Ratings and Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

It’s pretty clear from, well, everything that the protagonist is going to be lured into a Battle Royale style game involving real death. So I guess it’s a Battle Royale battle royale game, where the italicised & capitalised phrase is the title of the 2000 Japanese movie about a high school class that has to fight to the death, and the second phrase is the name of the gaming genre named after the film, which usually does not involve real death. Turning a battle royale style game into a Battle Royale style game… yeah, that’s kind of meta. But GameCeption is not afraid of being meta.

(Spoiler - click to show)I didn’t quite guess the plot development where we are actually playing our partner and then have to go out into the world to rescue him. Maybe that’s in part because it makes no sense. How exactly did we control them? And how is it possible that all these players that were originally in the physical arena didn’t die instantly when they were chopped down with an axe / exploded / were overrun by a car, but all had the chance to phone their partners? To your questions there will be no answers. Better to revel in the terribly clichéd but still satisfying survival part of the game, and then the ultra obvious and nevertheless also satisfying dynamite scene. Oh, and the “you are the player” meta joke at the end. You really must turn off your critical thinking and just go along, but if you do so, it’s great fun. And I think that’s what GameCeption wants to be: great fun. It’s not so bad to be the player.

Several reviewers said they wanted to see more depth to the relationship between the characters. But I don’t think that would work. It’s camp! Embrace the cheesiness! Take that car and go full Carmageddon! More emotional depth is something for a different game, is what I think. And if you disagree with me, please hold this bundle of dynamite while I hide behind the corner with this remote control.

I'm still not sold on Texture. There's the weird bug with the extremely small button text, but let's ignore that. Then there's still the problem that the affordances of the text are hidden; that is, you cannot see at a glance how you can interact with the screen; you have to grab each button in turn just to find out what your choices are, then go back to grab the button you want and go to the place where you can drop it. It's so much more laborious than link clicking, that there should be a large upside to make it worth it. But I'm not yet seeing it. All Hands, for instance, could just as well have been done in Twine.

Now we'll talk about the game itself. No, I'm lying! I first want to make a completely random comment about the blurb. This is the entire blurb: "The sea is calling you. Its voice is getting louder." And that is such pitch perfect Fallen London / Sunless Sea prose that I was surprised to find out that the game is not Failbetter Games fan fiction! But it's really not.

So let's finally talk about All Hands. It's a short story about someone who enters what it for all intents and purposes a ghost ship. They've always been drawn to the sea, but their farmer father forbade them to so much as think about anything nautical. And perhaps with good reason, because their sister drowned in the sea; more than that, was pulled under by waves that seemed hungry for her. Now the mysterious ship that has been sailing in this neighbourhood has come to shore, and of course you enter it, drawn in by the fascinating woman who owns it. Once you're on board, there's a geographically organised exploration section in which you can find several songs. When you are finished, you return to the woman in charge, dance with her, choose a song to sing... and depending on that song, you get one of several endings.

All Hands is nicely atmospheric. (Spoiler - click to show)I think it might not have been a great design decision to hide the room which explains the backstory most behind a lock that can only be opened if one has picked up the compass in the beginning; especially because it is extremely easy to miss this compass. After my first playthrough, I thought the story made no sense. Only on my second playthrough, when I got the compass, did things click. (I especially enjoyed the fact that you get a puzzle and then the protagonist just solves it without your input.) The 'good' ending, where the magic is dispelled and the characters embrace each other, was a fairly nice surprise.

I enjoyed this snack sized game, and would gladly play something more substantial by the author.

So here's a strange autobiographical fact, or at least, a fact that felt strange when I started playing The Whisperers. I once made some plans for an IF in the form of a play. The players would not play any particular role, but would only make choices only at the end of scenes, choices that decided the final outcome. I can't at the moment remember the title I had in mind (though I suspect I have plot sketches somewhere in a drawer), but I certainly remember the setting: that would have been Russia during the time of the Stalin purges. So... I guess those sketches can remain where they are, because Milo van Mesdag has very much beaten me to it!

Now my game would have been a piece of interactive fiction. Milo's piece, on the other hand, very much wants to be a play, and one feels that he mostly put it in interactive fiction form because it's hard to find a theatre group to performs one's script! This is not to say that it doesn't work as a piece of IF. But there are certain aspects of The Whisperers, including some of its most intriguing ones, that don't translate well to the medium in which we currently experience it.

