Ratings and Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

First things first: when you play this game, turn off the time limit. For me, playing with a real-time counter on the screen turned my interaction with A Death in Hyperspace into an experience that was harrowing in all the wrong ways. And the game really doesn't need it.

With that out of the way, let's get to the review. This game was written by many authors, but it's not particularly large. In fact, each of the authors wrote a single character. This makes sense, because A Death in Hyperspace is a murder mystery in (what at first sight appears to be) a classic vein, and a murder mystery needs a lot characters -- as suspects. There's no good whodunnit without a large number of whos that might have dun it. And so it's your job as the space ship's AI to find out where the characters are, collect two clues about each of them, and then decide which of them to accuse.

Interestingly, there (Spoiler - click to show)doesn't seem to be any truth to be found; or rather, whomever you choose to accuse, it will always be presented as the right person. It feels a little more canonical to decide that the captain died from natural causes, in part because it's asymmetric compared to the other endings, and in part because you only unlock it on your second playthrough. Otherwise, though, anything goes. That's fine. The traditional murder mystery where all is revealed at the end is way too comforting; it's good to shake things up once in a while, and this is a way of shaking things up that requires the medium of interactive fiction, so it's a good fit. More could have been done with the moral implications of the baseless accusations that we indulge in in most endings, but I guess the authors wanted to keep things light-hearted.

Gameplay is not entirely successful. On the one hand, the game wants you to play more than once. On the other, it quickly turns into an exercise in finding two clues per character, accusing them, and collecting another ending for your trophy case.

What is most interesting about the piece is the experience of playing this obviously naive AI whose reading of murder mysteries completely structures the way they see the situation. It’s like Northanger Abbey, except mystery instead of romance. There is something fairly hilarious about the inane questions and accusations that form most of one’s dialogue options. Underneath the somewhat mechanical mystery, there is a poignant little comedy playing out, where the player character is too blinded by grief and excitement to see the plain truth: (Spoiler - click to show)that the captain died of natural causes. That is ultimately the point of the game.

At first, there are strong vibes of howling dogs. It's a Twine game set in a small cell-like environment -- though this time it's a space ship -- where we perform boring daily tasks and kill the time, while the environment seems to be decaying around us, and we experience strange dreams at night. A cookie cutter recreation of the original Twine sensation, then? Well, no, not at all.

The first difference that becomes apparent is the vibe. There's no sense of true alienation here, nor of helplessness, nor of confusion. The protagonist owns this space ship, even if its not much, and they have a measure of control over how they live -- if they can arse themselves to do it, they can tidy things up, grow plants, do some exercises. Basic self-care, sure, but there's a sense of ownership and accomplishment. "I can give you the gift of meaningful labour," is what a character will say to them later on, or words to that effect; and then too it is the mundane things, mixing a salad dressing and helping clean up a kitchen, that anchor life and self.

Basic self-care, and emails. It's a good storytelling device, used often because it works: messages coming to us from outside to paint a fuller picture of the world and our life. There's a father in the background, a friend who would like to meet us but is also willing to support us if we need to absent ourselves for a while, and a surprising amount of information about esotericism, including tarot, but mainly focused on some ancient Greek cultic beliefs which also inform some of the protagonist's dreams. The juxtaposition of spaceships and Eleusinian Mysteries is surprising, but it works.

It turns out that (Spoiler - click to show)we are travelling to a cult that made a base under the ground in some small, otherwise uninhabited planet. The cult is not scary at all; in fact, it feels a bit like coming home, seeing some old friends, sleeping in your old bed, having a sense of community. But the protagonist is here with a specific goal: they want to renounce their membership. The want to do undo the rituals, unsee the revelations, return to the state of the uninitiated. It's not clear whether this is possible, although there's certainly nobody who tries to stop them. It's perhaps also not clear what it means.

But, perhaps, if it means anything, it is renouncing dreams of what is beyond this world in order to truly anchor ourselves in meaningful labour. As they are returning to the awfully mundane, we must imagine them happy.

