Ratings and Reviews by Joey Acrimonious

Shadow Operative is a cyberpunk adventure that can be played through a parser or through a sidebar with links: both options are easy to use and work smoothly.

The story here is not groundbreaking, nor is it fully committed to the grit and pessimism of classic cyberpunk. But it’s well-written, offering a good dose of wit and nerdy humor, and enough of its own unique spin on genre tropes to keep things fresh. There are a series of tasks/puzzles to solve, which I found engaging if a bit on the simple side - it felt like infiltrating a corporate office to do leet hacking was a bit easier and more straightforward than it should have been. A more expansive web of problems to solve, I think, would have elevated the game.

In general and especially with regard to the UI (which is built with Vorple), the technical side of Shadow Operative is where the game really shines. Gameplay was impressively smooth and intuitive, and the UI presented a whole lot of options and information in a neat and accessible format. It was both functional and really nice to look at. The credits list quite a few testers, which makes sense: I can easily believe that the author put a great deal of effort into testing and iterating upon the game in order to present us with this very slick, well-oiled piece. Also of note: it has a bangin’ soundtrack.

Overall, I’m glad that I played Shadow Operative. The author’s professionalism is abundantly clear in the design of this game, and I have a lot of respect for that.

I was very interested to play this game, which is described by the author as an “historical gay melodrama.” Indeed, it does what it promises, putting you in the shoes of various members of the Vidal family as they live through a succession of scenes taking place over the course of a summer. Through their actions and interactions, a series of events will unfold that are historical, gay, and dramatic.

The interface is a bit odd. It’s a hypertext game with the kind of navigable world-model that’s more commonly seen in a parser game. That’s fine, except almost all of the interesting action (such as dialogue between characters where you have to make important choices, for example) occurs in pop-ups. With all the interesting stuff happening in these pop-ups, I quickly came to feel that the navigable world-model was frivolous, and mostly just served to make the screen look overly busy whenever a pop-up would be sitting on top of the room description/navigation buttons beneath. I think if the entire thing had been presented as a traditional CYOA-style game - no navigation, just conversation choices - it would have felt a lot smoother without really sacrificing anything.

The story is intriguing and it introduces a lot of awesome ideas. There’s interwar Catalan politics, the strictures of bourgeoisie propriety, a strained family dynamic, a little bit of a coming-of-age story, a consideration of gender, and of course plenty of gayness, all coming together in a fascinating and very multifaceted plot.

Certainly, there’s the foundation of a great story here. And yet… I feel that the game doesn’t fully realize its ambitions. Things happen very quickly. Often, you play a character for only a very brief scene before suddenly switching to another character, so I found it difficult to fully sink my teeth into any given scene. Sometimes, the writing is very evocative. I greatly enjoyed the description of the instant attraction between the family patriarch and his daughter’s suitor, for example. But elsewhere, the writing seems overly minimalistic and matter-of-fact, and I was disappointed that later interactions between the aforementioned characters weren’t described with the same degree of detail.

Overall, I liked A Catalan Summer and feel that it’s worth a playthrough, but I also feel that it has the potential to be much better. If the author were to treat this as a rough draft, go back and flesh out what’s already there with more evocative prose and more melodrama, it could become something excellent.

Ascension of Limbs is a deliciously creepy parser game that’s heavy on resource-management mechanics. Every turn, the player is presented with a listing of valid commands and objects, so while there are definitely horrors to encounter, the dreaded game of guess-the-verb is not one of them.

Technically, the game is very well-polished, especially considering that it relies heavily on NPC behavior and ever-changing numerical variables. In my experience, everything seemed to work as intended. It might take a little while to get familiar with the mechanics and figure out the strategies for victory, since the whole thing is very unlike the typical text adventure, but it’s worth the time to get used to it. I found it quite satisfying once I’d worked out an effective business scheme through trial and error.

