Reviews by Joey Acrimonious
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The grit is palpable., January 25, 2022Noir drips from every pore of our hero, Tits Magee. She inhabits a world of pure style where sprezzatura is the only virtue - a gritty, hard-boiled world that can no longer muster the energy for frivolities like logic and capital letters, having long since poured every ounce of itself into digressions and metaphors as incomprehensible and distended as the ingredient list of a cheap hard soda.
As a comedy, it works. As a game, it follows the classic model of: here's a bunch of choices with little to no indication as to what you should pick, now pick the right one every time or you lose rapidly. Some would call that a true-to-life style of game design. In other words, not good. But I can't say that I minded that much, because the writing was such a pleasure to read, and the game is short enough that restarting is no grave inconvenience.
Totally worth the 5 minutes it takes to play it.
Painful to play, April 4, 2021I don't claim to be an expert on game design. But from what I've gathered, I believe most creators and critics of IF adhere to some version of this principle: that a well-designed game is one that is easily accessible to the player. Such a game may pose challenges, maybe even very difficult ones, through puzzles and the like. But the basic processes of interacting with the game, and getting information about what's going on and what's expected of the player, should be as easy and painless as possible. Thus the player may jump right into solving the fun puzzles while hopefully avoiding any unfun inconveniences.
There are probably many works which violate this principle, to varying degrees, unintentionally. But The Algophilists' Penury is on an entirely different level. This is a case study in what it means to purposefully shatter that principle.
Viewed through the lens of traditional parser game design, this is a very simple piece. It has a very small handful of rooms and objects. The central puzzle is extremely basic and can be completed in a matter of seconds, with little in the way of exploration or problem-solving, if one understands what is going on.
Key phrase: if one understands what is going on. If you've read the blurb ((Spoiler - click to show)"We were the Algophilists, obdurate in our longueur and waiting for our quietus in the tenebrous of our morbific abode; join us."), then you've read what is probably the most straightforward and easy-to-understand writing that Penury has to offer. All but the greatest scholars of obscure English verbiage will be faced with a vicious choice. Either play the game not really comprehending what it says, or play it with frequent recourse to a dictionary.
By the standards of the principle mentioned above, this is very bad. But let us note that Penury does not make its departure from the norms of game design merely for the sake of rocking the boat. It is a game wholly about pain, in which the player character is a masochist. Considering that context, I find some brilliance in how the game presents itself. Not content just to describe the experience of the player character, it seeks to evoke a similar experience in the actual player, too.
When it puts its confoundingly purple prose on display, it is inviting one to punish oneself by continuing to read such inscrutable and, perhaps, infuriating language. I find this a fascinating device, and it gives me much food for thought - calling attention to the idea that, substance aside, the style and composition of prose can serve huge purposes of their own in conveying what a game designer wishes to convey.
Brutal yet thoughtful thriller, March 16, 2021A Calling of Dogs is, at its heart, a character-focused work. Solving the problem of survival is a large part of the experience, but what makes it truly distinctive is the extent to which one gets to know the protagonist along the way.
The prose is highly effective: punchy, dripping with tension, and revealing much through a mix of subtle and not-so-subtle details. The surface-level stuff is told directly, but much deeper characterization is revealed through other means, shown rather than told. Subtle tonal shifts; the nature of the options presented to the player; the choice of things which the protagonist notices or remarks upon in their internal monologue - all of these devices are used to craft a rich sense of who they are.
I feel that the game achieves an excellent balance between acknowledging the protagonist's present victimhood, and the constraints it entails, while also acknowledging their agency and their broader identity. (Spoiler - click to show)They, the protagonist, are capable of exceptionally cold logic in spite of their hidden rage. They are capable of exceptional deception and manipulation, weaponizing their own sense of empathy for those purposes, in a calculated yet desperate drive for survival. This isn't who they normally are, and indeed, they do a complete emotional 180 and have a breakdown as soon as safety gives them the luxury of doing so. It is clear that the circumstances of their confinement forced them into an extraordinary headspace. Even so, their reaction to these circumstances speaks to who they are more generally. One gets the sense that they draw upon skills and attitudes learned over a life that has often been punishing. This should probably go without saying after everything I just wrote, but I feel that the protagonist is a complex, well-realized character with the ring of verisimilitude, and this is something I appreciate greatly.
I encountered some technical issues: occasional typos and a continuity error (Spoiler - click to show)where the antagonist looks at himself after the protagonist has already destroyed his eyeballs, but I felt that they just barely detracted from an otherwise deeply gripping, emotionally-charged experience.