As you can no doubt tell, I liked Metallic Red. I especially admire its understated, subtle approach. There are wild elements here (space ships! cults!) but it handles them in a way that is the exact opposite of pulp, going instead for the quotidian, for the mundane, for the abandonment of grand grand dreams that mean to pull us away from the solid core of our very material life. We need no blind seers to show us the way.

Someone has died: our father, mother, grandmother or grandfather. The choice 'grandmother' feels canonical, since the author dedicates the game to Elizabeth Walton Williams who I think is their grandmother. But as far as I know the choice makes no difference to the game.

The deceased was a famous painter, and as part of their will they have left us seven paintings -- though not seven specific paintings. It is up to us to choose seven pieces from among those that are left in their atelier. This is where play starts. We are given brief descriptions of paintings, often though not always accompanied by a sentence indicating its emotional mood. Then we choose whether to take it or leave it. If we take it, the painting triggers a memory of our interactions with the deceased. These memories are somewhat randomised, although they are chosen to fit the painting at least a little. Both the chosen painting and memories are saved for the player's perusal. Once seven paintings have been chosen, a non-interactive scene follows in which the player character finishes an unfinished painting, taking inspiration from the colours, subjects and moods of the chosen paintings. This final painting and the stages of its completion are shown as pictures in the game itself -- the first and only time that the game uses visuals.

The game is highly polished, both when it comes to details such as the Twine customisation and the music that plays in the background, and when it comes to what is most important, the writing. The paintings are diverse and described as well as it is possible to describe a painting in a few sentences. And the memories, which are the most important parts of the prose, are interesting, vivid, and well-written. Some feel slightly more generic -- a burst of anger after the child ruined a canvas -- but others manage to generate a real sense of individuality -- such as the one about the bakery.

Necessarily, a character portrait done in seven brief memories remains impressionistic; or, to use another metaphor from the history of painting, cubist, giving us a few snapshots of the deceased from different directions, which suggest but don't actually constitute depth. There's only so much you can do with memories that are brief, few in number, and narratively independent from each other. I would hesitate to call what results a 'character study'. We remain far too much at the surface for that.

The mechanics of the piece raise questions both mundane and philosophical. One soon finds out that the total number of paintings is not very large; the 'next' painting seems to be chosen entirely randomly, so you will start seeing paintings twice, or even see the same painting twice in a row, as if the protagonist is too confused to remember which paintings they've already looked at.

More importantly, there is something strange about first choosing whether to keep the painting, and then getting a memory. Shouldn't we choose based on what the painting reminds us of? Of course the game needs to work the way it actually does, because it would deflate the experience if we could first check out all the memories and then had to choose seven from among them. You want to have seven memories, no more, and no going back. Still, the current set-up doesn't leave the player with much agency. The main thing one can do to steer the story one way or another is choose paintings with 'positive' emotions or paintings with 'negative' emotions; this will definitely colour the memories one gets, and it may also colour -- literally -- the final painting we ourselves make.

Here the philosophical question pops up. There are paintings both negative and positive. If we choose the negative paintings, our memory portrait of the deceased will be emotionally negative; if we choose positive paintings, our memory portrait will be positive. But this is clearly and explicitly a selection effect. We can only end up with negativity by ignoring the positive, and we can only end up with positivity by ignoring the negative. Is Imprimatura trying to tell us that we can form our own relation to the past by choosing what we want to remember? That's an interesting vision, no doubt, but it would seem to require us to abandon the quest for truth and perhaps authenticity. Given the centrality of these ideas to how Imprimatura works, I would have liked it to engage with such questions more deeply.

An extremely short puzzle game, at least in terms of moves needed and objects implemented – perhaps not so much in terms of time needed to solve it. The basic conceit is that the objects in the room you’re in are not named; you have to find out what they are by interacting with them. I’m fairly certain that I’ve seen this before in a more traditional text adventure when you find yourself in darkness, but I can’t remember where exactly, so perhaps I’m wrong.

