechanic achieves that.

My favorite line in the game occurs when you finally reunite with your mother. It weaves the mother/child relationship together with the fact that you're both demons in a manner perfectly in keeping with the game's overall tone. It made me laugh out loud.

I also enjoyed the final climactic scene. I wouldn't call it a plot twist, but it was somewhat unexpected and even kind of appropriate from an IF standpoint.

If you're a fan of Bitter Karella's other games or just enjoy irreverent, light-hearted puzzle comedies, you should play Basilica de Sangre.

Trying to escape your past, in The Forgotten Tavern you turn up at a run-down tavern, out of other options. Soon you discover that there's something unusual about this particular tavern.

The proprietors, Max and Diana, give you a hammer and apron and send you through a secret portal to fight vegetables. When you defeat these vegetables you can bring them back to serve to customers. This allows Max and Diana to attract more customers, slowly upgrading the tavern (and your weapon and armor as well).

It all effectively amounts to a light RPG experience.

I found The Forgotten Tavern to be laugh-out-loud funny - one of the funniest games in IFComp 2018, in fact. Something about the whole setup, especially fighting animated vegetables (as well as the descriptions of such) struck me as hilarious. My family did as well; we had a good laugh around the dinner table one evening discussing what it would be like to do battle with large vegetables.

The tavern's continual menu changes and my character's status updates were fun. I was proud of my final title, (Spoiler - click to show)Tourism Board Chair.

The RPG aspects did come to feel a bit repetitive after a while, which eventually distracted from the comedy. But overall, I enjoyed The Forgotten Tavern.