Reviews by Spike

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.

This game's blurb describes it well: smooch.click is an experimental kissing simulator. And it's focused on the moments that lead up to the kiss.

Gameplay is choice-based. I played through a handful of times. (The game is quite short, and so it invites multiple playthroughs.) During each playthrough you are presented with a few scenarios, most of which give you three options. After three or four (or maybe five) of these scenarios, there is a final scene featuring a kiss.

I got mostly different scenarios on each playthrough. Once I saw a scenario at the beginning that had appeared near the end of a different playthrough, though. So the scenarios must be (mostly?) randomly selected each time you play.

The way the kiss scene plays out appears to depend on your previous choices. When I tried more romantic choices I was generally rewarded with a more tender kiss scene. The one time I tried choices that were more indifferent or dismissive toward my date the final scene featured a "bad ending," with (Spoiler - click to show)a spider, me hitting my head, and a trip to the hospital.

The choices aren't presented to you in list form. Instead, they cycle through at the choice's location in the text, on a timer of some sort. I don't in general like text on timers like this, but in this case I think it works. It felt like it emphasized the split-second decision of some choices (if I don't click this now, I'm going to have to wait until it cycles through!), as well as the almost arbitrary nature that choosing sometimes has. Romantic situations where you're trying to feel out the other person particularly feature this. Sometimes "the moment" passes, and you're aware that you've missed something that you won't be able to get back. (However, in smooch.click, if you wait long enough, you will be able to get "the moment" back.)

The text doesn't feature capitalization, which can sometimes come across as an artificial affectation. But I think it fits here, with the work's experimental nature.

I find the choice of the word "smooch" in the title interesting. Why not kiss.click? "Smooch" feels a bit informal and a cozier word than "kiss." It's also somewhat like the sound you make when you kiss. "Kiss" is a more generic word and so feels more bland. So, yeah, I think smooch.click is a better choice than kiss.click.

The game's long list of content warnings made me think that this would be a much racier, darker game than it is (although maybe I missed those endings). In fact, based on what I saw, I would not put smooch.click anywhere near the erotica or adult interactive fiction categories. The choices that you're presented with are more about how you treat people in general or whether you are bored or uninterested or emotionally attracted to them.

Overall, this was an interesting experiment, but it felt slight to me. I think a lot more could have been done with potential story arcs.

Stone of Wisdom starts off like a fairly standard old-school text adventure. You're given a quest to find a magic item (the titular stone), as well as three objects to help you along the way. There isn't much motivation provided for why you need to find the item, although the queen does promise you your freedom if you bring it back. But why is she asking you? Well, it appears you've done her a favor before, but the game doesn't go into the details. Presumably this backstory is contained in the two earlier games in the Bash series (which I have not played).

Even not knowing the background, though, the beginning isn't that much different from a lot of the quest-driven text adventures from the 1980s. Or, frankly, from a lot of classic fairy tales. And in both fairy tales and old-school text adventures, it's generally the journey that matters most, not the beginning or motivation (or even, sometimes, the end).

Stone of Wisdom contains several amenities that feel modern and not the kind of thing you would have seen in a 1980s-era text adventure, though. Perhaps these are naturally a part of the ADRIFT language; I couldn't tell. (This was my first ADRIFT game.) But I appreciated the automap - especially the ability to travel long distances across the map just by clicking the location that was my destination. Also, the auto-complete feature was occasionally annoying but mostly helpful. I never had the inclination to turn it off, although that was an option.

So, in general, this is an old-school text adventure with a more modern interface. The puzzles felt mostly straightforward and of the old-school variety, too, although a few of them were more involved and thus a bit stronger. Regardless, I did not need the walkthrough. The game is also quite gentle with you: It warns you before you're about to put yourself in an unwinnable state. It also guides you in some places with the puzzles. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)if you try to attack the troll with the sword the game suggests using the magic ring instead.

Overall, I found Stone of Wisdom to be a well-implemented old-school text adventure with a classic plot and setting and some modern features to ease gameplay. I enjoyed it.

