Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

I used IFDB's random game function and it came up with The Lady in Green, an old AGT story that I had to compile from the source on the archive.

The game is very sparsely implemented. Many nouns that are prominent in the room descriptions are not recognised by the parser, and not all exits are well described. For instance, in early location you see you car. "Enter car" does not work, but "north" does, because, apparently, your car is north of you. This game, then, is certainly from an earlier era of amateur IF programming.

The story starts of in a modern day hotel, but you are soon transported back in time where you have to rescue a lost boy. This involves a few simple puzzles. The main difficulty, however, is that it frequently and unexpectedly becomes impossible to go back to where you were earlier, and if you haven't found all the items yet, you're stuck.

At the end of the game, you can choose between staying in the past and returning to the present, but the story is so sparse and perfunctory that the player will have no preference and the choice is moot.

Not an awful game, but I also cannot think of any reason to recommend it.

Fallen London is a game specifically designed to get you playing it in bite-sized bits throughout the day, every day. It accomplishes this by limiting the number of turns you are allowed to play, and then replenishing this resource by one whenever ten minutes of real time pass. When you log into the game, you can play the maximum of 20 turns; after that, you will be allowed to play a new turn every 10 minutes. This means that optimal play requires you to log in every 200 minutes (slightly over 3 hours), while the temptation to get back to their website and play one more turn will re-arise every 10 minutes. (Probably while you are trying to do productive work.)

There is -- of course -- another way in which you can replenish your turns, which is by paying real money. You can restore 20 actions by paying $2.50. Tempting you to spend real money on replenishing turns is in fact the only reason that Fallen London uses a real-time limited number of turns; for the rest it is just a frustration-creating device that has no advantages for the player.

Of course, getting people to pay real money for more turns almost requires an in-game economy where turns can be exchanged for in-game benefits. In order to supply this, Fallen London sets up a core game system that revolves entirely around grinding. You'll have to increase four main stats, dozens of story stats, and dozens of ingredients in order to unlock new stories... and of course in order to improve your ability to grind and increase your main stats, story stats and ingredients, which can then be used to ... well, you know how this works.

Many of the game's grinding loops are based on trading time for security. You might, for instance, decide to become a great writer. You'll need to increase your "Potential" to do that, which you do by writing stories. If you try to write an easy story, you'll have a high chance of success, but your Potential will increase only a little. If you write a hard story, you have a low probability of success, but the potential reward is great. You can, however, increase your probability of success by writing more pages of draft material. This costs turns. So you will be spending dozens of turns clicking just the same few links again and again in order to create draft material, always wondering whether the time has already come to hazard your investment on the roll of the dice, or whether you should spend a few more turns in order to increase the chance of success.

This design is not just terrible, it is detestable. Fallen London wants to seduce you into logging in again and again, every couple of hours, or even every ten minutes, so you can engage in meaningless grinding that will allow you to improve some numbers on the screen, the prime use of which is that they'll help you in grinding more to improve them even further. While it may not quite be the interactive fiction equivalent of World of Warcraft, it certainly tries to get close. If you value your time and have even the slightest tendency to lose yourself to addicting game mechanics, you'll want to stay as far away from Fallen London as possible.

So why do people spend time with this game, and why do they even enjoy it? This has much to do with the game's primary strength, which is its writing and atmosphere. A Gothic, Victorian, subterranean London may sound trite, but Failbetter Games manages to make Fallen London feel fresh and engaging by taking the material in all kinds of weird and mysterious directions. The player is thrown into the deep, and is left to construct a coherent vision of the world from the many tiny fragments that he or she is given. Combined with the generally very good prose, this makes Fallen London a world that one is eager to explore and learn more about.

What is ultimately disappointing, though, is the quality of the story that arises. Fallen London feeds you many "storylets", but they rarely come together to form a "story", a greater narrative in which your character develops, acts, and changes the world. Two phenomena that show this problem vividly are the infinite repeatability of storylets -- you can just go to the same person again and again and play through the same story involving them again and again -- and the utter abstraction of most of what happens. For instance: you follow someone through town, and as a result you get... 10 whispered secrets. Not 10 actual secrets, with actual content, but the value "10" next to a piece of in-game currency called "whispered secrets". Or you spend dozens of your turns writing a literary tale, and when it is finished... the game doesn't even tell you what the tale is about. Of course, limitless grinding requires repeatability and abstraction, but it is here in particular that we see how the basic game design of Fallen London, while it might lead to money being made, is incompatible with achieving excellence in what ought to really matter to a story game, namely, story. The game continually promises to give you a great narrative, and it consistently fails to deliver.

