Reviews by jcompton
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Filling the brain spaces inbetween, January 5, 2021Amazing Quest is an abject failure of interactive fiction, if the definition of interactive fiction involves consequential choices, puzzle-solving, or mapping.
Amazing Quest is a resounding success of interactive fiction, if the definition of interactive fiction involves provoking the player's own creativity as they extrapolate story and context from a necessarily limited set of input and output. (Which I argue most good IF always does.)
Each game session tells a story. It's random, yes, but in a curated way with strong thematic elements, not bargain-basement GPT-2 word salad.
It's quick-play, suitable for the modern player with thousands of choices a click away.
The support materials are spot-on for the aesthetic and, more importantly, promote the player's own creativity.
Good interactive fiction.
Bad game.
Noble intentions, total miss on execution, August 6, 2020This dour slice-of-robot-apocalypse life aims to deliver the tension of a race against death with a narrow high-tech escape. Unfortunately, between some very rough syntax and a surprisingly narrow implementation of the puzzle, it falls well short of its aims.
I would have given a two-star review, squinting through the significant non-native English issues which cloud the story, if I had not needed to decompile the game in order to detect the necessary commands (Spoiler - click to show)throw fish at portal and (Spoiler - click to show)throw figure at portal. I knew what the game wanted me to do, but several other combinations of manipulating the direct and indirect objects together failed. It's also a very old-school conceit to force the player to jump through hoops before taking the obvious only escape route available. Our character is convinced (rightly so) that the fog is death. The machine offers some sort of chance. Why would we need to be convinced of its safety? Why would we need to go through that exercise twice?
Equally troubling is the fact that this single puzzle in two parts is not given much weight in prose and imagery. I should be getting just as much out of examining the figure as I do in (Spoiler - click to show)throwing it, but instead that action is given just a quick emotional name-check and is otherwise very mechanical.
These linear speed-shorts tend to succeed best when they parcel out roughly equal amounts of weighty narrative at each step: starting the game, discovering the problem, getting the tools together to solve the puzzle, solving the puzzle, executing the final move. Teaching her to dance instead splits almost all its story between the intro screen and "The End", and makes it unnecessarily difficult to bridge that gap.
(found while exploring un-reviewed games)
Saved mostly by the voice talent, July 25, 2020This game is a mess. And it was always a mess. It was an awkward and ill-fitting blend of real-time first-person navigation and parser interaction. We'd known since Sierra abandoned AGI that real-time exploration and parsers make poor companions, and Façade's parser wasn't even very good. It had an artificially tiny length limit, a weirdly ugly font more closely associated with dubiously marked and curious-smelling overseas shipping cartons than with the paperdoll aesthetic of the game, and did not deliver the heavily hyped conversational experience. (Notably, the keywording was so broad that it's infamously possible to auto-lose the game with a single innocuous noun.)
The replayability and emotional exploration are supposed to be the point, but the designers stuck us with an unlikable and unsympathetic pair. Why bother when the most satisfying emotional resolution is to simply not go through that depressing apartment door?
Not all milestones represent happy stops on a journey, so this game can be regarded as a milestone without actually recommending it. Where it shines is with the top-notch voicework of the principal players and a nod to the game engine which does a good job stitching together player names and spoken passages on demand. It's such a rich vein of material that a quirky musician has been able to stitch together five (and counting!) full-length dance albums featuring Grace (and to a lesser extent Trip, usually as the target of her musical rants.)
I'd recommend a (NSFW) listen to any of "Grace's" bootleg dance albums (especially the first three) above any struggle to get Façade running on a modern system.
They also serve who only stand and wait to kick, July 25, 2020You are kicker. You kick ball.
It's as though the old Saturday Night Live song about foreign placekickers who seemed like out-of-place afterthoughts was given a wry twist.
It's an outsider-in-a-crowded-room tale. This outsider belongs with the group, but (as portrayed) only barely. An at-first reasonably convincing simulation of a standard American Football contest (complete with authentic scoreboard in the status line) plays out while you wait to do something useful. Your job description is minimal, because your specialty focuses on kickoffs, extra point tries, and field goal attempts.
This game is too thoroughly implemented to dismiss as just another waiting simulator. You can focus your attention on different participants in the game (all of which have a variety of ways to disdain you, aside from the special teams coach who parodies the new-age gurus who were once in vogue at that position), stay limber, chug Gatorade, or just watch the Jumbotron and scoreboard.
We may not know precisely when or where this game is taking place (the presence of a Jumbotron puts it well past the leather-helmet era, at least, but the presence of fullbacks on the field suggests it may not be modern day) but we do know that our coaching staff is not especially good at their jobs, having called three straight runs on first down after a punt return up just 3-0 in the third quarter, and not immediately firing the punt returner whose return "dancing for extra yards" still only got him to his own three yard line. Good thing the opposition is just as badly coached, punting the ball away still down by three with no timeouts remaining in the final two minutes of the game!
The game's play-by-play and scoring are not predetermined, although three-and-outs seem much more common than scoring drives. On my playthrough, my 41-yard field goal was, in fact, the only scoring on the day. The game-ending banner tersely noted the team's victory, but not my unique and indispensible contribution to that outcome. A suitable ending to a game in which there was plenty to watch and plenty of people to (try to) talk to, but not much to learn except that sometimes work is narrow and thankless.