It’s not too hard to get a basic idea of what the objects are, and after a fairly short time I was sitting on other thing with something in my hands and the thought of making other thing move. But I got completely stuck on the right command. (Spoiler - click to show)‘go’, ‘push other thing’, ‘hit other thing’, ‘press heels’, none of that worked. I needed the walkthrough to tell me to ‘ride’. A bit of an anticlimax, naturally.

There’s different endings depending on (Spoiler - click to show)whether you take the cat, which is a nice touch.

There’s an old chestnut in adventure games: the recipe. You’ve got to make a magic potion, and you have a recipe, and now you have to first collect the ingredients and then follow the steps of the recipe exactly… and you’ll get the potion. I’m pretty sure King’s Quest has that kind of stuff. Or maybe it’s a real recipe that you’re trying to make, as in Savoir-Faire. It’s not very engaging – usually the real gameplay is getting the ingredients, or getting things ready, and then actually following the recipe is more a little task you need to get out of the way before you get the reward. You don’t want too many of such tasks in your game. It bogs things down.

So it’s bold to build a game that is all about following instructions! Assembly is such a game, although its not recipes we’re following, but IKEA instruction manuals. It’s like having little walkthroughs in the game, telling you how to construct, and also deconstruct, many of the objects you meet. Our protagonist is good at following such rules. Indeed, they’re incredibly bad at not following rules, being unable to unscrew a light bulb without an instruction manual showing them how to do it.

This could have been very boring, but Assembly keeps the instructions short, gives us frequent rewards for successful assembly and disassembly, and, especially, gives us a series of nice puzzles around these mechanics. This is no doubt the only game where finding an IKEA instruction manual feels good – although, come to think of it, All the Troubles Come My Way has this too, so scrap that. The puzzles are good, starting with some simple ones, moving on to slightly more difficult (Spoiler - click to show)(such as the lamp puzzle), and ending with one that is both simple and over-the-top and yet completely logical, applying IKEA logic to IKEA itself, giving us the comic reward we deserved.

Well, I guess it ends with one that went the least smoothly for me, (Spoiler - click to show)because I didn’t realise there was a flatpack box in my location, and it felt a little bit like a regression after the great scene with the collapsing stacks… but that’s a nitpick. This game is fun and light-hearted. There are some Elder Gods involved, but it never goes to dark places… at least, not to dark places you can’t illuminate with a good STRÅLA.

Recent world events are fairly disheartening and would give a lot of comfort to those who believe that violence is the dominant force in human nature, if comfort were something that such people could be given. On my Mastodon account, I wrote:

The willingness of others to engage in massive violence and cruelty can make our own attempts at kindness seem so impotent and pointless.

That that is not so, that even the smallest human gestures are of supreme importance, that in some sense they redeem the world, that is the faith we need.

It’s not an easy faith, but there is no alternative.

I ended up liking The Witch quite a bit more than I started out liking it. It does a lot of stuff early on to make you bounce off of it, from having a map full of empty locations (most of them, unfortunately, in the beginning) to failing to implement prominent nouns.

What also made me consider quitting was the first puzzle I solved. (Spoiler - click to show)I get the sign, went to the beaver, brought it to the tree, get ten points… and then, happy as I was, typed ‘score’ and read that my puzzle solution had made the game unwinnable. As this was literally the first thing I did in the game, I found it rather discouraging!

But I persevered, and as I went on, I actually started liking the game more and more. The setting is more fun that it at first appears, with many neat little touches of world building and some good descriptions, especially around puzzle solutions. It also made sense, once I came across the mill, that my little adventure (Spoiler - click to show)with the beaver had the undesirable result it had. I came to appreciate the ‘score’ message as a helpful guide to what made the game unwinnable. And I started solving some of the puzzles, such as the mill and the mine, without hints, which made me feel good. These puzzles are not completely groundbreaking, but they are fresh enough to be fun. And the programming is very solid.