The most obvious of these is the whispering. Most of the characters are whispering most of the time (and should be heard through microphones -- not sure if that really works to be honest, but maybe it does). That's in part because this is Stalinist Moscow, and the secret police is everywhere. But it's also because they're all living in the same 'paper wall' apartment, where everyone hears everything. And they're living in that apartment with a member of the secret police. A not insubstantial part of the characterisation is done through voice volume. Sergei speaks up, especially in the beginning, when he's still a confident young officer of the NKVD. The Guide always speaks at full volume. But most of the other characters do not, or only when they forget themselves.

The main plot is fairly simple, and the choices of the audience don't make that much difference. Young Agnessa has followed her brother Sergei to Moscow. But she's not a Stalinist; in fact, she's a secret Trotskyist who believes that Stalin has betrayed the revolution! She falls in love with the young architect Nikolai, and he with her, and gets pregnant. Her dream is to strike a blow against false ideology, and Agnessa and Nikolai conspire to bomb the foundations of the new Palace of the Soviets. (In reality, this megalomaniac construction project was dismantled and abandoned during WW2.) Depending on the audience's choices, this may or may not succeed, but either way, they end up getting caught.

There's a subplot about a middle-aged couple, a Russian man and a Ukrainian woman. The woman's entire family has starved to death in Holodomor, the famine in Ukraine that Stalin intentionally exacerbated. She has taken to the dangerous practice of icon worshipping. And there's a very minor subplot about Sergei's ability to find enough traitors to condemn to death.

It's all interesting enough, and the underlying research is immaculate. But I'm not entirely sold on the plot or the characters. There's something nihilistic about it. The three men have all found ways to submit to the state. It's only the women who dare to have any individuality: Dariya through her religious parctices, and Agnessa through her political action. But surely Dariya's husband, Georgy, is right when he points out that God will also listen if you don't endanger yourself with the possession of physical icons. As for Agnessa... in another review, I read the suggestion that we are supposed to empathise with her political ideals. But I don't believe that. Sure, Trotsky looks pretty good when you compare him to Stalin's terror and remind yourself of the fact that Stalin had him killed with an axe. But Milo has no doubt very carefully chosen to highlight one particular episode from Trotsky's thinking in the play: his stance on the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion. In that rebellion against the Bolsheviks, sailors and civilians demanded, and I'm quoting Wikipedia:

reduction in Bolshevik power, newly elected *soviets* to include socialist and anarchist groups, economic freedom for peasants and workers, dissolution of the bureaucratic governmental organs created during the civil war, and the restoration of civil rights for the working class.

*To Sea in a Sieve* is a prequel to *To Hell in a Hamper*, J. J. Guest's 2003 game where you find yourself in a hot air balloon with a crazy person who has brought way too many heavy items. That game was a sequence of puzzles about getting rid of all these objects; because if you don't, you're both going to die. The setup of *To Sea in a Sieve* is... more or less identical, except that this time you're in a boat, and your companion is a pirate captain who wants to bring all his treasures. I wonder if the character of the pirate captain was inspired by the captain from Ryan Veeder's game *Captain Verdeterre's Plunder*, or whether Veeder and Guest are just both leaning into standard pirate tropes.

I looked up my review of *To Hell in a Hamper* and found this final paragraph:

My single complaint is that the game doesn't actually contain that many *jokes*. It has a good comic setup, and some of the stuff you discover inside Booby's coat is hilarious; but there are few events or descriptions in the rest of the game that make one laugh or smile. This game would have benefited from having Admiral Jota as a co-author; his gift for stuffing a game full of funny remarks would have been very effective here.

Heist games are well-known genre, and with good reason. There's a clear goal that requires ingenuity to achieve; there's a spatial and temporal element that fits IF world building well; and of course here are opportunities for puzzles and suspense. As others have noted, The Finders Commission starts of with some pretty bizarre world building (and a weird choice between what seem to be five indistinguishable characters). But then it quickly turns into a fairly standard heist game. There's the museum; there are some people to either manipulate or watch out for; a few opportunities for puzzle solving; and if it all goes well, you walk out with the loot!

Apart from one possible bug (the box that I believe I needed to turn off the alarm suddenly disappeared from my inventory), everything was solidly implemented. It's bit strange that you cannot investigate the display before launching the chariot -- the first few times I tried, I got interrupted, but later on the room was empty and I still wasn't allowed to read the label. This threw me for a while. But I ended up solving the puzzles without too much trouble, felt some nice tension as I had to defeat a timed sequence, and was satisfied. There's nothing truly memorable or innovative about the game, but it succeeds at being what it wants to be.