The (Hack) Actor's Nightmare, July 15, 2020It's a wonder IF writers haven't leaned harder into overt soap opera presentation. The stock verbs are so over-the-top and tailor-made, what with all the KISSing and THROWing and KILLing we reflexively do. In this slice of daytime drama / wry workplace comedy, no one in particular is at the controls. Although you are seemingly the least-qualified performer to sort out the issues, only you have the motivation to walk about the set and try to string together the scenes between the commercial breaks. And, of course, you have a secret weapon that lets you weave plot threads twice as fast...
I enjoyed Craverly Heights more than a C-grade. Tight writing, paths to multiple endings feel natural and build the character/actor relationships well. The game is mostly well implemented, although the lurking stack overflow bug is funny in its way.
But I do feel cheated that we never got a scene with more than two characters, never got a solid soapy slap (to receive or give--indeed, SLAP is unimplemented and HIT gives the stdlib response!) and never got a payoff (beyond head canon) for the Pauline(Spoiler - click to show) / Janine conflation.
Two nations, divided by a common language, July 10, 2020Bored of the Rings developers Delta 4 followed up their cult hit with The Big Sleaze, a sendup of hardboiled detective novels in the tradition of Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. Rather than just being an extended gag, however, the game does a good job at actually being a game. Its puzzles are mostly reasonable, and the adventure is long and meaty enough to reward a playthrough.
This game is entirely fine. It manages to squeeze far more plot and narrative into the constraints of the typical tape-loaded 8-bit game by dividing into three parts with reasonable breakpoints.
But it's remembered more fondly in its native country for the same reason it may immediately break the player's immersion: it tries to walk the line between "American potboiler novel" and "British vocabulary" and, at least on the west side of the Atlantic, very quickly shows the seams. It's the digital embodiment of John Cleese's growly American accent: it's obvious what he's doing, but it's also obvious why it's not quite right.
If you're unbothered by "cheque/check" and "kerb/curb" issues in your potboiler tales, you'll find a heavy supply of tongues in cheeks, very tight inventory limits and some guess-the-verb problems with good-for-their-constraints graphics.
A version of this review originally appeared in The Spectrum Games Bible Vol. 3.
Neither this game nor the game it roasts (Malinche's Endgame) are readily available today. So it is a hidden memorial to a specific strain of designer-on-designer criticism extinguished a while ago.
What it does have is a consistent voice that finds every opportunity to portray the protagonist as a powerful, sweaty, and sweatily powerful man, with a side dish of awkward exit descriptions. There is no real goal or end. There are plenty of rooms to visit that repeat the same jokes about naval stereotypes, shareware-preview marketing, and acts of personal violence.
The meta-puzzle for today's player is deciding if the quest to find the story file is worth the reward. It made me blurt-laugh several times, which doesn't make it a good game or art, but does give it the rank of Weirdly Amusing Artifact.
Grading on a curve, July 1, 2020It's a generous two star review for this easily forgotten, heavily flawed treasure hunt. It commits a lot of the usual sins of this period of text/graphics games: disk swapping, difficult mapping (including the old "you're looking in a different direction" gag), opaque puzzles poorly clued by blurry/chunky/unclear graphics, and lots of things which are very unfair. But there's a weird style to the game and some clever lateral thinking puzzles which, in the hands of better designers, could and would (and probably have) gone down a lot better. Difficult to justify tackling in earnest, but worth exploring with a ready dose of nearby hints.
A laboratory of sci-fi endings, June 30, 2020This is a trope-heavy choicer which feels most like an exercise in writing a range of standard-issue conclusions to a stock "isolated farmer alien abduction" scenario. It does have distinct voice and style, occasionally marred by imperfections in formatting and language.
Your first choice is to be either Roger or Ellie. Although both are described (before the choice, that is) as loner, isolated Wyoming cattle farmers, "alone so often these days that sometimes you have to remind yourself of your own name", the choice quickly has more than a cosmetic impact. Roger is terse, gruff, and wholly go-it-alone. Ellie at least is on a first-name basis with a barn cat named Milo and has the option of calling a veterinarian for assistance. And the circumstances that spark their alien encounter relate to their herds but are very different challenges.
The two character branches have multiple distinct limbs with a relatively small number of choices. The situations and the outcomes are strictly mainstream/pulp sci-fi writing.
Where the game distinguishes itself is in the different voice given to the two characters. Not simply Roger's point of view but his plotlines tend to be rougher, more direct, more abrupt, and less florid than Ellie's. Her tales frequently have longer, more elaborate prose even for some of the less-than-ideal outcomes. (Arguably Roger's overall "happiest" ending is probably the most abrupt non-death ending, (Spoiler - click to show)when his indefinite alien confinement is relieved by the arrival of his half-alien son.)
Indeed, the characters seem to get generally better outcomes when they make different types of choices, (Spoiler - click to show)Roger doing best when he plays a confident, strong, but not-reckless brand of masculinity, Ellie doing best when she demonstrates compassion and patience.
The storylines of Stars Above are easily digested because chances are you already know them on some level. But it's a fun diversion.
Cute (if shallow) premise, no meaningful interactivity or story, June 30, 2020It is the bleak allegorical near future. Downtrodden everypeople must sell the only thing they have of value--IP addresses--to moneyed interests, in order to support their vices.
That's a story that could go somewhere! And the format initially suggests that it will, telling you that you have three addresses to sell. However, nothing that qualifies as a "game" actually seems to have been implemented. There is only one path to an abrupt end, and you can see all of the content in a brisk 90 seconds.
The post-game "synopsis" and "extra notes" reveal the author's broader and bolder ambitions (one plot point is labeled (METAPHOR FOR MYSELF, THE AUTHOR)) but something apparently went awry before the decision to publish was made.
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