Ratings and Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

Cursed Odyssey is a CYOA-style game in which you have to bring a merchant vessel home after it has been cursed by a witch. You meet about five obstacles on the way, each of which you'll have to overcome by making the right choice out of two or three possibilities. If you choose sensibly, you'll probably get to the best ending in one playthrough; which is good, because most of the wrong choices lead to instant death.

There's nothing really wrong with this short adventure, but there's no particularly good reason to play it either. Perhaps its worst aspect is the layout: by using only a very small part of the screen, the game forces you to scroll much more than necessary, and if you scroll too far, the game itself scrolls away.

Apparently, the people who made this are also planning to develop commercial games. If so, they need to work on their craft. Cursed Odyssey stands to, for instance, the Choice Of games as a high schooler's short story stands to a professional novel.

The Bookshop Poisoning is a short story in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes mysteries, although Watson has become an Edinburgh police officer and Holmes is called Bell. Bell will attempt to solve a murder in a bookshop, but you, the player / Watson, have to activate his thinking by showing him books that contain certain keywords. To take an example that does not appear in the game, you might have to come up with a book title that contains the word 'poison' -- e.g., "Strong Poison" by Dorothy L. Sayers. You can type in any book title you wish and the game uses, I suspect, some kind of online database to check whether the book exists and who its author is. This works very well.

It's a nice and original puzzle idea, perhaps let down a little bit by the fact that there are so many books that just attempting titles at random is a pretty successful strategy. The game is short and the story appropriate to the puzzle theme, if not particularly engaging. Three stars because it is worth trying.

I wasn't blown away by the first Sorcery! That game hewed very closely to the standard gamebook format: you traverse a garden of forking paths by making unmotivated choices ("go left or go right") towards a predestined end. To its credit, it managed to be quite a bit more merciful than the original books while keeping the charm of such adventures intact; but all in all, it wasn't precisely a shining example of game design. I hesitated for a bit about whether I wanted to buy the second part as well. I'm very happy I did.

On the surface, Sorcery! 2 looks a lot like the first game. Combat works in the same way, there is still the same rather cumbersome magic system, and you still drag your character across a nicely drawn map. This time, the map is a of a city and we also get maps of the interiors of buildings and even of a sewer system; but that alone need not make a major difference.

In other ways, however, Sorcery! 2 differs markedly from its predecessor. Most importantly, instead of the uninspiring quest of getting to the other side of the map, we are now tasked with finding four missing nobles, each of whom knows one line of a crucial spell. Successfully completing this mission requires the accumulation of many hints and clues which allow us to slowly understand what is happening in the city. Combined with a game mechanic -- I won't spoil it -- that allows the player to traverse the city almost at liberty, what we have is much less a traditional gamebook structure and much more an interactive investigation in which the player can make informed choices about where to go next. The plot is good; the sense of discovery is real; and finding all the clues feels very satisfying.

It also helps that the game is much, much bigger than the first game. I assume that the makers felt more free to take liberties with the source material, because there is no way all this content could have fitted into the original book. There is so much to discover, there are so many pieces of the story to fit together, and there are so many opportunities to just have fun in the game (including by challenging people to play the excellent little mini-game Swindlestones), that Sorcery! 2 will keep you busy for quite some time.

To a certain extent, the aims of the game are limited. This is still very much a sword&sorcery fantasy yarn with much emphasis on plot and adventure and very little on emotional or philosophical depth. But I find it hard to imagine a game that would more successfully combine the sensibilities of a fantasy gamebook with those of the modern player. Coupled with my intense enjoyment of the experience, that leads to a 5-star rating. Highly recommended.

Apperently, this game was written for a game jam in which the games could contain no more than 300 words of text. As a proof-of-concept that that is enough to build a rudimentary RPG in Twine, I suppose RPG-ish is a success. But I will ignore such issues of context and history; the aim of my review is, as always, strictly to assess whether you, as a player, should be interested in playing this game.

The answer is a resounding 'no'. This is surely one of the most boring RPGs ever made. There are no tactical decisions, there is no interesting prose, there is no sense of discovery -- indeed, there is nothing worth seeing here at all. The only way to lose is through boredom, when you really can't be bothered to check how much health you have left or go through the grind for more XP. Best avoided.

Another reviewer tells us that the game is a critique of RPGs. But can something be a critique of a genre if it is indistinguishable from the worst examples of that genre? There are some very interesting critiques of RPG tropes and game mechanics (the pen-and-paper meta-RPG Power Kill comes to mind, as does the cRPG Undertale; I myself once tried something in this vein with my pen-and-paper game Vampires; but really, such critiques are almost as old as the genre). RPG-ish isn't one of them.

