Ratings and Reviews by Joey Acrimonious

If you've read as far as the game's title, you probably have a good idea of what its shtick is. Everything is AAAAAAAAAA. Great minds will no doubt disagree over whether this is a good premise for a game. I, for one, find it hilarious.

That said, I also feel that the humor is severely weakened by a lack of commitment to the central gag. While the game's objects are all AAA-ified, its verbs are not! This leads to disappointingly non-AAAAA situations, such as having to, for example, (Spoiler - click to show)"examine AAAA" rather than "AAAAAAA AAAA" because the latter is not recognized. There are also a variety of default failure responses that have not been translated into AAAAAAAAA.

With a grand total of one room and two important objects, A AAAAA AAAAAAAAA ought to have carefully crafted what minimal content it has. Instead, by neglecting the details, it ends up not taking its own gag seriously enough to really sell it.

There's a lot to like in Savor: rich, evocative (if a bit florid) prose; a pleasing visual design including well-chosen graphics to lend weight to the atmosphere; a compellingly mysterious setup that then delves into slow-burning horror.

But while I appreciate all of those things on an intellectual level, I found it a struggle to actually enjoy any of the game's strengths. Actually, that's an understatement - after all, some games aren't meant to be enjoyed as such, and that's just fine. But playing Savor is straight-up frustrating thanks to two design choices which combine to create a punishingly unpleasant experience.

First, the structure of the game encourages several replays. While the narrative stakes are high - (Spoiler - click to show)you're trying to help a pair of chronically-ill, suicidal characters - many of the choices you make along the way are rather mundane. Do you perform this chore or that chore? Do you wander over here or over there? Incongruously, these mundane choices have outsized import to the plot, determining whether or not you find the items you need to progress. And there's little hope of determining the right choices apart from hindsight, since, after all, many of them are mundane things with no obvious gravity. Thus, in order to reach a decent ending, it's likely you'll need to replay the game with the benefit of knowledge from at least one failed playthrough. This, by itself, is in my view a minor detriment. I'd rather a game not rely on this kind of recursion to inflate its challenge/complexity unless there's a specific narrative reason why it makes sense, in-universe, to be replaying (e.g. there are stories about time travel that make sensible use of this device). But it's not a huge deal and I could overlook it...

...Except for the second thing. The game is chock full of timed text that can't be skipped. Mercifully, it's fairly quick. It wouldn't have been terrible if this was a one-playthrough game.

But put these two design choices together, and you have a game which forces its player to spend a whole lot of frustrating time just passively waiting for the game to scroll through stuff that the player has already seen once, twice, or thrice.

The author definitely has a vision worth seeing. But making it so taxing to actually explore that vision was, I think, a misstep.

Imagine, if you will, a truly excellent sex comedy - one which perfectly balances uproarious humor with genuine eroticism.

Now stop imagining, because here it is. Sex on the Beach absolutely nails its genre.

The humor is deep and varied, ranging from dry wit to raunchy farce; from clever metatextuality to lurid depictions of cartoonish dudebro shenanigans. The gags are unrelenting from start to finish. I found that it contained exactly the right about of Dungeons and Dragons references, although I would have preferred to hear a little more about Layla's Vampire: The Masquerade campaign. But I digress.

The sex is also deep and varied. The game's primary XXX-scene is the culmination of something that is done extremely well throughout the entire piece: providing the player with meaningful choices. Even though the game never branches too far off the central path, there are so many choices that allow the player to flesh out the protagonist as you see fit, and it's fascinating to see his personality materialize according to your choices. Do you want to play a bold charmer? An insensitive buffoon? A sweet nerd who is secretly an amazing dancer? Or just a straight-up horndog? All of these and many more combinations are within your grasp.

Equally fascinating is seeing how Layla (she's - well, let's not beat around the bush, she's the person with whom you have sex on the beach) reacts to the protagonist's choices. While it seems predetermined that she's down for a fling, the actual dynamic between her and the protagonist changes noticeably depending on how you choose to play, and it lends a valuable spark of verisimilitude to the often-outrageous yarn. She's also full of exactly the right kind of clever banter to humanize her as a character while maintaining a sense of levity in the proceedings.