I wasn’t able to finish the game without hints, though, and that had mostly to do with implementation – so I strongly suggest that Charles returns to the game and make some changes based on what I’m going to say now, because it can greatly improve the experiences of future players. (Spoiler - click to show)(1) The owl puzzle could be better clued. Showing the seed leads to death, okay. But the current behaviour of the seed is rather overwhelming: dropping it anywhere in the game leads to instant death. This does not suggest that it’s possible to throw it at the owl in its den, given that the owl can instantaneously move to the other side of the map to kill me! I wasted quite some time trying to protect myself with a bucket on my head and things like that. Perhaps the seed should simply do nothing outside of the tree; and perhaps it can be a bit better clued that you might have the time to throw it. (2) I had the exact right idea with growing the peach tree, but “put plant food on peach pit” gives an error message, and so I abandoned the idea. This should probably just work! I also think it would be good to have a more positive message for dropping the pit at that location, and maybe allowing something like “put peach in mud”. (3) I also got stuck with ‘apricot’, but that was more my own fault for not being a thorough enough old-school adventure player. But it might be a bit better clued that you need to say a password to the mirror. I spent time trying to show it different objects. (4) When I crossed the river for the end game, the game told me that it had become unwinnable. But it hadn’t! I could still win, using the exact chain of commands in the walkthrough. I had all the right objects with me. Not sure what was going on there. (5) I’m not sure if I would have ever solved the final puzzle, but I love the idea of it: the race through the maze and the final imprisonment. Perhaps it would have bee nice to put an object somewhere in the maze over which the player trips the first time they go there? That would be a great clue.

All in all, I think The Witch is a really neat game. It has gotten a fairly cold shoulder in the reviews, which is unfortunate. Solving some of the implementation issues in the early game, and improving cluing of a few of the puzzles, could go a long way though. You’ll never get the love of people who don’t like difficult parser games, but you sure can get the love of those who do. It’s all solid, well thought out, and with some seriously good puzzle ideas.

It had to be a printer. Printers are evil. I'm relatively tech savvy, but the one computer accessory that I look at with trepidation is the printer. There's so much that can go wrong, and it's all so unclear. I mean, it would have been easy for Geoffrey to focus on a tech issue that makes the protagonist's mother look like an elderly ignoramus. But the steps needed to solve this printer problem are completely realistic, and realistically maddening. (Spoiler - click to show)Why can't that stupid printer just tell you that the paper is missing from the second tray? God knows that I have desperately clicked options like 'deep nozzle clean' in the hope that it would magically solve whatever unfathomable problem I had in the past. Also, after I tried to clean a printer with a leaking ink cartridge, I've sworn an oath to never every buy another inkjet printer... but (a) I ended up with a laser printer that somehow got toner in the inner machinery, and (b) my wife later bought another inkjet printer anyway. So printers are stronger than oaths, is all I'm saying.

In a sense, the tech issue in Fix Your Mother's Printer is only there to give a framework for family conversations. That too is very realistic. The practical is the justification, and then of course your mother wants to talk to you -- and at least as I played the protagonist, they also didn't mind talking to their mother. I liked the conversations, which hit some good personal notes and add interest to the game. It seemed to start out a little silly, with the mother's obsession for topiary, but ended up at a slightly more serious level that seemed to fit the game as a whole quite well.

I have two points of criticism, one about what the game sets out to achieve, one about how it sets out to do so. The former kind of criticism is always a little fraught: shouldn't I just judge a game on its own terms? Maybe. But I think Fix Your Mother's Printer could have been more memorable if it had given up on its intention to stay at the level of the light-hearted. These people have a bond, but they also have problems, and it would have been interesting and possible affecting if their bond had actually helped them gain more insight into those problems. One does not feel that (Spoiler - click to show)reconciliation between the parents comes any closer, or that the protagonist has gained any real insight into their romantic hang-ups. I would have loved the game to be more ambitious in that regard, even if it would have meant straying from the current tone.

