Ratings and Reviews by Joey Acrimonious

I cannot summarize Sage Sanctum Scramble any better than its blurb has already done: as promised, it’s a grab bag of puzzles. Most of them have to do with wordplay and/or rearranging letters in some way.

The quality of the puzzles is excellent. Professional-quality. Enthusiasts would pay money for them, without a doubt. And they’re implemented extremely solidly, with the parser responding smoothly to almost everything I tried - that’s quite an achievement given the complexity of some of these puzzles, and the variety of different inputs involved. In many cases, the game even recognizes inputs that are barking up the right tree, dispensing hints or encouragement to help the player reach the finish line.

But make no mistake: while this game is easy to pick up and play, it’s quite challenging to master. The puzzles range from easyish to total brain-busters, and everything in between. Winning the game only requires a portion of the puzzles to be completed, so it’s not terribly hard. But if you’re in it to achieve a perfect score, that’s another matter entirely, and will likely require a major time investment. For reference: I think it took me about 5 hours of gameplay before I decided to finish up with a dubious score of 37. But I don’t have a lot of experience with these types of puzzles. Your mileage will vary.

This piece is 98% interactive, 2% fiction, with only the barest threads of narrative tying the puzzles together. Is that a drawback? Or would a more substantive story be a mere frivolity here? I suppose you’ll have to answer that question for yourself. But for me - yeah, it's a considerable drawback.

Overall, if you want a bunch of clever word puzzles without any frills or pretensions, Sage Sanctum Scramble has you covered.

Wonder and whimsy. Political intrigue and murder. Detective work, bureaucracy, and the simple human pleasure of wearing a scarf. A Murder in Fairyland has it all!

This game is a joy to play. The writing is on-point. The graphic design is bright and gaudy in the best possible way. There’s a diverse variety of puzzles to solve: word searches; filling out forms; a card game; as well as more classic IF staples involving clue-hunting, using the right action on the right thing, etc. It’s all implemented very well. The variety of different things to do made gameplay feel fresh throughout.

The world is mysterious and compelling: a realm of thought and emotion, powered by memories and videogames, ruled over (at least locally) by Machiavellian nobility at the helm of a byzantine machinery of state that you navigate via a literal labyrinth of contracts and forms. It seems that the setting is pre-established in the author’s other works. I haven’t read them yet, so some details were no doubt lost on me, but that’s fine. I feel like, if anything, my unfamiliarity with the setting only added to the sense of wonder and intrigue.

The high point of the experience for me was reading the beautifully-written memories of the protagonist’s scarf.

Solving the murder is a well-designed puzzle with many facets and several possible outcomes. It’s easy to come up with an acceptable solution, but it takes serious exploration and a keen eye for detail to reach the best solution.

Overall, A Murder in Fairyland is among my favorite IFComp 2020 games. Would recommend.

Vampire Ltd has the quintessence of a solid parser game. In many ways, it feels like an exercise in moderation. The humor is neither too dry nor too outrageous. There’s an element of social satire here, with the major characters’ vampirism serving as a metaphor for their self-enriching corporate mismanagement, but it’s played with levity. There’s an element of mild mystery with some clues to uncover, but all is soon revealed without a whole lot of head-scratching.

I had an exceptionally smooth time playing the game. Part of this is thanks to the author’s success in presenting a polished experience, with plenty of synonyms, plenty of interesting non-default failure responses, and plenty of useful context presented through dialogue or descriptions to keep the player on the right path. But it’s also partially thanks to the modest scope of the game, with straightforward challenges and a paucity of objects. I see this as both a strength and a weakness: while there were few opportunities for sticking points, the world also felt a little more spartan than I would have preferred.

Overall, I feel that Vampire Ltd succeeds in what it sets out to do. It’s a light, well-built, unpretentious comedy that kept me entertained without trying to knock my socks off.

You Will Thank Me as Fast as You Thank a Werewolf is a collaboration between the human author and a neural network that generated new text based on the author’s past works. It’s described as “an experimental story about a lifelong romantic relationship,” but I never would have guessed that this was supposed to be a story about anything in particular. It’s a jumble of disjointed events and ideas, perhaps slightly more coherent than an early Buñuel film but not quite as sensible as a typical fever dream. Expect to encounter only the slightest bit of narrative coherence: sometimes sentences on the same page seem to bear a logical relationship to each other, but that’s about as far as it goes.