*Edit a few hours later. Now that I've thought about it some more, I think there is a strong symbolic component to this piece as well. (Spoiler - click to show)Consider that the protagonist, according to a flashback, is implied to be someone who was assigned female at birth but who does not identify as a woman (that's why I've been saying "they" all this time - for lack of a better term since their actual gender identity/preferred pronoun was never clearly revealed in my playthroughs). And then consider that, according to the protagonist's observations, the antagonist's previous victims (i.e. the previous occupants of the cage in which the protagonist is trapped) have been women. Some of the language also seems to imply that the antagonist perceives the protagonist as a woman, i.e. he does not know about their gender identity. It's fair to say that the protagonist is fighting to escape from a cage, and a fate, to which womanhood is attached in some sense. This can easily be read as a metaphor for, or a parallel to, a struggle against the confines of gender norms.
Bitter screed, March 16, 2021OK Boomer: The Game is quite simply an expression of anger. Perhaps it could be called an expression of righteous anger if we're being generous. I have no doubt that there was a point to writing it - the author clearly sought, and hopefully got, some catharsis out of the deal. But is there a point to reading it? Well...
The game employs humor to comment on social issues, but the humor is relentlessly mean-spirited, and the message is handled flippantly enough that it mostly feels like it boils down to "I am angry at people who are like this." You're cast in the role of a straw man, the incarnation of every negative "boomer" stereotype you can think of, and then spend the entire game being a rich pig-headed jerk (because that's all the game allows you to be). Well, actually, that's all contingent upon you playing as a straight white cisman. You have the option to play very briefly as a gay black woman, in which case the game proceeds somewhere along these lines (to paraphrase only a little bit): "Your life sucks and then you die. Now I will punish you by making you play as a straight white cisman." See what I meant when I said the humor is mean-spirited?
The phrase "straw man" keeps popping back into my head because it not only describes the main protagonist - it feels like a concept that is at the very heart of the game's ethos. This is not a nuanced take; this is us-versus-them ad absurdum.
So, if you think it might be amusing to spend a few minutes hating on the rhetorical construct of an evil boomer, enemy of all young and progressive thinkers and aren't bothered by the possibility that it might alienate actual people who don't fit the stereotype, maybe you'll get something out of this. Personally, I did not find much value in playing OK Boomer. There's not a lot of depth and there's not a lot of levity either. It's just an expression of someone's anger, directed at a certain group of people, all the way through.
Gets its point across, at a cost, March 11, 2021I have mixed feelings about Killing Me Softly.
In this game (well, "interactive narrative experience" might be a better classification, but that's a mouthful), the player steps into the shoes of a member of one or more marginalized groups, and is made to endure a slew of casual yet hurtful comments from coworkers and strangers in a string of vignettes.
The goal here is very clearly educational: to make the player understand the hurtfulness of these comments and empathize with those who experience them.
This is a wonderful goal and I believe the game is very successful in it. The comments are believable - although many of them come off more as overt insults than microaggressions, but that's just as well. One can easily see how frustrating and disheartening it is/would be to be subjected to this kind of BS on a regular basis.
I think one of the greatest challenges for a game of this type, which seeks not merely to explore a social issue but to educate people about it, is to make its point such that it will sway a player who is not already in complete agreement with whatever it seeks to teach. And I feel like, at least with regard to its most central message, Killing Me Softly clears this hurdle better than most. It's difficult to imagine anyone playing this game and failing to appreciate the hurtfulness of the comments. So, point made - good job.
But then, on the other hand...
The player characters are not fleshed-out or multifaceted (unless you count "belonging to multiple demographic categories" as multifaceted), and we never get to know them very intimately as individuals. They're stand-ins for the marginalized groups they belong to, basically. This by itself is fair enough given the goal of the game, although I do feel that it could have had even more gravity, and delivered a more compelling narrative experience, otherwise.
The NPCs are nothing more than cardboard cutouts, most of whom exist for the sole purpose of showing up, dropping a hurtful comment, and leaving. Sometimes the game tells us the context - for example, mentioning briefly that the person making the comment is a buddy from work - but never does it show us the context by building up to it within any kind of normal ongoing interaction. Again - this by itself is not a huge flaw given the goal of the game, but it does signal the limited scope of the experience. We're focused on one thing, here, not a holistic narrative.
After an initial introduction, every single scene is a short, tightly-focused vignette in which one of two things happens. Either the protagonist is the victim of a microaggression/insult, or they're upset in the aftermath of a microaggression/insult. That's it. That, happening again and again, is the entirety of this experience. I do see why the game presents itself in this way: it's staying true to its main goal. And yet I feel that there is something missing. Hypothetically, these characters lead complex lives, but we see them only when they are hurting, only in their vulnerable moments.