Soda51's oeuvre consists for the most part of extremely short games with ham-fisted messages. For Me It Was Tuesday is no exception. Here, we follow two girls as they go to the arcade to comment on two boys playing Street Fighter. At least, that's what I think is going on; on the one hand, the game suggests that you are playing one of the girls and are also playing the Street Fighter game, but on the other hand, the girls continually make sexist remarks that would make no sense when addressed to another girl. So the fiction of the game refuses to become very clear. Either the girls are commenting on two hapless boys, or they have some thing going on where they trash talk to each other as if the other girl were a buy.

The piece is highly non-interactive; you just press a couple of links, and they change what you see next, but there's no meaningful agency.

So why am I giving the game 2 stars? Because the stream of insults the girls engage in are sometimes spot-on as gender-inverted parodies of the stupid things that some male gamers say to female gamers. This makes the current game slightly better than the other Soda51 games that I've played, and that should be rewarded.

The Sorcery! games are recreations of four of Steve Jackson's Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. In this first instalment of the series, the gamebook origins are still quite obvious: you journey through a rather literal 'garden of forking paths', making relatively unmotivated choices between one road and another, and dealing with the creatures and situations that you happen to come across. Continuity is provided mostly through your inventory and health. If you find a giant's tooth here, you'll be able to use it later; if you lose much health in this fight, you might not survive the next. Otherwise there is little in the way of a coherent narrative to bind all the events together.

This means that at bottom the game is a learn-from-previous-attempts exercise in optimisation. You won't be able to follow all paths; some paths are more lucrative or less dangerous than others; some paths may open new options later; and the challenge is to find a way through the game that gets you to the end with a maximum of useful items (to be used in the next part of the series).

Of course, in the original gamebooks, the challenge was less one of optimisation and more one of survival. Death could come swiftly and unexpectedly, and the non-cheating player would usually need many playthroughs to achieve victory. However, the electronic Sorcery! makes some very welcome changes to the original format. Combat is less random and the game allows you to redo fights if they went badly. If that isn't enough, there is a handy system for going back to any previous point in the game. While this makes Sorcery! much easier than the book on which it is based, this is a welcome change -- especially if you are not a kid in the 80's with limited access to games and limitless amounts of free time.

Sorcery! looks quite beautiful even on a mobile phone, even though the modern art doesn't mesh that well with the original pictures from the gamebooks. (I would have preferred to see this original 'ugly' style of fantasy, where people are likely to be dressed in rags and deformed by diseases, throughout the game.) The writing is good, though nor particularly distinctive.

Should you play Sorcery!? If you have any fondness for gamebooks, or just enjoy a nice combat-filled fantasy romp, the answer is probably affirmative. (I bought the game for 5.49 euros, and that seems okay.) But the best reason for playing Sorcery! is that it is a good introduction to Sorcery! 2, a game that is much, much better, and that I would wholeheartedly recommend.

The Dreamhold is presented as a game suitable for beginners, complete with a tutorial voice and the choice between a normal mode and an expert mode. And yet Plotkin's aim is not maximal accessibility or minimal resistance on the way to a winning ending. He is not here to hold your hand. If you expect him to, you will be disappointed; as some of the reviewers have been, who complain about the openness of the world and the complexity of some of the machinery one meets.

But Plotkin signals his intentions early on, when the player is brought into a room stuffed with useless objects that one is nevertheless encouraged to examine one by one. This, surely, can be intimidating to the new player. Yes. But it is also something one must absolutely learn to cope with if one is to navigate any of the classic parser games. The same is true about learning to explore large worlds, about making leaps of dreamlike logic, and about thinking through possible interactions with complex machinery. Rather than hold your hand, Plotkin drops you in the thick of things, with one message: trust me. And you can trust him. Everything will make sense; you won't get the game into an unwinnable state; and with some determination, you will probably be able to win.

But Plotkin takes things a step further. He is not only introducing the player to the skills and techniques need to play old-school parser IF, he is also introducing them to a particularly fine example of the aesthetic of those games. The mysterious, abandoned world; the slow accumulation of hints that build up a narrative framework; the spirit of experimentation; and especially the being rewarded for your hard work with strange and unexpected experiences -- it is all there. Introductory games tend to be limited and boring; and in a sense that means that they do not teach the player the right mindset. They teach her to think in limited and boring ways. The Dreamhold teaches players to persevere, to try strange things, to try and step off the seemingly beaten path.

Whether it actually succeeds is less sure. The existence of a simple solution, bypassing large parts of the game, might fool people into thinking the game has less to offer than it has. (It fooled me, but luckily I replayed it using David Welbourn's walkthrough.) Approached with the right mindset, however, it does a great job preparing player for the world of old-school parser IF. Although it might spoil the player in the meantime -- it's kind of hard to go back to Adventure after playing a game as polished as this!

Something like this used to crop up with distressing regularity in the Interactive Fiction Competition: an extremely sparse dungeon crawl that offered little in rewarding prose and nothing in tactical challenge, while promising to be the first instalment in a long series of adventures. Of course there is one crucial difference between Beginner's Cave and those unfortunate entries: Donald Brown's 1980 game actually was the first instalment in a long series of adventures. It spawned an entire movement of games using the Eamon system and is thus of obvious historical importance.