Fallen London is a game on which a lot of creativity and obvious talent has been spent and, I'm afraid, wasted. Reactions to the game vary wildly, though, so you might want to try it out for yourself -- if, that is, you think you can resist the lure of a game that always wants to tempt you into wasting your time grinding to increase meaningless numbers.

You are in a room with a book. All you can do is read the book, and this will present the text of Moby Dick to you, part by part, with no means to go back and forth through the story. I guess that makes this the least convenient way of reading the book that exists.

I was sort of hoping for an eastern egg if I had the patience to "read more" through all of it, but alas, when you reach the end you just get the question whether you want to quit or restart.

Now there could be changes to the text, either deterministically or randomly, which would constitute an original contribution of mr. McGrew to tale of the whale; but the slight possibility of this is not enough for this reader -- or, I venture, any other -- to actually read through this.

The Cursed Sword of Shagganuthor is a short, CYOA-style sword & sorcery tale about a small band of villagers who attempt to protect their land and family from the endless hordes of the evil sorcerer-king. Once the artifact from the title appears, bad news gets worse, and some gruesome horror scenes are to be expected.

According to her website, Laura Michet works as a professional game writer. Unsurprisingly, then, the writing is fine on the surface level. However, at the deeper level of theme, things are less satisfactory. (Spoiler - click to show)Scars that grows tongues and teeth and devour or scar others is of course a great literalisation of the idea that being hurt makes people, paradoxically, hurt others, including the others they love. Used to say something about the human condition, this horrific metaphor could have been at the core of a memorable fantasy tale. But "The Cursed Sword of Shagganuthor" remains at the most literal level and eschews the opportunity to explore the theme of emotional scars in any depth.

What is truly a missed opportunity, though, and what explains my low rating of the game, is that absolutely nothing has been done that justifies this piece being published as interactive rather than static fiction. Your choices do not matter at all; they at most change the descriptions of the immediately following scene slightly. Any two playthroughs of the game, even one where you choose to be as honourable and brave as possible and one where you choose to be a moral and physical coward, will be virtually indistinguishable. So why not just write a short story? Perhaps I am too harsh, but interactive fiction that lacks interactivity, and that lacks a damn good reason to be non-interactive, just seems lazy and ill-designed to me. So without wishing to imply that this story is badly written, I still cannot give it more than two stars.

The claim -- made by Paul and John the Evangelist -- that salvation can only come through Christ is of course deeply problematic, and has been felt to be problematic for a long time. For Christ is a historical phenomenon, with whom many have not been acquainted. How could their ignorance warrant damnation?

"Deathbox: 2013" wants to ask this question, but it runs into a problem of its own. For on the one hand, the only people for whom the question has any real interest are highly orthodox Christians. But on the other hand, the author's beliefs are so different from those of a highly orthodox Christian that it is doubtful there will be any serious communication between them. Indeed, it is doubtful that any of the real target audience would ever start up a game called "Deathbox: 2013 -- God's endless love."

So that leaves Tylor with people like me, who are already convinced that a theory which entails that virtuous Buddhists will burn in Hell is not a theory worth having. (I would add that, obviously, only universal reconciliation makes sense.) People like me will not be particularly challenged or surprised by the game's message. That leaves only the game as game, but unfortunately, it consists of little more than a single choice in the beginning and some mostly non-interactive sequences leading to an often pre-determined end. So there's not much here.

Two stars for the writing, which is competent and fast-paced.

The Hunt for the Gay Planet is a small CYOA fiction, centred around Anna Antropy's trademark themes of lesbian love and deviant sexuality. It is well written and has some surprising moments; but there is little depth, there is little game, and the deviancy is not deviant enough to sustain interest. I'd recommend playing her Encyclopedia Fuckme instead.