The biggest mystery of all was the breakfast my character claimed to be their favourite: buttermilk biscuits with sausage gravy. This sounded like the worst and most implausible thing in existence, so I did some googling, and found recipes in which I saw: biscuits that did not look like biscuits; sausages that did not look like sausages (but more like the minced meat you might put into a sausage); and most of all, gravy that really, really did not look like gravy. From what I gathered, it was more something like minced meat in a creamy sauce. All of which left me only more flabbergasted. Cookies served with meat and cream? As a breakfast? Now this is a mystery someone should make a game about!

Allison's game is a very effective piece that puts you into the role of someone who stutters, as they get through a day in which they need to perform several tasks that involve talking. Interactivity is key. By giving you the choices that the protagonist faces, and letting you live through their successes and failures, Dysfluent does more to generate understanding of what it's like to stutter than a non-interactive story does. The use of slow timed text, usually a big no-no, is actually something you are not allowed to complain about in this case. To complain about it would be to refuse to put yourself in the protagonist's shoes -- and while that's fine for, let's say, some random horror game, it's not fine for a piece that is all about generating understanding of a real-world phenomenon.

I love the use of colours in this game: green dialogue options are easily said, yellow ones will come out with some difficulty, red indicates a full-on block. I assume that it's a good reflection of how the protagonist experiences their stuttering. It's not a complete surprise; there's some premonition of what you'll be able to say, and what you won't be able to say (as easily). And it generates some excellent dilemmas. The best of those is during the job interview, where you can choose fluency (green) or accurateness (yellow). Of course you choose accuracy. And then you get another choice, but not fluency is green and accurateness is red. Ouch. What do you do? It's a tough call, and of course that's precisely the point. (I also enjoyed the sense of dread when, after telling the game what my favourite food was, I also had to tell it what my least favourite food was...)

If I have any criticism, it might be that the way the world reacts to the protagonist is so insensitive that it strains incredibility. Especially the flashbacks are all just straightforwardly horrible. I hope they weren't taken from real life, though they have something of the autobiographical about them. It seems to me that even when I was a kid, stuttering was explained to me in terms that were far more nuanced than those used by the supposedly professional specialist we meet here in the therapy scene.

But overall, I think this is simple a very good piece of interactive fiction. It's solid as fiction, built on smart design decisions, and it's effectiveness as a tool for generating understanding boosts it further.

The best moment in The Sculptor is the description of the final statue. This is a hard moment for any artist. When you're writing about a fictional masterwork, you need to describe a masterwork in terms that make it believable for the reader -- but of course, without having to actually make that masterwork yourself. Here's what Yakoub gives us: an old nude man, wrestling down a falcon that attempts to peck his heart, raising a scythe with which to kill the falcon; meanwhile, the old man is being strangled by his own beard, and water flows around his feet, washing the shame away.

What I love about this is how it audaciously combines several motifs from European art into a single vision. The man is, clearly, Old Man Time, or Death, with his scythe. But he's also Saint Michael fighting the dragon, as well as Prometheus, his innards being pecked at by a bird. And being strangled by his own beard, well, this cannot help but remind one of Laocoön being strangled by the snakes. As for the water, I heard these lines of Elliot in my mind:

A painter of the Umbrian school
Designed upon a gesso ground
The nimbus of the Baptized God.
The wilderness is cracked and browned
But through the water pale and thin
Still shine the unoffending feet
And there above the painter set
The Father and the Paraclete.

On the marble's waves ran the memories of your lost days.
And through them shimmered back the reflection of tears, now held up by your thirsty, wrinkled lids.

On the marble's waves danced the memories of lost days, shimmering and distorted as one, two, three tears squeezed past your wrinkled lids.

Is The Little Match Girl my favourite fairytale? There are other fairytales that have better, more interesting stories. But ever since I was a kid, The Little Match Girl has had a special place in my heart because it makes me cry. Not that it's that hard to make me cry. In fact, dear readers, it's (in)famously easy. When in Piglet's Big Movie Piglet realised that the other animals were really his friends, I cried. And I was 40 years old when I watched it. When I and my wife have a spat, I usually end up holding back my tears while my wife complains that it's no fun being angry with me because I cry too easily. But most fairytales don't go for the tear ducts. Except, of course, for The Little Match Girl, which goes for it in the most direct and melodramatic way possible. What can I say? It's not great art, but I love it.