And then there's the choice system. You, as a player, have just a little bit of choice in how to respond to the microaggressions/insults. Usually you can ignore them. Often you can confront them (and typically get ignored), sometimes with a choice between being more or less direct, although we get the sense that both player characters are very uncomfortable with direct confrontation (and very fairly so). But in many cases, options are listed but unavailable, indicating that the player character is incapable of reacting in a certain way due to emotional exhaustion - for example, as best as I can tell after a few tries, the player character will always be emotionally incapable of (Spoiler - click to show)telling HR that their coworkers wore blackface at a party. Again, this by itself makes sense and fits the goal of the game. You can't expect someone to endure mistreatment again and again and always remain up to the task of confronting it in whatever way the player might want to, and this feature of limited choice serves to call attention to the emotional toll that the player characters suffer over the course of the story.
But when I take all of these things together - the vaguely-developed characters, the constant victimhood, and the limited choice - I just can't say that it feels entirely right. To the game's credit, there was (in my playthroughs) one short scene where a player character achieves a major success - (Spoiler - click to show)winning a promotion, albeit with some snide remarks on the side. But with that sole exception, everything relentlessly drives home the implicit message that marginalized people are victims first and foremost. It does not show us their lives apart from that. The characters exist not for their own sake, but only for the sake of demonstrating something to the player. The game makes instruments of them, and that does not sit right with me.
There is important representation going on in Killing Me Softly. But overwhelmingly, it is not positive or affirmative representation, and for that reason, I feel that the game - while successful in a very major regard - could have done better.
The Meh Alien Dating Sim, March 9, 2021In The HUND, you play as some dude who interacts with a bunch of humanoid alien women aboard a spaceship, most of whom seem to be available for a relationship with the protagonist.
It should go without saying that this is a wonderful concept for a game.
In terms of execution, however, The HUND has much room for improvement. Generally, the key feature I'd want in a dating sim is for the characters to be portrayed as interesting and compelling. But here is a very brief experience, and even a masterful writer would struggle to craft interesting characters within the scope of such a small game.
Compounding the problem, most of the dialogue is very rote, and I feel that a disproportionate amount of the content is just describing the minutiae of each character's appearance. The player is told everything there is to know about the shape of a character's eyes, the style of their hair, and the peculiar hue of their skin. But one would have to look very closely to find even the slightest bit of personality to distinguish one character from the next - I only got about as far as recognizing that some of them seem more energetic than others.
There are some good ideas in here. I do quite like the use of (Spoiler - click to show)the farm as a metaphor for the generational cycle of life, for example. But the characters' utter lack of distinctive personality just prevents this from being any kind of success as a dating sim in its current state.
Works on Several Levels, March 9, 2021Sit and watch helplessly, in horror and/or amusement, as a baby pilots a combat mech, sowing mayhem and carnage.
I find the sheer extravagance of this premise to be hilarious, and GUNBABY delivers it with confidence and sass. But beyond that, the game works on an additional level (spoilered as this basically details the entire plot of the game, short and simple as it is):
(Spoiler - click to show)Perhaps the cleverest conceit of GUNBABY - which elevates it beyond merely being the violent romp that it most certainly is - is that the baby is a police officer. The fact that Officer Giggles patrols the mean streets in a heavily-armed death machine is no accident, but rather the result of a logistical dilemma: in order to equip their combat mech with a more powerful propulsion mechanism, the police department needed to free up space by finding a smaller pilot. Thus, the game can be read as a commentary on militarized law enforcement, or perhaps more broadly on the use and delegation of power within hierarchical organizations. When some people are empowered to use force against others, what's to stop an undisciplined/unqualified/malicious actor from abusing that power? GUNBABY calls attention to this concern by taking it to its logical extreme, vesting a farcical amount of deadly power in arguably the worst possible candidate.
I enjoyed the visual presentation. As for the game design, it's unclear to me how much of an effect the player's choices actually have. In some cases, the gunbaby seems to follow the player's instructions, but I'm not entirely convinced that this is anything more than coincidence - perhaps the gunbaby's actions are completely random. Until and unless someone figures out a pattern or method that eludes me, the player is effectively a helpless observer. This won't satisfy all comers, but I feel that it does contribute effectively to the sense of complete FUBAR-ness that GUNBABY cultivates.
AA Out of AAAAA, December 16, 2020If 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.
Infernal Timed Text, December 16, 2020There'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.
Witty, Thoughtfully-Designed Smut, December 14, 2020Imagine, 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.
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