The palpable strength of Ascension of Limbs is in its unique brand of casual, creeping horror. It’s a game that might slowly draw you into a situation that isn’t quite right, and gently draw you to become complicit in it. The truth of the situation, and the consequences of your complicity, are not revealed at first. Maybe they’re never fully revealed at all. For the most part, it seems, the reader is afforded only disquieting glimpses into the horrors of this world, and left to try to piece things together for themself.

A very solid piece, well worth multiple playthroughs to experience the variety of different endings (and journeys) this game has to offer.

The Arkhill Darkness is a lighthearted, trope-laden fantasy romp that delights in goofy humor and breaking the fourth wall. It’s a fun time. The visual presentation is slick and does a good job of setting the mood. There’s a very simple RPG-style combat system which is, in my opinion, entirely unnecessary.

If you’re looking for flawless prose, a deep story, or characters that you’ll come to care very deeply about, I’d say this is not the game for you. On the other hand, if you’re in the mood to see what happens when high fantasy meets kung fu and yo momma jokes, The Arkhill Darkness might put a smile on your face.

Just be warned: your greatest foe won’t be a dragon or a demonic horsething. It’ll be the typos.

Alone is a gloomy exploration of post-apocalyptic survival. It has some nice, succinct writing and some implicit commentary on current events, but I read it first and foremost as a vehicle for puzzles. In classic parser fashion, you’ve got a problem to solve, and you have to work out how to do it through exploring and using the tools you find. For the most part, I thought the challenges were very well-designed: neither too obvious nor unfairly hard, they require a bit of logic and sometimes a bit of an inductive leap. I found them satisfying to solve.

Framing the central problem-solving task are a cast of characters, a story, and a world, all of which are successfully employed to buttress the action, but none of which are really the focus. The level of polish is good, with no bugs that I encountered.

I would have liked to have seen a bit more on the storytelling front. What kind of person is the protagonist? Where have they been? Where are they going? Exploring details like these, I think, would have made me feel a bit more invested in the problem-solving. But even so, it was a good time and I reckon fans of oldschool text adventures will be pleased with Alone.

This entire review is a giant spoiler, so:

(Spoiler - click to show)This is one third of an interesting trio of ostensibly puzzle-based games. I say “ostensibly” because, once you figure out the central conceit - that “Adventures in the Tomb of Ilfane,” “Incident! Aliens on the Teresten!,” and “Terror in the Immortal’s Atelier” are all pieces of one overarching adventure - there really is no puzzle left. By reading each of the games concurrently, they supply cut-and-dry solutions to the other games’ puzzles, and these solutions cannot possibly be missed. They’re marked with huge blinking text! The entirety of the puzzle to be solved, then, consists of this single realization. Everything else is just doing what you’re told. While the intertextuality is a clever idea, for this reason, I didn’t get much out of these games in terms of meaningful interactivity.

The story itself confused me a bit since each of the games includes the same set of names applied to totally different things - is Ilfane, for example, the leader of an ancient nation? A spacefaring species of alt-right aliens? Or just a cabinet? I found myself wondering whether there is a deeper meaning behind how the names are assigned differently between the games. Is it an invitation to consider the importance of context in generating meaning? Maybe a comment on the unreliability of the games’ narrators? Perhaps it is meant to suggest a kind of symbolic connection between the (seemingly totally different) people and objects who get assigned the same name? Or maybe it’s just for shiggles? At this time, I have no answer to these questions, but it’s interesting to think about.

The games are well-polished, with a pleasing color scheme and no bugs that I encountered. My one gripe with the technical side is the inclusion of timed text. Timed text is a finicky thing that’s almost impossible to get right. In this case, I thought it was too slow, and that detracted from the excitement of some otherwise-dramatic sequences… except for a few times when I glanced away for a second and missed a line. Oops.