Logic Puzzle Sampler is not a game; it describes itself more accurately as a toy, and it is also a programming example that comes with Inform 6 source code. As a toy it will probably not hold your attention very long, but as a piece of Inform programming, it is worthy of respect -- and could perhaps even be useful, in a somewhat bizarre game.

Playing with Logic Puzzle Sampler consists in manipulating a SHRDLU-like world of blocks and balls, and writing sentences about this world on sheets of paper. If the sentences are true, the paper turns green; if they are false, the paper turns red. Of course, the game accepts only a very limited set of sentences, but this is still impressive.

Even more impressive is the fact that you can write sentences about the colours of the pieces of paper themselves. And yes, this does allow you to have some self-referential fun -- luckily, Logic Puzzle Sampler has not restricted itself to a two-valued logic!

As the about-text indicates, the model beneath the toy is somewhat limited, and doesn't always analyse the situation perfectly. (Spoiler - click to show)For instance, if A says "B is green"; B says "C is green"; and C says "B is red"; the game will correctly turn B and C grey, but it will then incorrectly turn A grey as well, while it should simply be red. Still, what it can do is striking and well worth a look for those who are interested in such things.

I played this game because of the title. Just think of the possibilities inherent in a game called "The Twelve Heads of St. John the Baptist"! We get to play Salome as she is given the Herculean task of learning and performing twelve increasingly erotic dances, each successful performance being rewarded with a new head of St John, who was a very capital fellow to begin with. Or we are cast as the executioner who faces the even more straightforwardly Herculean task of beheading a saint from whose wounds two new heads grow immediately. Or...

But let's not get carried away. "The Twelve Heads of St. John the Baptist" turns out to be a SpeedIF, which means that it is very short, very silly and not as polished as a normal game. (These are perhaps not necessary qualities of SpeedIF, but they are certainly very common.) You are carrying twelve heads, and you have to find clues that allow you to determine which head is the real head of Saint John. Which is fine as far as puzzles go, but not having a dance of the 84 veils seems like a wasted opportunity to me.

There is a theory that if you make a game that is really bad, but you know that it is really bad and signal this to the reader, the game will be funny. This theory is false.

There is another, even more popular, theory that if you make a game that is really bad in the same ways that some other bad games are really bad, but you know this and the other guys were just incompetent, then your game is a piece of satire. This theory is also false.

Here we have a bad fantasy title, useless choices, arbitrary deaths, a (paradoxically enough) lame running gag, and a story that doesn't make sense. Perhaps this adds up to a brilliant joke when you encounter it in the middle of Saints Row 3, from which the game is apparently taken. Outside of that context, it certainly doesn't.

Encyclopedia Fuckme is a fast-paced, action-packed lesbian BDSM-themed CYOA game, written in breathless prose that is certainly meant to be hot and sexually arousing. Does that make its purpose "clearly pornographic", as Sam Kabo Ashwell claims in his review? I do not think so. It seems to me that an essential part of pornography is that it gives the reader (or watcher) exactly what he or she desires, which is why (a) most pornography is very formulaic, and (b) it is always clearly classified, so the consumer can choose the exact right product and not be confronted with kinks he or she doesn't like. Wittgenstein famously claimed that there can never be surprises in logic, and the same is true for pornography -- which makes it somewhat surprising that sex is more fun than logic, as John Cleese once proved, or rather, did not.

Anyway, what I want to say is that Encyclopedia Fuckme doesn't spell its specifics kinks out in advance; and that given their bizarre nature, and the way they are played out, it will be the rare reader who finds this game arousing all the way to the end. This is intentional. Encyclopedia Fuckme wants us to explore the weird tensions that arise when sexual arousal meets (Spoiler - click to show)revulsion, revulsion not in the shape of disgust, but in the shape of fear and uncertainty.

As far as I have seen, the game has two endings: a bad ending that you'll probably reach the first time, and a good ending that takes a little thought and exploration (or dumb luck) to find. The good ending is (Spoiler - click to show)hilariously over the top. For me, at least, it provided the catharsis needed after the rest of the story by making me (Spoiler - click to show)laugh out loud in disbelief and delight.