Although The Little Match Girl 4 is ostensibly by Hans Christian Andersen, it doesn't have much to do with the original story. Not having played the previous instalments, I rely on the in-game background to tell you that the original little match girl, instead of dying in the Copenhagen snows, found that the she could travel through time and space by looking intensely into a fire. She then became a sharpshooter and vampire hunter, as well as the adopted daughter of Dickens's Scrooge, who christened her Ebenezabeth. All of which makes little sense. Luckily, however, Ryan Veeder has a talent for taking something that makes little sense and then handling it as if he had no inkling about its senselessness... and then it starts making sense. Throwing together crazy ideas and then revelling in their craziness tends to get old pretty fast. But throwing together crazy ideas and then moving forward as if it's all perfectly normal, well, that is a way to generate unique and memorable settings. And I don't know if there's anyone in the IF scene who has developed that technique as much as Ryan has.

TLM4 is a light puzzle parser game with all the impeccable writing and smooth gameplay that one expects from a Veeder game. It's supposedly inspired by *Metroid Prime*, which I haven't played, but I gather that the basic idea is that you get new powers as you move forward, and these powers open up new passageways in areas you have already visited. In this case, your list of powers is simple: the ability to transport through fire, shooting flaming bullets, turning into a mouse, scanning things, and unlocking anything. All the puzzles in the game require you to use one of these powers, so it's fairly easy to get through everything without using the hints. You'll visit a wide variety of locations, which are heavily interconnected, and all of which correspond to one or another standard genre trope: dinosaurs, vampires, pirates, the Old West, spaceships. But Ryan brings enough charm and slight twists to each of them to make them feel fresh. The vampires are trapped in a terrible endless meeting; the pirates are, if I'm not mistaken, straight from Gilbert & Sullivan; the spaceship is being looted by space pirates who are more interested in vague mischief than real harm; and the journal you find near to an abandoned mine is... not what you expect. It doesn't cohere into a single setting, but all of it is fun.

The most intriguing thing about TLM4 is its tone. So much about it screams 'light-hearted fun' that I'm tempted to say that this is a game of light-hearted fun. The off-beat genre takes. The smooth, simple puzzles. The standard video game trajectory of getting more and more powers. The basic treasure finding plot line. And yet... it is quite obvious that at least one person is not having fun, and that is the little match girl herself. She is, if not quite a tormented person, at the very least troubled; even, perhaps, a little dead on the inside. We are told repeatedly that she no longer has the ability to be astonished at the majestic grandeur of the universe. She claims to make friends in all kinds of places, but she doesn't make friends at all, and the only person she has an emotional connection with is a guy she cannot forgive. And then there's a brief scene where we are transported back to Copenhagen, to the snow, to the hovel where she, as a child, is suffering with her brothers and sisters, waiting for salvation. It's all there in the game, but it's never really thematised; it's not hidden, but still never allowed to take over from the light-hearted fun.

I'm tempted to read all of that as a parable of Ryan Veeder's creative activity. If you follow him, you see a man who creates fun in many ways: elaborate RPG campaigns, highly polished IF games, cute plush toys, music tracks. But there's a darkness there too, never allowed to take over the work, but never quite absent. Like the little match girl, Veeder is shooting his flaming bullets around for all of us to enjoy -- but who knows how he feels on the inside?

Which is probably terrible psychologising. But hey, that's a parable for *my* creative activity; always trying to bring that darkness to light, get it out in the open, put it at the centre of attention, and then, if I really indulge myself (which I usually try not to), go for the tear ducts. What can I say? I love it.

Magor is an Italian cheese made up of alternating layers of Mascarpone and Gorgonzola. (The name, which is an obvious portmanteau of the names of the two constituting cheeses, is apparently mostly used in the Netherlands.) It's what you buy when the strong taste of Gorgonzola seems a bit too much, and you want something smoother, less adventurous. Of course, when you're eating it, the enjoyment is somewhat tinged by regret. Why didn't you get the straight Gorgonzola?

Magor is also an old magician in Larry Horsfield's extensive Alaric Blackmoon series, of which this is the first game I've played. He's more the goofy Merlin from Disney's The Sword in the Stone than a serious Gandalf type, prone as he is to losing his spectacles, and given as he is to using most of his magical talents for the production of whisky. But Magor is pretty effective when he wants to be. When the king and duke Blackmoon come to you and ask you to find out what their family connection is, you quickly solve a sequence of problems (all there for you in the Tasks list) and give them the answer they crave.

