Reviews by Joey Acrimonious

There were many ambitious entries in the IFComp 2020. This is the only one I’ve played that goes so far as to stake out a new aesthetic school of its own. The bizarre, alien world of Deus Ex Ceviche is inextricably steeped in the unmistakable flavor of this so-called Piscespunk: a marriage of artificial life and marine biology, here examined at the intersection of religion and for-profit enterprise.

The whole experience is packaged with a visually-stunning backdrop of netted fish, rendered with distinctive colors and bold lines that evoke a vague impression of stained glass and its tracery, bringing an ecclesiastical flavor to the table. Against this, the game’s interactive elements are rendered in pixel art that adds a palpable artificiality. The visual design elements of this game are thoughtfully-constructed and I cannot overstate how well they work together to sell the radical new Piscespunk concept.

Gameplay consists of putting disks in slots and seeing what happens, with each input yielding a narrative description of a resulting event, plus a change in your resources (of which a certain amount must be collected for victory). Both the story and the mechanics come off as weird, surreal, and possibly confusing at first. Why is the GUI gooey? How exactly does brine accumulate as a result of accidentally censoring important passages in the holy text? Nothing makes sense according to the logic of reality as we know it.

But much of the pleasure of playing Deus Ex Ceviche is in keeping at it, gradually discovering that this world has an internal logic of its own, according to which everything makes perfect sense. Trial and error (and the advice of a helpful goldfish) will reveal that the strange results of disk-insertion are in fact quite predictable, and one can easily achieve a desired outcome.

Meanwhile, as one becomes more acquainted with the setting and its characters, the weird language and inexplicable causal relationships of the story’s events will gradually decode themselves into something that’s actually quite coherent.

The travails of the faithful as they struggle to perform their duties in the face of a malfunctioning temple apparatus; the underdog tale of an obsolete abbess seeking to fulfil her duties while painfully aware of her own shortcomings; the desperate hope of the congregants to find some kind of comfort or meaning in a corrupt, pay-to-pray religion. From these poignant beginnings, the Section B-2 Temple will spiral into a crescendo of mounting tension, as constructed systems transcend their intended purposes. All aspects of reality - social, ontological, and architectural - will be revolutionized by one’s apotheosis, and one’s faithful will experience the terrible ecstasy of union with one’s divinity. It’s all on display in a series of rich, evocative vignettes. There’s real, human emotion here. It’s the kind of stuff that could be described in terms of heartbeats, smiles, and tears… if it weren’t already described in terms of databanks, replacement fingers, and salt instead.

If that doesn’t already have you hooked, then frankly, I don’t understand you. Just know that my meager review cannot possibly do justice to the raw power and majesty of Deus Ex Ceviche. Without a doubt among the most unique and memorable games of the comp, it definitely deserves a playthrough (or five).

In a classic setup, The Cave thrusts the player into a cave network to explore. But it quickly becomes apparent that mapping out the inscrutable and shifting web of rooms in search of the exit is neither possible nor necessary. This isn’t about the destination - it’s about the journey, as your character is defined by the choices they make along the way, dealing with challenges or opportunities in one way or another.

This is a cool concept, but the decisions I had to make soon started to feel a bit more mundane than I’d have liked. There’s not a lot of emotional weight behind most of what I encountered. Do you search the ashes or just keep going? Do you cross the stream or go around? Decisions like these do indeed reveal something about the person who makes them, but not enough for me to feel fully invested in a game that’s supposed to be about a journey of self-discovery.

There’s a strong element of randomness to the game, with both events and room-connections being (at least partially) randomized. I fear that the RNG may have given me the short end of the stick during my playthrough. The blurb promises lost treasures, forgotten ruins, and ancient magic, but I didn’t encounter any of those things except for a single spell that I never got the opportunity to use. Instead, despite my attempts to try new options in the hope of reaching new areas, I just kept winding up in the same handful of rooms/situations… mostly involving searching ashes and crossing streams. I might return to the game and search for the juicier bits at some point, but perhaps the RNG would have benefitted from a bit more scaffolding to ensure that each playthrough has more variety to it.

Overall, a winning concept that I think would benefit from some tweaking to draw out some more depth and variety.

Quest for the Sword of Justice is a surprising little game that subverted my expectations at every turn. Although, maybe that's just because I haven't played enough self-aware RPGs.

Right off the bat, as an RPGMaker game, it wasn’t what I expected to see in IFComp at all. But then, it also cheerfully ignores many of the salient features of its own engine, eschewing the traditional RPG experience in favor of something a bit different. The thing is, (Spoiler - click to show)the game comes with all the trappings you'd expect: skills/attributes, an XP system, an inventory system, etc., all seemingly included with combat in mind. But there isn't any combat and all that stuff is pure window-dressing. By subverting the expected mechanics of an RPG, Quest for the Sword of Justice cleverly weaves an element of parody into the structure of the game itself.