Where these games shine the most is in the quality of the prose and cleverness of the writing. The included myths and parables, especially, were a pleasure to read. With delightfully unexpected/cynical riffs on established tropes, these pieces of fiction-within-fiction are extremely effective for communicating the disturbing value system of their in-universe authors. The ultimate goal of the games, it seems, is to stake out a certain position in contemporary social/political discourse. But they do it with a certain levity and campiness that makes them feel more like a fun romp, even as they deliver the messages of a gloomy cautionary tale.

Overall, the games bring plenty of cool ideas to the table, and they execute some of them very well.

This entire review is a giant spoiler, so:

(Spoiler - click to show)This is one third of an interesting trio of ostensibly puzzle-based games. I say “ostensibly” because, once you figure out the central conceit - that “Adventures in the Tomb of Ilfane,” “Incident! Aliens on the Teresten!,” and “Terror in the Immortal’s Atelier” are all pieces of one overarching adventure - there really is no puzzle left. By reading each of the games concurrently, they supply cut-and-dry solutions to the other games’ puzzles, and these solutions cannot possibly be missed. They’re marked with huge blinking text! The entirety of the puzzle to be solved, then, consists of this single realization. Everything else is just doing what you’re told. While the intertextuality is a clever idea, for this reason, I didn’t get much out of these games in terms of meaningful interactivity.

The story itself confused me a bit since each of the games includes the same set of names applied to totally different things - is Ilfane, for example, the leader of an ancient nation? A spacefaring species of alt-right aliens? Or just a cabinet? I found myself wondering whether there is a deeper meaning behind how the names are assigned differently between the games. Is it an invitation to consider the importance of context in generating meaning? Maybe a comment on the unreliability of the games’ narrators? Perhaps it is meant to suggest a kind of symbolic connection between the (seemingly totally different) people and objects who get assigned the same name? Or maybe it’s just for shiggles? At this time, I have no answer to these questions, but it’s interesting to think about.

The games are well-polished, with a pleasing color scheme and no bugs that I encountered. My one gripe with the technical side is the inclusion of timed text. Timed text is a finicky thing that’s almost impossible to get right. In this case, I thought it was too slow, and that detracted from the excitement of some otherwise-dramatic sequences… except for a few times when I glanced away for a second and missed a line. Oops.

Where these games shine the most is in the quality of the prose and cleverness of the writing. The included myths and parables, especially, were a pleasure to read. With delightfully unexpected/cynical riffs on established tropes, these pieces of fiction-within-fiction are extremely effective for communicating the disturbing value system of their in-universe authors. The ultimate goal of the games, it seems, is to stake out a certain position in contemporary social/political discourse. But they do it with a certain levity and campiness that makes them feel more like a fun romp, even as they deliver the messages of a gloomy cautionary tale.

Overall, the games bring plenty of cool ideas to the table, and they execute some of them very well.

This entire review is a giant spoiler, so:

(Spoiler - click to show)This is one third of an interesting trio of ostensibly puzzle-based games. I say “ostensibly” because, once you figure out the central conceit - that “Adventures in the Tomb of Ilfane,” “Incident! Aliens on the Teresten!,” and “Terror in the Immortal’s Atelier” are all pieces of one overarching adventure - there really is no puzzle left. By reading each of the games concurrently, they supply cut-and-dry solutions to the other games’ puzzles, and these solutions cannot possibly be missed. They’re marked with huge blinking text! The entirety of the puzzle to be solved, then, consists of this single realization. Everything else is just doing what you’re told. While the intertextuality is a clever idea, for this reason, I didn’t get much out of these games in terms of meaningful interactivity.

The story itself confused me a bit since each of the games includes the same set of names applied to totally different things - is Ilfane, for example, the leader of an ancient nation? A spacefaring species of alt-right aliens? Or just a cabinet? I found myself wondering whether there is a deeper meaning behind how the names are assigned differently between the games. Is it an invitation to consider the importance of context in generating meaning? Maybe a comment on the unreliability of the games’ narrators? Perhaps it is meant to suggest a kind of symbolic connection between the (seemingly totally different) people and objects who get assigned the same name? Or maybe it’s just for shiggles? At this time, I have no answer to these questions, but it’s interesting to think about.

