Reviews by AKheon

Codename Obscura is a parser-based IF made by Mika Kujala, published during IFComp 2023. In this story, you are a secret agent in Italy on a mission to gather intelligence and possibly unravel a clandestine scheme or two.

The game has been made on Adventuron and is intentionally very retro in style. It's basically an old-school, puzzle-heavy adventure game with a fairly limited parser as well as some lovingly crafted low-res graphics which help set the atmosphere. You can have shrill PC speaker sound effects, too, if you enable them from the menu.

This title lacks many of the niceties of modern parser-based games, which raises its difficulty on occasion. The parser error messages are generic to the point of being unhelpful. The game is a bit inconsistent on verb usage - sometimes "use" works, sometimes it doesn't. There aren't many synonyms for common verbs either. You can't examine portable items before picking them up, which often leads to some redundant typing. There are a lot of contextual actions too, which only do what you'd expect in some specific room in the game and nowhere else. The puzzle design, likewise, can be a bit obscure in its reasoning, and I had to resort to the walkthrough more than once while playing.

I like the quaint charm of the 80's Italian setting, though. The graphics look nice, and the prose also uses some snippets of Italian to create an impression of visiting a foreign time and place. It's a kind of a pity that the implementation is not very deep and there isn't much to do in the game world besides general exploration and puzzles, but I suppose it makes sense considering the style of gameplay this title is going for.

Overall, Codename Obscura provides puzzles and intrigue for at least an hour or two. Retro puzzlers are not my favorite style of IF, but the game's terse writing and spirited atmosphere managed to leave a positive impression.

The Vambrace of Destiny is a parser-based IF by Arthur DiBianca, published for IFComp 2023. The game is a dungeon crawler with a very streamlined execution. The writing and world building are both fairly minimal, and the normal Inform 7 interface has also been heavily modified to only accept single-button input, which makes the gameplay feel remarkably fast-paced and smooth.

The game is technically very impressive. Once you get used to how the game works, playing it feels like a breeze. Although the limited input scheme is quite unusual, I could see it working for a number of other kind of games on Inform 7 too. There's also a map screen that becomes updated as you keep exploring the game world, which makes moment-to-moment gameplay feel even cleaner.

One drawback of all this streamlining is that it really highlights the old school, essentially fetch quest-like and quite repetitive nature of the adventure itself. There are some fairly intricate puzzles which require you to do things in a certain order, or with certain timing, to mix things up. Still, with the minimal storytelling and minimal interface, I found myself slightly demotivated to continue after a point. I think you might have to love old school dungeon crawling just for the sake of it to get the most out of this title.

One Does Not Simply Fry is a ChoiceScript-game written by Stewart C Baker and James Beamon, published during IFComp 2023. It's a kind of a Lord of the Rings-parody where much of the cast partakes in an onion ring cook-off at the summit of "Mount Boom".

The gameplay is what you'd expect from a fairly well fleshed-out ChoiceScript-game. There's a character selection, some stats, achievements, a lot of branching story text and multiple different endings. It's simple to get into but has a lot of potential for replayability as well.

I remember reading and enjoying Bored of the Rings back in the day, and I think that the comedic execution in One Does Not Simply Fry goes to a somewhat similar direction. The prose is a hurricane of absurd puns and parodic references from the start to the end, down to silly character names like "Sour Ron". It doesn't take itself very seriously, and some of the humor is a bit hit-or-miss, but there are so many jokes here that at least some are bound to land... right?

The tone of the story is also quite contemporary, starting from the way the whole setup is reminiscent of reality TV in all its overbearing glamour - there's even a Gordon Ramsay-expy acting as one of the judges. The occasionally heavy-handed progressive politics (e.g. race-lifting and/or "queering" the cast) also firmly make this story a product of its era, in both good and bad.

I had the willpower to play through the story 2.5 times. The way the writing prioritizes quantity-over-quality when it comes to jokes eventually becomes a bit tiresome, even though there are some clever comedic payoffs here too, such as (Spoiler - click to show)Leggy Ass' bad ending. I freely admit I probably just didn't get all of the humor here - especially more referential and wordplay-based humor tends to get lost on me.

Overall: a fun premise, fair amount of content, competent execution, arguably a bit one-note. Like any deep-fried delicacy, enjoying too much at once leaves you with a heartburn.

My Brother; the Parasite is a choice-based IF by growscant, published during the IFComp 2023. It's about a complex yet painful sibling relationship between a woman and her deceased brother (Spoiler - click to show)who still lingers in a pseudo-alive state thanks to a strange parasitic disease.

The game has been made on Twine, and it makes extensive use of self-made graphics. The visual style is quite polished, yet it has a certain rawness to it that suits the disturbing tone of the story. As one minor technical fault, it seems Twine can't change images on the screen completely seamlessly, resulting in small "loading times" when scenes and images change. Or could it just be my browser?

This is a very narrative-focused IF without much real interactivity besides clicking links to progress in the story. Timed text adds its own bumpy and unpredictable feeling to the game flow, and hyperlinks are also used in some different ways here and there for variety. Other than that, there isn't much else to talk about the gameplay.

The story itself is highly emotionally charged. The protagonist has to face the reality of her abusive brother's death and make sense of the mixed emotions that are brewing inside her. (Spoiler - click to show)The parasite adds an interesting twist to the storytelling. Although tonally the story is very much about pent-up emotion, like a prolonged, regretful, angry rumination about things the protagonist wishes she could've resolved with her brother while he was alive, in a sense the brother is still around and actually becomes a physical threat in some scenes. In this regard, you could read the story as being a kind of a cross between family drama and zombie fiction, or consider the parasite as a strictly symbolic storytelling device - it seems to work either way.

The writing is quite good in my opinion. The prose is usually compact and restrained, but it has a few more freely flowing and poetic moments when the situation calls for it. The forlorn small town setting is brought to life with some good worldbuilding detail too. It definitely feels like more than just character drama happening inside a vacuum.

Overall, I thought My Brother; The Parasite was memorable, gripping and full of anguish. Although I personally prefer IF with a bit more interactivity, as a story it was worth experiencing.

In the Details is a short choice-based story by M.A. Shannon, published during IFComp 2023. The story is about a vain musician who is about to enter superstardom (Spoiler - click to show)thanks to the power of the Devil, who has inconveniently come to take back what belongs to him.

This is the first time I've played an IF that's been developed on Texture. It has an interface where you drag 'n' drop buttons on top of highlighted text. I found this slightly awkward to do while playing on laptop with a touchpad-mouse, but otherwise, the system seemed pretty easy to use and suitable for this kind of streamlined choice-based gameplay.

The prose is pretty good, creating a sense of locale and character without expending too many words. The story itself is rather brief, though, and I don't feel like it has a lot of meat to it. The game description has both tags "comedy" and "horror", but I found the story neither particularly funny or scary. It has a few graphic moments and a life lesson, and that's pretty much it.

The game description says the estimated playing time is around 30 minutes, but for me it felt shorter, even though I replayed the game and managed to reach 3 or 4 different endings. There was one moment where I wondered if the design was buggy, (Spoiler - click to show)mainly the point where you have to choose between telling a truth or a lie, but being honest does nothing. I couldn't tell for sure if this was supposed to create characterization or if it was simply an unimplemented button, but this could be my unfamiliarity with this system too.

Overall, I found In the Details engaging enough, albeit a little short and light.