This is employed in service to the overarching story, which also is basically a comic endeavor. The author does a great job of setting up certain expectations with apparent seriousness, only to proceed to smash those expectations into tiny bits for humorous effect.

It’s a short game and a light read, but I found it successful in (what I think is) its main goal of being good for a laugh or two. There are at least a couple different endings to find, and both of the ones I got were amusing.

The Eidolon’s Escape is a nice, solid choice-based game that puts the player in the role of an incorporeal entity seeking to escape confinement.

The protagonist itself is one of the main draws of the game. Everything is seen and interpreted through the (figurative) eyes of the somewhat misanthropic Eidolon, and it’s written convincingly. The protagonist has an idiosyncratic way of viewing the world, taking a non-human’s view toward human behavior that varies between analytical/opportunistic and judgmental/repulsed. Its unique perspective is palpable at every turn, lending a strong and distinctive narrative flavor throughout.

The design of the choices and branching is, for me, a mixed bag. There are many choices that look like they’re calling for the player to make an inductive leap, levering the Eidolon’s limited insights on human psychology to choose the most effective way to manipulate other characters. And that works very well and feels quite satisfying - as long as the illusion is preserved. But on repeated playthroughs, I found that most of these choices don’t have any importance to the direction of the story, actually serving only to punctuate events and change some flavor text. In many cases, if you select the “wrong” choice, the game will just correct it for you (i.e. that didn’t work, so now you’re doing the other thing instead), the exception being a few landmines where the wrong choice leads to an immediate game-over.

By creating the illusion of important choices to engage the player through at least the first playthrough, the author probably made a judicious use of time and effort, and that’s cool. But I feel that the whole thing would have been more powerful, especially on repeated playthroughs, if there were more choices with actual gameplay consequences other than the occasional possibility of insta-loss.

There are a handful of more-important choices stacked at the end of the game, leaving us with a branching structure that’s less of a tree and more of a spork.

One of the endings makes clear the conceptual underpinnings of the action: (Spoiler - click to show)that the Mage is holding the Eidolon against its will because it is a metaphysical remnant of the Mage’s dead loved one, and the Mage desperately wants the Eidolon to identify with this person even though the Eidolon does not. This is an outstanding concept which intrigues me immensely. It has huge emotional gravity and lots of potential to be interpreted in a metaphorical light.

But I wish that the game had done more to explore and develop this awesome concept. As is, it’s all explicated in a few short paragraphs right at an ending, where the player no longer has any ability to respond in-character. There’s a bit of foreshadowing near the start (which can be easily missed), but that’s about it. I feel that, had this weighty relationship been developed in richer detail and been more present throughout the experience, it would have taken the story from good to excellent.

Wow. What a journey. The Incredibly Mild Misadventures of Tom Trundle is witty and crude, sage and sophomoric, beautifully authentic and laughably schlocky, all rolled into one epic deluge of mystery, passion, and adolescent angst that absolutely oozes old-school cool.

This is a story about adolescence, and every aspect of the game sells that fact. You have to literally navigate a byzantine, absurd educational institution for arbitrary reasons decreed by an antagonistic adult. Your character is continually preoccupied with carnal thirst at times both appropriate and not (but mostly not), finding sources of arousal in pretty much any interaction with the opposite sex, of which there are plenty. There are at least three different pizzas in the game, each of which serves a crucial mechanical purpose. Everything sucks, but your street-smarts and disregard for the rules are exactly what you need to navigate this sucky world and accomplish some good deeds - fulfilling the hackneyed destiny of the male savior and winning the gratitude of a bunch of young women in distress. Obviously. It’s brilliant at times; it’s bizarre at times; it’s as if the entire fabric of reality in this universe has been warped according to the world-view and desires of an adolescent boy. And that’s definitely entirely deliberate.

Our point-of-view character Tom is at the center of everything here, and his distinctive voice is woven into the whole experience of the game through his endless cynical commentaries and self-absorbed digressions. As a character, he’s compelling in the sense that he feels like an actual, complex human being. Sometimes he’s capable of great sensitivity and insight, showing genuine understanding of the feelings and goals of those around him. Other times, he’s an inconsiderate brat. And as these different aspects of his personality come up during the story, they make sense. He has verisimilitude. I can easily believe that Tom is an actual young man on the verge of adulthood - someone who is mature in some ways and at some times, but who still has a lot to learn.

I was especially amused by the way his deliciously blasé attitude carries over into the game world - for example, through the existence of objects with names like “crappy snack machine” and “uninteresting stuff.”

In terms of implementation, the game is excellent. The parser works smoothly. I encountered no serious bugs nor mechanical struggles. The puzzles are mostly excellent as well - they’re cleverly-designed, with a unique and awesome mix of insight into the real-world applications of miscellaneous things and total disregard for using them as intended. Some are challenging, most are fair and can be solved with a bit of logic once you get into the classic adventure game mindset (i.e. that it’s okay to screw things up and leave a trail of destruction in your wake, taking and levering every possible tool in an inexorable drive toward your goal). But there were a small handful that just threw me for a loop, leading me to resort to the walkthrough only to find that the solution was some arbitrary-seeming action whose utility couldn’t possibly be understood until after having done it - I would have appreciated a more obvious hint, for example, that (Spoiler - click to show)sitting on a certain chair (as opposed to examining or searching) will reveal a hidden item.