But there’s definitely some interesting content here, even if it’s not presented in the form of a traditional storyline. Certain themes keep recurring throughout the experience: the narrator’s preoccupations with work (especially the fact of being hired and identifying oneself with a job); family (especially a brother who seems to keep coming up); and mortality (and people who either resist or acquiesce to it). A distillation, perhaps, of what is explored in the author’s other works?

I’m not sure that there is any point to the interactive aspect of the experience. In typical CYOA-style, the player sometimes picks one of two choices, but the choices themselves are often non-sequiturs and they don’t have an obvious relationship to whatever happens next.

Much of what you’ll read here is just a step above gibberish, but there are also scattered gems - sentences that clearly bear the mark of AI uncanniness but which just work in a sublime kind of way. For me, the most enjoyable part of the read was uncovering such gems. For example:

(Spoiler - click to show)The parrot says: “I am a parrot, and I love you.”

(Spoiler - click to show)“Beware, you blind socialist,” he said, “even though you have a heart of gold and cocaine.”

(Spoiler - click to show)Everyone except Wikipedia is shocked

If that’s not poetry, I don’t know what is.

I don’t believe there’s any way to give constructive criticism here, nor will I be giving a star rating. It is what it is. Would I recommend giving this one a read? Yes, but only if you’re in the mood to spend half an hour not knowing what in the world is going on.

The Brutal Murder of Jenny Lee is a murder mystery which, in many ways, feels like it takes cues from the walking simulator genre.

It consists mostly of exploring various locations and examining items to glean information. But it’s not all business. As you go through the game, you’ll learn as much about the victim’s life as you do about her death. Notes, letters, artifacts, and the comments of your “employer” who is deeply connected to the case all help you to gradually piece together an impression of a moment in a young woman’s life. It’s compelling, well-written stuff. Little things like a pencil case or a sketch are described with enough care, enough attention to detail, to show rather than tell a story that felt very authentic and human to me.

There’s a couple nice puzzles here which call for the player to gather information, make a deduction, and act upon that deduction. But there’s also quite a good chunk of the game that consists solely of examining things until some answer is spoon-fed to you. The whole experience hews to a more-or-less linear path: you go where the narrator takes you, and do things step-by-step according to his whims. It works, but I think I would have gotten even more enjoyment out of a more varied and less linear set of problems to solve.

I wasn’t fond of the way the game occasionally hides the parser for a predetermined amount of time when important text shows up. I get that the author is trying to emphasize important moments, but still, I don’t want to have to wait around counting the seconds until I’m allowed to keep playing after I’ve finished reading whatever I was supposed to read.

There’s a secondary aspect to the story: (Spoiler - click to show)the twist that you’re an AI being exploited by someone who is wrongfully imprisoned for the murder, and you ultimately seek to escape. It’s an interesting concept, but doesn't feel fully woven into the main story, and isn't developed in enough detail to satisfy questions about how exactly the character is able to accomplish what it does. Maybe this aspect is a prelude to a sequel which explores it in greater detail? That would be neat.

Even though I wasn’t totally on board with every design choice here, The Brutal Murder of Jenny Lee brings a great atmosphere and strong writing to the table. Overall, I enjoyed my time with it, and would gladly try more of the author’s work in the future.

As others have pointed out, Popstar Idol Survival Game cuts off at the end of the first challenge, just a few minutes into gameplay. It’s a shame, because what’s there makes it seem like an extremely interesting and possibly hilarious RPG, held back only by an almost complete disregard for grammar.

But you can do what any would-be star popstar idol would do when faced with a seemingly impassable obstacle: cheat.

Since Popstar Idol is game-breakingly bugged in multiple places, there are multiple different fixes you'll need to make by hand in order to play the whole thing from start to finish. As an aside, it might be easier in Twinery, but I know nothing of Twine, so these notes will show you how to make quick-and-dirty fixes in Notepad++.

(Another aside, kudos to Mathbrush for developing the first part of the fix and posting it to the Intfiction forum, which is what inspired me to keep going and fix the remaining gamebreaking bugs.)

Step 1: Download the html file and open it in Notepad++ or a similar text editor.
Step 2: Delete all the text on line 198, where it says (display: "Untitled Passage 12"). Leave the line break on line 198 for ease of line-reference going forward.
Step 3: Navigate to line 1073. Near the end of that line, you'll see (if: $singinggoal is 300). Change just that part to (if: $singingprogress &g-t; 299). Then remove the hyphen between g and t, I just put it there as an admittedly inelegant solution to preventing this form from reading the html and messing everything up.
Step 4: Navigate to line 683. Change Failed to True Ending.
Step 5: when you play the game, be sure to pick Song A rather than Song B when first given the choice.