The title of this game has a poetic ring to my ears, and it does a good job at evoking the game's setting. The credits say the original version of the game was in French, so I looked up the French title: Au Coeur d'un Cercle de Sable et d'Eau. My substandard French would transliterate this as "At the Heart of a Circle of Sand and Water." I like the English title the author selected better than my attempt, but I do think a little is lost in the title's translation: My sense is that "au coeur" captures something stronger than the somewhat weak English word "within" - something that fits the events of the game.

The title screen immediately made me think of a teenage Moana. (I can't help it; my kids are at just the right age for watching animated Disney movies.) But the story is different: The PC, Mananuiva, is not searching for the heart of Tafiti. (Or even for the heart of the circle of sand and water.) She's participating in a coming-of-age ritual that requires her to sail out beyond sight of her island. She's looking for something more meaningful than the typical life of the women of her island, although she's not sure what. She's been gone much longer than is normal for this ritual. The story begins as she finds another inhabited island, where the villagers have something that they want of her.

For me, the first page of the actual game felt rather like a wall of text. It was a bit intimidating. However, once I was a few paragraphs in I didn't care anymore; I was grabbed enough by the story that I wanted to keep reading.

Within a Circle of Water and Sand is choice-based. Playing it felt somewhat like reading one of those old CYOA books I remember as a kid, although the writing is better and the story is more compelling than those books tended to be. There aren't a lot of choices at the beginning, but the game does keep track of certain decisions, and these will affect your options later in the game.

I played through a few times, getting different endings each time and slowly uncovering the truth of what's happening on the island.

Overall, I enjoyed Within a Circle of Water and Sand. I found it to be a solid, beautifully-illustrated game with a good bit of replay value. Also, I have already recommended it to some friends who haven't played interactive fiction; it seems like the kind of game that could serve as a nice introduction to choice-based IF.

I looked it up: apparently "Tohu Wa Bohu" is a Hebrew phrase. It appears in the second verse of the biblical book of Genesis, where it is translated "without form, and void."

One of art's many purposes is to serve as therapy for the artist. Someone might write poetry to deal with the end of a romantic relationship, for instance, or perhaps paint to help cope with a child's suicide. For many years I kept a daily journal, and spending time each day organizing my thoughts helped me make sense of the events in those periods of my life. (Perhaps my journal entries aren't truly art, but writing them felt therapeutic in the same way I'm talking of here.)

Tohu Wa Bohu feels very much like it served as therapy for the author. It feels, to me, like something deeply personal. The work's blurb indicates this: "An immersive exploration of chronic depersonalization / derealization disorder. Content warning: This true story deals in part with suicidal ideation." So it's a true story. But it's not really a story in the conventional sense. Instead, you're taking a quiz about whether you have feelings of depersonalization. So the true story must be the author's, the one that underlies all of the quiz questions and answers.

One aspect of art-as-therapy is that the more personal it is the less universal it tends to be. And I think that's the case with Tohu Wa Bohu: It's very personal. But unless you've experienced something like what the author has gone through then it may be difficult to relate to the work. That's where I fall, I'm afraid, with Tohu Wa Bohu. (And that's probably how most people would respond to my journal entries from my college days, frankly. I'm still glad I wrote them.)

So, I don't feel like I can rate Tohu Wa Bohu. I do, however, appreciate what the author was trying to do with this work. It looks like he put a lot of effort into it, and I hope it helped him through what he's been struggling with. And I hope that others reading it who have had struggles similar to the author's will also resonate with it.

I was predisposed to like Dungeon Detective because of its cover art. The signal it initially sent me was something like "comedy version of the 1980s Dungeons & Dragons cartoon starring a hyena." (I know it's a gnoll, but in the cover art the main character looks like a sentient hyena. Which works for me.)

And I did enjoy Dungeon Detective. You, Sniff Chewpaw, gnoll detective, have been hired by a dragon to determine the identity of the adventurers who looted your dungeon. So the game ends up being a choice-based mystery.

I played through twice. The gameplay involves uncovering clues that help identify the adventurers. For the most part, you're examining the same parts of the dungeon no matter what choices you make. Your choices do, however, seem to affect which clues you find and how much information you can glean from them.

The writing is evocative; it captured the feeling for me of walking through a dungeon, making decisions about where to go next and what to do. Also, the characterization is strong. There aren't very many characters, but they all have distinct personalities. I particularly enjoyed the interaction between the PC and the dragon; it reminded me some of (Spoiler - click to show)Grunk and the gnome in Lost Pig.