If you're in the market for AIF, do yourself a favor and give this one a try.

The meta is strong with this one. It's a parody of Pick Up the Phone Booth and Dye, which is itself a parody of Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die, and you'll want to play both of those games first in order to fully appreciate Pick up the phone booth and Cry.

Compared to the rest of the PUTPBAD corpus, this game has two salient features. First, it gleefully embraces and even intensifies the cruel, mocking sense of humor that the original established. Second, it's riddled with typos and grammatical errors.

Whereas the original PUTPBAD explored the antagonistic relationship between the protagonist and the phone booth, this game follows in the footsteps of Dye by rather focusing on the internal struggle of the protagonist. It's a case of player vs. self, as you seek to win the game in spite of your own limitations. But whereas in Dye this struggle is eminently practical in nature - you (Spoiler - click to show)can only lift one thing at a time and need to find a way around this - in Cry what we get is a protagonist who struggles against their own mental and emotional weaknesses as they try in desperation to solve a seemingly insurmountable puzzle. The protagonist is portrayed as pitiful and pathetic... for laughs.

Perhaps, in a game with better writing, I could have found the humor in this. But when combined with all the typos and poor grammar, it just comes off as crude.

The original, venerable Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die has inspired quite a few parodies. Among them, Pick Up the Phone Booth and Dye is notable for the cleverness of its premise, but its execution is not all that it could be.

The premise is a winner: taking a game that was already a joke, and adding a new layer of humor by reinventing it around a pun. The implementation surpasses that of the original, in that most of what is described can actually be interacted with in several sensible ways, although it still leaves much to be desired (e.g. the protagonist has a default description, the dye's odor is not described, etc.).

But I feel that this game doesn't have all the heart of the original. Players of Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die will recall that it evoked a world with a certain personality. Perhaps a thin and Nyquil-soaked personality, but a personality nonetheless. The small New England town's once-proud, graffiti-covered phone booth, stubbornly resisting the player despite its best days clearly being behind it, made for a compelling antagonist. But Pick Up the Phone Booth and Dye, unfortunately, does not share this level of characterization. Here, we are presented with a bland, ordinary phone booth in an utterly unremarkable location. In the original, we were given an adversarial relationship between the protagonist and the booth; here, we are given basically no insight into the protagonist's motives.

For these reasons, I feel that this game suffers from a palpable lack of emotional gravity. It didn't resonate with me in spite of its clever premise.

This is an artful piece: the disciplined minimalism of Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die, combined with the rich implementation of Aisle.

The authors of PUTPBAA have, through their concerted effort, realized what was missing in PUTPBAD. With dozens upon dozens of recognized verbs, each yielding a different ending, what we have here is not extensive but rather extremely intensive. Almost any action your imagination might dream up is accounted for in some way.

As a parody of the original PUTPBAD, it works brilliantly. As a game unto itself, it works brilliantly. Perhaps my only complaint is that it does not aspire to the emotional depth of Aisle, but as far as lighthearted comedies go, Pick Up The Phone Booth And Aisle is a shining example of a joke that goes all-out.

With this demo, the basic premise of Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die is recast in a slightly more expansive world. But is that a step forward? On the contrary, in this case, I would argue that it's a step backward.

While the larger scope of Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die 2 opens the floor to a mix of interesting jokes, puns, and puzzles, it sacrifices the beautifully minimalistic design that made the franchise distinctive in the first place. And while the original was disciplined enough to hew tightly to its severely limited world-model, this sequel plays fast and loose, introducing a number of incomplete locations and puzzles. Granted, this is a demo we're dealing with, but even so: isn't it good practice to limit a demo to a more-or-less complete segment of a game, rather than allowing players to see all the bare scaffolding of things yet-to-be-written?

On top of that, one of the key weaknesses of the original - a lack of comprehensive implementation - persists in the sequel, now with even more things mentioned but not implemented as objects.

While Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die 2 is amusing at times, it lacks the singular vision that made the original so memorable.

This is certainly a minimalistic work, but the title actually undersells it. In a clever twist, picking up the phone booth and dying is only half of what Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die has to offer. Uncovering the other half is the real challenge here.

There are a lot of things I like about this game. It's efficient, in that it manages to pack a lot of punch into an extremely small package - with only two potential actions of consequence, only one of which can be executed in a single playthrough. The metatextual aspect, using the game's title to give crucial information even before play begins, is a neat trick as well.

But it has to be said that the game is woefully under-implemented. There are quite a few things that are described in the text but not implemented as objects: the town, the square, the smiley face. There are also quite a few default failure responses to actions that really ought to have been given more attention. I was disappointed, for example, that smelling or touching the phone booth yields only Inform's default message. With a world this small, it would have been relatively easy to really focus on the details, but unfortunately they haven't received so much care.

At the core of this game is a pretty good joke. But I feel that the best jokes are those which go all-out. Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die, unfortunately, does not.

So, first of all, the cursor is a sauropod. Possibly a brachiosaurus? This fact alone is worth a star.

Quintessence brings a nice combination of physics and whimsy. It asks the player to think a bit about the nature of such lofty subjects as cosmology, consciousness, and agency; but it does so in the context of a lighthearted, cat-centric reality. Definitely an imaginative piece.

Apart from aforementioned sauropod, the graphic elements include pleasant images of the cosmos. What's less pleasant, however, is the fact that the text tends to fade into the busy backgrounds. Even with black outlining, I found that the text was often a strain to read.

The most intriguing thing here, in my view, is the idea of embodying the universe, its rules, and its destiny in conscious entities: the cat and the particle (and its permutations). This allows Quintessence to inject an element of pathos into what would otherwise be cold, impersonal aspects of reality. Neat. But I feel that it didn't run as far with this idea as it could have, and a deeper dive into the psychological and (for lack of a better word) interpersonal aspects of the characters' existence would have made this game into a more compelling mythology.

Right from the outset, The Call of Innsmouth builds itself upon a strong aesthetic foundation. The style of the prose and the parlance of the characters just screams “pulpy noir set in the 1920s.” This, combined with a darkly atmospheric visual presentation, makes for a game that oozes an instantly-recognizeable flavor. About 15 seconds in, I was absolutely hyped to go gumshoeing across Lovecraft Country, slowly uncovering unsettling hints of more sinister happenings behind a seemingly-mundane missing person case.

Except… that’s not quite how it goes.

Generally, I reckon that preserving a sense of mystery throughout the bulk of the story is crucial to the appeal of a piece of detective fiction. Ditto for a played-straight Lovecraftian work. But The Call of Innsmouth goes in the other direction, laying out quite a bit of blunt exposition early-on, so that the entire mystery is explained fairly clearly, even well before the climax. And I do mean explained - in most cases, you as the player aren’t making deductions or trying to weigh evidence to figure out what’s going on. Nor is there much room for ambiguity. You just get told everything directly, either by other characters who are happy to volunteer everything they know in a few major info-dumps, or by the internal monologue of a protagonist who can sometimes be exceptionally quick at jumping to conclusions.

This, I think, is a detriment to an otherwise well-written story. I would have preferred the underlying horrors to be revealed more slowly and gradually, with more opportunities for the player to apply their own logic to the course of the investigation.

That aside, I did enjoy many of the more action-oriented scenes in the latter half of the game. Many of the choices at that point are hazardous, with plenty of opportunities for insta-death, but they didn’t feel arbitrary. On the contrary, these choices reward the player for paying attention to the current situation and applying a bit of logic or intuition to it - for example, realizing that you need to take a hostage because you are unlikely to defeat/outrun your foes otherwise. That’s great. But why aren’t there more opportunities for the player to use their brain like this in the earlier, more investigative sequences of the game? As it is, there are very few points during the investigative phase where the player’s choices matter at all.

Overall, strong writing, has the right vibe, but could have done a better job at making me feel like a detective.