And that's it. Now, you may be asking, is it worth going through all that rigmarole just to be able to play a buggy game?

My answer is yes. Popstar Idol Survival Game, in its full glory, is a wild ride. The prose is full of errors, the pacing is odd, and the whole plot seems rushed-through without as much time to simmer as it deserves. But the ideas… the raw potential of the wild, zany, epic ideas that unfold in the latter parts of this story is astounding. I genuinely hope the author returns to this work and spends a whole lot more time refining it into the masterpiece it was meant to be.

Gave it 1 star in its current state, but if you apply these fixes, it's easily worth 2.

Edited 26 April 2022: the above instructions were for the version of the game downloadable from the IFComp 2020 site, which is no longer available. For the version that is now on IF Archive (and linked from this IFDB page as of this writing), the basic instructions are the same, but the line numbers have changed.
Step 2: now look on line 223.
Step 3: now look on line 1098.
Step 4: now look on line 708.

The Turnip takes place in a world almost like our own, but just different enough that it seems impossible to fully grasp the nature of the setting or the motivations of the characters. There’s a dog that acts almost, but not quite, like a dog would act. You have a job that seems almost, but not quite, like a job that a person would have. There’s a turnip that acts almost, but not quite, like you’d expect from a turnip. The whole thing feels kind of like what would happen if an alien from some other planet were asked to write a short story about life on Earth, having heard a little bit about it but not having studied it in any detail.

It’s a piece that provokes a bit of thought. The world of The Turnip may seem weird to us. To the eyes of folks in a hypothetical alternate world like this one, presumably our society would seem equally as weird. It might seem odd that the society in this story attaches economic value to a dirt field full of holes, but who are we to judge? To them, maybe it would seem odd that we attach economic value to a field full of… Christmas trees, for example. This, I think, is the strong point of The Turnip: it invites us to question our frame of reference.

It’s also totally linear (apart from your choice of whether to read certain brief descriptions along the way), and reading everything from start to finish takes a few minutes at most, so there’s not much to it. It’s an efficient story, in that it packs a fairly high degree of interesting content relative to its tiny size. Worth the time to check it out.

#VanLife is a day-to-day personal economic simulator with some interesting mechanics, but sparse writing. You live in a van with solar-powered appliances. Can you balance your mood, your cash, and your battery charge to succeed in this minimalistic lifestyle? At its core, the premise is great, and I’ve got to give props to a game that encourages less-resource-intensive living.

But the implementation can be wonky at times. Everything depends upon a small pool of random events which cause wild and unpredictable swings. You can be doing great one day, only to lose the game on the next because you got stuck with a couple bad events that you couldn’t do anything about. Or you could be on the cusp of failure, only to skyrocket back to prosperity because of one or two lucky events. Your decisions kind of matter, but I felt like they were totally overshadowed by the sheer importance of luck.

The other thing that hampered my enjoyment here is… I quickly came to dislike the protagonist. That feels odd to write, since the protagonist doesn’t have any lines and isn’t ever described directly, yet they come across as someone who isn’t serious about the #VanLife. I felt like I had to constantly battle my own protagonist’s unreasonable expectations. This is a person who earns a living by posting photos with inspirational quotes. Regularly, thousands of dollars fall into their lap from making guest foodie blog posts. They never have to pay money for food or gas or parking, and they never get harassed by the police for parking illegally either.

Basically, the protagonist is privileged in many ways, and yet they’re constantly unsatisfied. Got an offer to receive a bunch of cash and a free appliance, possibly more energy-efficient than the one you already have, in return for a product endorsement? Well, your protagonist loses mood, because capitalism = bad. Craving some pancakes but don’t have the right cooktop because the game hasn’t given you the opportunity to buy it yet? Well, you’re about to lose a giant chunk of mood, my friend. Want to hop online and frag n00bs, but you don’t have enough battery because you already spent it on two cravings for avocado toast today? Well, that’s probably a game over. Sucks to be you.

I found myself losing the game often in the first few days because the protagonist was full of so many capricious requests that there simply weren’t enough resources to indulge. The protagonist is defined by one personality trait: the trait of being someone who never should have set foot in a van.

According to the webpage, the game is still in beta, and that makes sense. It feels like a rough draft of what could (and hopefully will) become a good sim. A wider variety of random events would help spice things up, but what the game would benefit most from would be a rebalancing of the events’ effects so that they don’t cause such wild and unpredictable mood swings. Then, there would be room for players to start thinking about long-term strategy, without the immediate threat of game over due to lack of pancakes looming over their heads from the start.

