Ratings and Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

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.