Ratings and Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

IRL: The Game was written by Julia Mkivic and accompanies a book by Chris Stedman. I haven't read the book, but it supposedly explores the challenges and opportunities of living part of our lives online; and the game is a companion piece that allows players to think through these issues for themselves.

Unfortunately, IRL: The Game reduces a nuanced and multi-dimensional issue to a series of black-and-white questions that float in a narrative void. The basic idea of the game is that you are following several people on social media. Three appear regularly: a cartographer who is struggling with how to best resist the way that gentrification destroys existing communities; an online performer (possibly drag, but I'm getting that more from the book description than from the game itself) who loves being in front of their audience; and someone who is organising a furry convention. The idea is that all of them are struggling with how to weigh their online presence against their physical contacts. Each of them asks you several questions, and you can always answer these with either a pro-online or a pro-offline option. Depending on how many you chose, the final screen will give you a different description of how they continue. For instance, the furry organiser will either organise a fully in-person conference, or organise a partly online conference.

So... yeah. Online and offline interact in complex ways, and getting a bunch of dichotomous questions that make me choose either one or the other isn't really getting me to think about any of the complexities involved. Furthermore, the game doesn't even attempt to hook the choices up to the unfolding narrative. Yes, your answers determine what exactly the characters will do. But what the characters do has no effect on me, on the questions I receive, on how I feel about things. One does not in the least identify with the outcomes.

A missed opportunity, one feels, and certainly not one that made me eager to read the book.


(I played this game as part of an IFDB Spelunking expedition where I try to play through ten random games.)

How do we approach the singularity? is a choice-based game written in Quest. At the time of writing this review (February 2023) the online version of the game throws an error, but downloading the game and playing it in the Quest interpreter works fine.

In terms of structure, the game isn't very adventurous. Most passages give only one choice. Where there are two choices, one of them usually leads to an untimely end, often immediately. In effect, there is only one route through the story. While walking this route, the player will have to contend with many spelling and grammar errors, including some that a cursory spell check would have found.

I still kind of liked the game. You are a soldier from Earth sent on a military mission against an invading alien army. The mission is action-packed, fast-paced, and, most importantly, written with creative energy. While you have played or read or viewed similar scenes before in similar stories, they nevertheless tend to have their own unique twist. And of course the mission is more than it originally seems to be, and the end has something to do with the singularity. It doesn't make too much sense, perhaps, and we end up having to make a big choice with very little information or investment, but still -- the journey wasn't boring.

(I played this game as part of an IFDB Spelunking expedition where I try to play through ten random games.)

I'm not particularly given to nostalgia for old school adventure games, but ANDROMEDA 1983 gets it right. The graphics and music are fitting and fun, and the minimal descriptions are used to great effect, with 'talk to stranger' in the first room setting the tone brilliantly. If anything, I would have liked to see more of this slightly over-the-top logic.

ANDROMEDA 1983 quickly turns into a small puzzle game. The puzzles are fair and not too difficult. I used a walkthrough twice, but mostly because it was time for me to go to bed and I wanted to finish the piece. The first thing I looked up was something I should have tried myself. The second was for the final command, and that was more or a syntax problem. (More verbs could have been accepted there.)

I didn't play the original game, so I can't make a comparison, but ANDROMEDA 1983 is a nice diversion that is enhanced by its graphics and music.

(I played this game as part of an IFDB Spelunking expedition where I try to play through ten random games.)

You actually won't meet a tall dark strangler (as far as I know), but this is the message you get from the fortune teller in the game, whose sole purpose is to make this joke. That gives you a fine impression of Paradise in Microdot. It is (obviously) an old school adventure game that has you walk around the map, struggle with a limited parser, pick up objects, and use them for puzzles that are usually not too hard, but certainly made more difficult by the parser and one's complete inability to gain extra information through the 'examine' verb. There are also quite a lot of riddles. I used the walkthrough by Dorothy Irene to get past the more difficult points.

The game has good-humoured charm. Some of these older adventure games have a tendency to berate the player and make fun of them. There's a little bit of that here, but mostly the game seems to enjoy your success. It throws pictures of smiling people and animals at you when you've solved a puzzle. And one just feels that the author enjoyed themselves a lot when they came up with the riddles and the weird locations.