Story-wise, I feel that the game is somewhat front-loaded. As I first met some of the other major characters and engaged in a few early puzzles, I was hooked! They, like Tom, were complex and compelling. Interacting with them exposed motivations and emotions that I could believe. The situation that unfolded might have been far-fetched, but the people felt real, and their personalities started to shine through with a slow-simmering richness. I was hungry to interact more with them and learn more about them.

Yet I felt that the climax and epilogue in particular did not fully live up to the strength of those earlier interactions. By this point, the flavor of authentic teenage interpersonal drama had gone out the window in favor of a kind of campy, totally unbelievable depiction of (Spoiler - click to show)the trauma of physical abuse and kidnapping, where several young women who have been captured and imprisoned by a maniac, and who are in immediate danger, just calmly flirt with our intrepid protagonist from their underground prison cells. I’m still not sure whether I want to read this as dark humor or just plain distasteful. Either way, the verisimilitude I’d adored had evaporated.

After this, I’d at least hoped for a strong emotional payoff - an exploration of how the characters ultimately grew and changed as a result of the pivotal events. It materializes… partially. The arc between Allison and her father comes to a satisfying closure. But as for most of the other major NPCs, the epilogue tells us what they go on to do, but it doesn’t show us where they stand on an emotional level. Tom himself seems to come away with a slightly greater sensitivity toward the needs of others (particularly their need for space and boundaries). And that’s awesome. I just wish the ending had hit home a little harder.

The author's postmortem on the Intfiction forum is a fascinating read and it helped me appreciate the game on a new level, as a symbolic piece. Definitely recommend that.

Anyway, Tom Trundle has its flaws and its awkward moments, but I can't deny that it's a hugely memorable experience that left an outsized impression on me. It's not perfect. I'd give it 4.5 stars if I could, but with IFDB's rating system being what it is, guess I'll have to round up.

And just one more thing. It involves a spoiler so huge that I sincerely recommend not clicking on it unless you’ve completed the game for yourself:

(Spoiler - click to show)Why isn’t Darth Vader your father?!

On my first playthrough, this transit nightmare about a confusing commute didn’t impress me too much. With somewhat minimalistic writing, a short playing time, and a bunch of choices that felt like they had no real emotional significance, I felt at first that this was a competently-built game but not a very engaging one.

I was wrong.

Upon completion, the game lists ten possible endings to achieve. I’m glad that I accepted that challenge. Through repeated playthroughs, What the Bus? matures into something greater and more sublime than what it might seem to be on the surface. The labyrinthine web of interconnected bus routes and rail lines in this game meant little to me at first, but they took on a new significance once I’d found a few endings and had to hunt for the ones I still needed. No longer could I blindly click my way to completion - now the game was drawing me into the shoes of the protagonist, as I tried (and often failed) to navigate the insane world to the endings I was trying to get.

Damn! I didn’t realize this interchange took me to the red line again! or Oh crap, I didn’t want to get on that bus. These were the types of things I kept saying to myself as I gleefully embraced the role of clueless commuter more and more. I felt a genuine sense of accomplishment when, after countless times getting lost or winding up in the same dog park again, I finally achieved the last ending by running across a rail line that I didn’t even know existed. Glorious victory, and good fun.

One of the endings is also a nod to a classic piece of Boston lore, which is much appreciated.

This entire review is based on a spoiler that goes straight to the heart of the game, so be warned.

(Spoiler - click to show)Move On is a single chase scene, packed with action and presented with little context. Advancing through it requires the player to press a button at just the right time, determined by watching the movement of a motorcycle at the top of the screen.

I’m ambivalent about this as the core mechanic of the game. On the one hand, it’s super cool and innovative. And the urgency of getting the timing right does an excellent job of conveying a sense of action and danger.

On the other hand, I feel that it doesn’t fully take advantage of the core feature of IF as a medium: namely, a story told through text. Move On does have a good deal of interesting writing, but the thing is, it’s difficult (at least for me) to read it all while also keeping an eye on the motorcycle! I ended up going back to reread it all after completing the game, but by that point, it was no longer joined to the palpable excitement provided by the timing mechanic.

So, Move On showcases a fresh take that has some great strengths but also some drawbacks. I think I’d have gotten more enjoyment out of it if it were easier to read the text while also keeping an eye on the motorcycle, maybe by putting the motorcycle closer to the text or by giving some more conspicuous signal (maybe a sound effect?) when the time is right. But as it is, definitely a fun and interesting game that’s worth seeing for yourself.

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.