The games are well-polished, with a pleasing color scheme and no bugs that I encountered. My one gripe with the technical side is the inclusion of timed text. Timed text is a finicky thing that’s almost impossible to get right. In this case, I thought it was too slow, and that detracted from the excitement of some otherwise-dramatic sequences… except for a few times when I glanced away for a second and missed a line. Oops.

Where these games shine the most is in the quality of the prose and cleverness of the writing. The included myths and parables, especially, were a pleasure to read. With delightfully unexpected/cynical riffs on established tropes, these pieces of fiction-within-fiction are extremely effective for communicating the disturbing value system of their in-universe authors. The ultimate goal of the games, it seems, is to stake out a certain position in contemporary social/political discourse. But they do it with a certain levity and campiness that makes them feel more like a fun romp, even as they deliver the messages of a gloomy cautionary tale.

Overall, the games bring plenty of cool ideas to the table, and they execute some of them very well.

Academic Pursuits (As Opposed to Regular Pursuits) is a very smooth, very well-polished, bite-sized parser game that takes a fairly simple scheme and executes it wonderfully. The task that awaits the player in-game is, more or less, rote. It’s not a puzzle to be figured out, nor is it a series of decisions that have much of an effect on the course of the plot. Instead, it’s a series of opportunities to experience a moment in the life of the protagonist, and gradually piece together a picture of what’s going on (beyond the immediately obvious).

In some key respects, Academic Pursuits has the qualities of a slice-of-life work. You’re playing a moment in time. The focus is on the internal life of the protagonist: what she thinks, feels, and remembers as she goes about the work of arranging her things. But there’s also a bit more to it than that. Within this moment in time, there are enough surprises, enough mysteries, and enough spiciness to keep it quite interesting. Put it all together, and it works beautifully.

Everything in this game is made with care; most everything a player might do is met with interesting and satisfying responses that convey a rich attention to detail.

The only thing I didn’t like about Academic Pursuits is that there isn’t more of it. Take your time, explore all that there is to explore, and you’ll see a fascinating vignette unfold before your eyes.

(s)wordsmyth gives the impression of a quest for revenge, but it’s actually a quest for redemption. You must fight without fighting, using only your words to win over your opponents. It’s a simply-structured but fun adventure featuring a series of verbal duels.

I appreciated the uniqueness of each encounter, as they all demand a different approach. Negotiation? Flattery? Intimidation? The best course of action depends on the situation, and you’ll have to read your opponent to figure out how to deal with them successfully. The prose is well-written, especially when in dialogue with certain powerful opponents: many of their lines are written in a beautifully dramatic, almost poetic style that really sells the supernatural feel of such encounters.

The presentation of the game, in the style of a visual novel except without any visuals apart from a game-over graphic, seems an odd choice. Another minus: defeat can happen quickly and sometimes feels arbitrary. Unless you're far more observant than I - or just plain lucky - expect to be doing a fair bit of dying and replaying from checkpoints.

Throughout much of the game, the main characters (the student and the master) seemed a bit inscrutable. I didn’t feel a whole lot of personality from either of them. They’re laser-focused on their mission and most of their dialogue serves to establish this, and this alone. In the case of the master especially, I felt that she suffered from her dual role as character and narrator - her distinctive voice as a character seems to evaporate and turn generic whenever she begins narrating events and surroundings.

The ending, however, is a satisfying and strong one - strong enough to elevate the whole experience of the game. Once I reached it, I finally felt like I understood the personalities and motivations of the main characters. I just wish there had been a bit more build-up to that point, a bit more meaningful and varied dialogue between the student and master throughout the game.

Overall, (s)wordsmyth packs a good amount of punch despite some less-than-perfect design choices, and it’s well worth a playthrough.