The more internal criticism has to do with the choices we are being offered. There are way too many moments when the choices come down to "(A) be mean, (B) be neutral, (C) be nice". It felt a bit like the unfortunate type of CRPG dialogue (far too prevalent even in otherwise great games like Baldur's Gate 2) where the dialogue options often come down to "(A) be evil, (B) be neutral, (C) be good". It's not very interesting. It's not very clear why anyone would choose being nasty to their mother. And crucially, it means that you're making exactly *one* choice: your attitude. And then the rest of the game is just you either choosing the option that fits your attitude, or turning the character into a tonally inconsistent mess. The dialogue could have been more interesting if the author hadn't felt the need to support three tones throughout the game, and had instead focused on more interesting aspects of characterisation.

All in all, this game is simply very enjoyable.

Let me come right out and say I don't like the title of this game. Sure, I get the The Lord of the Rings reference, but, first of all, this game has nothing to with post-Tolkienian fantasy (precisely not!) and second, the suggestion that this king is just out to loot is totally wrong. The title sets low expectations that don't do justice to the remarkably fun game we actually find.

I don't think the main character is ever named, but we're obviously playing Conan the Barbarian as written by Robert E. Howard. It's perhaps important to emphasise that Howard's Conan is not stupid and does not overcome his foes through brute force alone. He's a cunning guy who manages to become king and isn't at all bad at ruling, even though some of his subjects resent his origins among the barbarians. Brouwer follows these ideas to the letter. I'm almost certain that there's a Howard story that starts exactly like One King to Loot them All, with Conan as king being surprised by some magical assassin whom he defeats; but even if I'm wrong about that, our game is pitch-perfect Howardian Sword & Sorcery. Even the prose is Howardian, which is admittedly not an unreserved compliment -- Howard tends to indulge a bit too much in long sentences and rare words that do not quite add up to great prose (although not as much as his friend and fellow writer Clark Ashton Smith). There's something of that here too, which is especially noticeable in the error messages, that are too long to be easily scanned and mentally discarded.

It's almost impossible not to be reminded of Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom when playing One King to Loot them All, because both are restricted parser games with a barbarian protagonist. But actually they do not have much in common. S. John Ross's game is a geographically open puzzler involving quasi-RPG-style character progression, whereas Onno Brouwer's game is a tight story-line with no real puzzles to speak of. Perhaps even more importantly, Ross' barbarian really is stupid, and the limited verb set is used to streamline puzzle design. Brouwer's Conan is pretty smart (he has no trouble explaining the logic he used to get through the paths of order and chaos) and the limited parser is used to... yeah... mostly to tease the player with some intentional parser frustrations, actually! (Spoiler - click to show)One's inability to open the wine bottle is pretty funny, as is the fact that this puzzle solution if given away in the Help text, where you probably won't notice it. (Though I did. Right when I was about to give up in the Pit.) There are some real parser frustrations, though, which don't help. (E.g., "water" is not a synonym of "waters", the two guards cannot be disambiguated by the adjectives the game itself applies to them, etc.) I can imagine that some players hit their head against a wall. A pit wall, perhaps.

But they really should keep playing. For what had been an entertaining if far from perfect sword & sorcery romp, suddenly turned into a game that had me play it with a giant grin on my face, (Spoiler - click to show)a grin that grew bigger and bigger when I realised how far I could undo, and then, that I could save the priestess, and then, that everything after that also subtly changed (including the nice scene where the priestess points out that she should be the sacrifice), and... well, yes, it was just lovely. The final fight with the necromancer was a tad confusing (I never really understood how the interception worked), but otherwise it was so much fun. Including the revelation about the three chosen ones.

The one thing I think is a little sad is that you can't actually (Spoiler - click to show)start UNDOing when you've just opened up a new game. Famously, you can win Slouching towards Bedlam on the first turn, but by taking an action that you only have reason to take once you've finished the game and know what's going on. One King to Loot them All could also allow the player the freedom to start on the winning path immediately; if anyone stumbles upon it without preparation, that's fine too!

Anyway, really nice game.