I've had less-than-optimal experiences with Adrift games in the past, having fought the parser much more than I'd like to. But Magor Investigates... is truly one of the smoothest parser experiences ever. Whether we should thank Adrift 5 for that, or whether Larry is just a really good implementer and had really good testers, I don't know, but it's something for which the game must be applauded. Larry is certainly responsible for the detailed implementation of objects, the quality of life features, the useful messages when you're doing things not quite right, and all the other little touches that make the game feel helpful and interested in your success.

I'm less sold on the aesthetics of the game. Like many Adrift games, it has the look and feel of a 1996 website hosted on GeoCities, with sans serif fonts in multiple colours on a black background. The only thing that's missing are animated gifs that make fun of Bill Gates! At one point, the game even seemed to switch to Comic Sans... but that must have been an illusion. It must have been. Of course none of this really impacts one's enjoyment of the game, but I don't understand why the Adrift Runner doesn't look a little bit more professional. (I should try Frankendrift to see if that's better.)

On to the substance of the game. As Magor, you have to solve a sequence of 'puzzles' in order to get the information the king and the duke wants. I've put 'puzzles' between scare quotes not because the puzzles are especially scary, but because they're not scary at all; they're so not scary that one wonders whether they are really puzzles, or simply tasks one has to perform. Not that I minded. I liked pottering about, relaxing, enjoying the descriptions, which are pretty enjoyable in a low-key, relaxed way. It's a no stress 'adventure'. I've put 'adventure' between scare quotes not because... well, I guess you get the idea.

Indeed, although my play experience had been extremely smooth and quite enjoyable, I nevertheless wondered why all of it had been *this* low-key. The central stakes of the game are so incredibly tame. The king and duke already know that they are related, and now they want to know exactly where in their vast lineage this link happened... well, turns out it was six generations ago. Not very exciting, but they immediately start a huge party! I think it would have been way more surprising if two nobles had not been related to each other in the sixth generation, and it also got me thinking that the Axe of Kolt, which can only be used by those with the blood of... I forgot his name... must be usable by, oh, I don't know, but after so many generations, it must be usable by almost everyone in the kingdom, right? Anyway... I suppose I was eager for a little more adventure. It was really nice to play this game, but next time, I'd prefer to leave out the Mascarpone and go for the straight Gorgonzola.

I'll spend some of this review being critical about the prose of this entry, but I'd like to start with the good stuff, of which there is quite a bit. First off, there's the pictures. There's not that many of them, but they help not only set the mood, but also make the people you interact with more concrete. The immediate, visual knowledge of who it is that has walked into the coffee shop somehow makes the encounters more real; and therefore it makes it all the more disconcerting when you have to pick one of them as the potential serial killer. It's all the more disconcerting because there is literally no reason to think any one of them is guilty of so heinous a crime, and the only reason you, as a player, are likely to pick a name anyway, is that the police imply very strongly that they'll try to prosecute you if you don't.

The scenario is pretty fun too! It's a good choice to start the game with the police interrogation. This ensures that the coffee shop scenario, which is relatively slow in terms of the build-up of tension, is immediately charged. You're already looking at all the NPCs with suspicion, which is precisely what the games wants you to do. And it feels less strange that the protagonist is so easily scared, because we know that's she's right to be scared. I enjoyed wondering what was going on, and I enjoyed no knowing what to do when I was called on to accuse someone. Then... well, depending on what you choose, you may either be left in the dark (which I suspect is not a very satisfying ending to get) or you may find out what is really happening... and that's pretty horrific. A good twist ending that left me blinking in disbelief for a while. (On further reflection, it's an extremely literal take on the idea that you shouldn't fear people who don't look like you, but you should fear people who DO look like you. A pretty good idea for a horror story!)

I don't think you can do much in the game to learn more about what is happening, or to change the outcome. If you can, I'd love that, and it would raise my rating of the game. But I didn't find any promising avenues to explore.

Okay, so as I indicated in the beginning, the weakest part of *Please Sign Here* is the prose. It's always possible to understand it, but it's marred by frequent grammatical mistakes and sentences that don't quite work in a variety of ways. Sometimes it's a metaphor gone awry:

Silence cuts through Jackie's next intended sentence.

The cop returns the evidence and brings forth new ones.

Until close! No butts!

It begins to thunder outside, and the lights of the store flickers. Jackie makes a move to look out the window, rain blearing reality and greyness together. The road is empty, and the light from the streetlamp barely illuminates against the concrete.