The first thing I noticed about Tangled Tales is the ambition of its presentation: it’s a multimedia experience with a parser, graphics, and sound all bundled into a .exe.

I have to respect the amount of work that went into the design of this interface. This could have been breezed through in good old Inform 7, but no, Tangled Tales insists on going the extra mile. Was it worth it? For me as a player, the answer is probably not. I didn’t feel that the graphics or sound added much to the experience. The window is set up so that you can only display either the text or a location graphic at a given time. Consequently, I spent almost no time appreciating the graphics.

Everything about this game seems to be painstakingly built to induce a very particular kind of nostalgia trip for a very particular kind of player. That’s true of the interface, which bravely bucks the familiar and minimalistic presentation of a typical modern parser game. It’s also true of the writing, the world design, and the parser itself, which I swear came straight out of an era from before I was born. The world is more-or-less a maze, full of indistinct locations connected in a large, convoluted network, and you may indeed be driven to draw yourself a map in order to try navigating this game. The story and the characters are amusing, but they aren’t developed in any great detail - they’re not the focus here.

The focus is a series of puzzles which would look extremely easy in theory, but which are viciously difficult in practice due to Tangled Tales’ cheerful indifference to the kinds of quality-of-life details that modern IF players are accustomed to. This is a game in which the parser is so finicky that I didn’t even know when I was playing guess-the-verb or not. Looking at a table might yield a brief description, but there’s no indication that what you really need to do is to look on the table. Sometimes you have to give an NPC a command in one syntax, sometimes you have to use a totally different syntax for no apparent reason. If it were not for the walkthrough, I never, never in a million years would have finished this game, because I wouldn’t even have understood that the things I tried were usually correct, just not phrased properly… with the proper phrasing often being some idiosyncratic command that I’ve never seen before and never would have thought to try.

To top it all off, we’re given a fifteen-page walkthrough file. The actual walkthrough is a chunk of run-on text encompassing about half a page. Then there’s an image that takes up one page. One page is dedicated to explaining what interactive fiction is, and briefly introducing this game in particular. The other twelve pages? Instructions. This astounding document is what cements my belief that Tangled Tales is designed to provide, as faithfully as possible, the authentic oldschool experience, deliberately complete with all the shortcomings and frustrations that may entail. It’s a metaphorical middle finger to every new idea or convention that has been developed in the realm of IF-design theory over at least the past 30 or so years.

There’s definitely a certain audience who will get a kick out of this.

Fight Forever is a martial-arts RPG that focuses primarily on stat-building - you’re trying to train a character who will be capable of taking on your opponents. The game has all the bones of a fairly expansive RPG, but from what I’ve seen, it appears to be unfinished. There are many greyed-out options that don’t seem like they can be unlocked at present, perhaps teasers for future content?

The writing is terse but effective, and it intrigued me. I wanted to explore more of this game, see what different options are available, and experiment with different ways of building a character. Unfortunately, this proved very difficult, because the way stats are handled is extremely opaque. Unless I’m missing something, there’s no way to see a comprehensive summary of all your character’s stats at once - instead, you have to rely on occasional notifications that you’ve increased x stat to y level. At no point did I ever come across a listing of what all the stats even are, much less what they’re supposed to do. There’s no obvious way of telling what the numbers mean. Within a few fights, I had increased my mindset to 3000 while my heart was 52 and my kicking was 2… but I couldn’t figure out how to tell what effect any of those had, or how they compare to my opponents’ stats.

I found the fights to be frustrating for three reasons. They occur through infernally slow timed text that can’t be skipped. They are narrated in a very spare and repetitive manner. And, most importantly, they give no actionable feedback. I was left with no clue why I was winning or losing! Was it chance? Was it because of my scores in some crucial stat(s)?

The system intrigued me enough that I wanted to keep playing and exploring - maybe, with time, I would figure out things that weren’t immediately apparent? But my plans were cut short when I decided to retire and try playing as my 14-year-old scion. That didn’t work, because a 14-year-old can’t enter fights, so I’d have to wait for time to advance… but after exhausting a few training options that can only be done once between each fight, I was left with no obvious way to make time advance. I was stuck at 14. Oops. Game over for me.

Should you try Fight Forever in its current state? Maybe. There’s definitely some interesting mechanics here, even if they are hidden behind a totally opaque presentation. Maybe you’ll be clever enough to figure out things that I missed? I had some fun trying, so hopefully you will too.