In addition, the major choices in the game mostly revolve around your interactions with these characters. Depending on certain options with them, the way you find various clues and the level of detail you gain from those clues appear to vary quite a bit.

There are multiple endings as well. Even if you successfully identify the adventurers, the story can play out differently depending on certain choices you made with respect to the other characters. I also liked how (Spoiler - click to show)the dragon still gave me three out of five stars on the ending where I failed to solve the mystery.

It was fun to play a gnoll. I remember them only as enemies in D&D games. I don't think I've ever played a gnoll before. Also, I like the idea of mashing up the fantasy and mystery genres. The combination of the two as displayed in Dungeon Detective felt fresh to me.

My only critique is that the game was a little on the short side. However, as I said in my review of Haywire, that's really another way of saying that I enjoyed Dungeon Detective and would have liked more game to play!

Yak Shaving for Kicks and Giggles! is a short, light-hearted parody of a quest for spiritual enlightenment, complete with Dada Lama and 1970s-style aesthetics. Once I realized what the plot was I immediately thought of the Animaniacs episode where Yakko, Wakko, and Dot meet the Wally Llama. There are some similarities in tone - for example, the solution to one of the puzzles would fit right into an Animaniacs episode - but for the most part Yak Shaving's humor isn't quite so physical.

And there are a handful of puzzles to solve. I found some of the solutions to be a bit on the absurd side, but this is in keeping with the game's sense of humor. Plus the puzzles are always well-clued, and so the offbeat solutions come across as fair rather than frustrating.

There's even a meta-joke going on here, although I didn't catch it until I did some searching after finishing the game. Wikipedia defines "yak shaving" as "Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem." Which, of course, is a good description of a lot of puzzle-heavy IF games. So Yak Shaving for Kicks and Giggles! ends up being a joke on multiple levels: As a traditional IF puzzle game in terms of structure, most of Yak Shaving is "yak shaving" - and it features yak shaving as well.

Personally, I prefer the author's games Alias 'The Magpie' and To Hell in a Hamper, but I did enjoy Yak Shaving for Kicks and Giggles!, and it elicited several chuckles from me as well. If you like the sense of humor present in J. J. Guest's other work, you should try this one.

Like Tower, Dreamland feels like one of those games that's more about the experience than anything else. The scenes in Dreamland are more concrete, though. I played through three times. In all three playthroughs, I started off with a decision of what to do (read a book, have a snack, play a computer game) before going to sleep. After that choice, I was presented with three different scenes while dreaming: (Spoiler - click to show)watching a play (it's Shakespeare's As You Like It, apparently), perusing a market, and visiting a library. These scenes were presented in different orders the three times I played, though.

There are two small puzzles to solve in Dreamland:
(Spoiler - click to show)
1. Helping the shoemaker find his wife. You have a couple of different options when you find out where she is, though. For instance, you don't have to tell him the truth.
2. Giving the right book to the librarian. The right book was different for my two playthroughs. I think it was tied to whether I was dreaming to remember or dreaming to forget. I also think it was tied to my choice of activity right before going to sleep.

Neither puzzle is that difficult, although it took me several tries to (Spoiler - click to show)find the right book to give to the librarian.

The writing felt somewhat dreamlike to me, in keeping with the game's theme, although there were a few too many small spelling and grammar mistakes for my taste.

Tower is a bit surreal, and that appears to be the intent. You're climbing a tower, and it's not entirely clear why or how you got there. At the various levels you have to make choices that have symbolic meaning. For example, there's (Spoiler - click to show)a room full of chocolates, a watermelon and a treasure chest that fit together somehow, a suit of armor, and a room that's so bright that you can't see. I had some trouble making sense of the variety of images, though.

My original take on the game was that the PC was dead and the tower represented the PC's journey to or through an afterlife. However, the author told me that isn't quite correct. The PC is still alive. However, he had (Spoiler - click to show)once attempted suicide and is recovering. I suppose the tower can be thought of as symbolizing the PC's attempt to work through his trauma.

At the end I unlocked the code that gives you a page of text explaining what the game means, but I don't think it helped me much.

Overall, I feel like Tower is supposed to be an experience more than a story, per se. The soothing, somewhat contemplative music helps set that mood.