Considered from the point of view of a 2018 player, however, there is not much to recommend this game. We crawl through a rather linear cave that is described in drab prose and offers few opportunities for interaction. The combat system is similarly uninspiring: you type 'attack' until you win. There are some opportunities for tactics by selecting weapons and armour, but it doesn't amount to much. There is some unclued instant-death as well. The most original aspect of the game is no doubt the fact that you can easily find allies who will follow you around and help you in combat.

The great selling point of the game is the fact that you can take your character through hundreds of additional Eamon adventures, keeping the weapons and gold that you earned in this one. This surely taps into a very basic wish of many gamers -- the wish to accumulate, to get better, to be rewarded, to achieve domination. Everything has changed in gaming since 1980... and yet, everything has remained the same.

(I played the game's online version at eamon-remastered.com.)

Like Horse Master, Tonight Dies the Moon is a futuristic game set in a dystopian world that is sketched in few but striking and imaginative details. Also like Horse Master, it contains some sequences that are reminiscent of existing computer game genres -- a sort of reverse Space Invader and a market-simulating farming game -- but neither deliver nor want to deliver the kind of victory that such games promise. Add the instantly recognisable visual style of the games, and there can be no doubt that you are playing another Tom McHenry game.

(Spoiler - click to show)Tonight Dies the Moon is actually two related games: one where you play on Earth and one where you play on the Moon. In one sense, these sequences are entirely different. On Earth, you are obsessed with the war against the Moon, you go to work to shoot some lunar bases, you say goodbye to your best friend, and then you escape to the moon. On the Moon, you've apparently never heard of a war; you spend turn after turn planting crops for both the government and yourself, raking in big profits for the former and meagre earnings for the latter; you have some non-interactive interactions with your fellow colonists; and finally, you get blown up by an attack from Earth. (Perhaps it is also possible to die earlier from starvation, if you don't manage to be successful at the farming game; and maybe, just maybe, it is possible to earn enough money for a ticket to Earth.) So where the Earth story is a more traditional piece of linear fiction ending on a high note, the Moon story is a farming game with some episodic fictions sprinkled through it and a predetermined loss looming over you.

But in another sense, the two halves of the game are very much alike. Both protagonists live in poverty and must scrape to get by. Both are pawns in a political system that doesn't care about them and with which they collaborate for lack of an alternative. Both keep their lives tolerable through a friendship with a single person. Both dream of a different existence, and look at each other's world in the night sky with the vague hope that maybe there is a better life up there. We, of course, after playing both halves of the game, know that those dreams are only that, dreams; they have no base in reality. But we understand why people would think differently. We understand why they must think differently in order to keep life bearable. As a tale of misguided and yet understandable longing, Tonight Dies the Moon is quite beautiful and affecting. The Moon-sequence could have been a bit shorter (the game goes on and on long after the episodic fiction has stopped), but all in all, not in the least because of the many original details (like ChangeNames and the process of copying and changing books on the moon), it works and stays with the reader.

Less successful is the political side of the game. Earth and Moon are quite obviously meant to be modern-day versions of the U.S.A. and Russia in de cold war. Earth is a hyper-individualistic and shallow society obsessed with a war fought with drones, and even more obsessed with its bad health care system. The Moon poses as an egalitarian community, but the government is just profiting from the people, its plan-based economy is a disaster leading to famine, and anyone who wants to read something good must engage in samizdat. The former, if read as a critique of current right-wing political trends in the U.S.A., is over-the-top and lacks the kind of truth that would make it sting. (After all, not even Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are in favour of expensive health care or ineffective wars, even though their policy decisions might lead to that.) The latter, if read as a critique of the Soviet Union, is like kicking someone who is already dead; while I don't see how it would apply to current left-wing movements. The entire game might have been more successful if the personal stories of longing had been emphasised more and the political background had been emphasised less.

In total, I think Tonight Dies the Moon is less successful than Horse Master, but still a great play. I'm looking forward to more games by Tom, because his imagination is a fecund (and I suspect scaly) thing that takes us to wild and aberrant places!

This game is a political satire of capitalism. The premise is that you choose to be one of five classes of capitalist scum, and then battle it out with the 100 people who are richer than you in order to become #1. Battling is an automatic, RPG-like system of seemingly random rolls.

As a game, this has nothing to offer. I assume that that is deliberate; what it wants to be is political satire. But this game is to satire what a cask full of elephant piss is to a glass of gewürztraminer -- not the clearest metaphor I've ever employed, perhaps, but you know what I'm getting at.

After playing three of Soda51's games today, I can reach the overarching conclusion that this author, who obviously wants to make political statements, should read and watch some good political satire to find out what works and what doesn't.