You can play the game on your own PC on a ZX Spectrum emulator (though I couldn't get my keyboard input to function) or online. The online emulator wasn't entirely stable, and when the game crashed on me close to the end, I decided to not replay everything. But I suspect that the final parts will not be too different from the earlier ones.

(I played this game as part of an IFDB Spelunking expedition where I try to play through ten random games.)

In Rough Draft we take the role of Denise, an author of children's fiction who is plagued by the combination of an approaching deadline and writer's block. She decides to just start typing whatever comes into her head. Our job, as players, is to make choices about where to take the story. Almost all of these choices lead to dead ends in the writing process, but some of them give Denise an idea that she can then use in another branch of the story. Thus we need to visit the unsuccessful stories in order to be able to construct the successful one.

The story that we are writing is not very inspired, but it does the job. The game gives us a visual representation of all the story lines, which is very helpful indeed. Care has clearly gone into the presentation of the game.

Some things about the game are puzzling. For instance, it's not just ideas from one story branch that pop in another, but so do items -- we can use items that we haven't actually obtained yet. I suppose that we are to understand that Denise will later restore continuity. More importantly, it seems to me that the process presented to us by the game has little to do with the process of writing a story. Denise has only a starting situation, and nothing else -- shouldn't she think about at least some structure, or an ending, or something like that, before just writing? But I suppose just writing is a possible technique. But even then, surely the problem you run into and the solution you need is never going to be 'I don't know how to continue this story here in the forest, let's start again from the beginning but now they go to the mountains'. That's just not the kind of change that could be relevant to getting a plot sorted out.

(I played this game as part of an IFDB Spelunking expedition where I try to play through ten random games.)

When people come across systems for writing choice-based stories, and then start writing a quick first game without much forethought, usually one of two things happen. Either the author focuses fully on exploring the system, neglecting the narrative and creating a game that goes like: 'You're on a street. Do you go left or right?' Or the author becomes somewhat giddy with all the possibilities offered by a branching story, creating a game that goes in all kinds of directions without forming a meaningful whole. Bender Lyfe is very much that second type of game.

Our protagonist is an aspiring football (soccer) player who is almost late for high school. Depending on where we go in the house, and what we do and do not investigate, we usually end up at one improbable death or another. The game is not without some humour in the form of dramatic irony; in one passage, we are given the opportunity to follow a man who tells us that he has candy in the back of his windowless unmarked van, something that doesn't set off any alarms for our protagonist. This unwise course of action in fact leads to a very unexpected (Spoiler - click to show)death by watching too much football.

If one is willing to click through all the choices in this very short game, one can even find a happy ending that involves... football. But there is not much reason to make this effort.

Here’s what I like most: the fact that we’re playing a variant of rock-paper-scissors where you are told in advance what the opponent’s move will be. Of course this makes it utterly trivial to win the fight that’s playing out in this cyborg arena; but that’s precisely how you’re clued in to the fact that winning isn’t the point. Making the audience happy, that’s the point, even though that may involve taking some heavy hits yourself. This is not a real fight; it is a cooperative ballet. And your partner trusts you so much that they never conceal what they’re planning to do. That’s the subtlety. That’s what you have to realise.

All of this is placed in a serviceable framework, but apart from the mechanic described above there’s not much subtlety to be found. The political commentary is simple to the point of being simplistic and so are the emotional strings that get pulled. It works; but it’s no more than a vehicle for delivering this one brilliant idea: combat as trust.

Reason to play this game: it makes us think about the narrative potential of combat mechanics.

I Should Have Been That I Am is a short game, but it has a surprising amount of variability in its text: as the robot protagonist follows one or another line of thought, the card game they are playing plays out differently. (I didn’t fully understand the card game -– it seems to be poker, but it was unclear to me whose cards I was seeing. I don’t think this mattered much, though.) But the card game and who wins it isn’t really the point. No matter how it ends, (Spoiler - click to show)the stranger infects you with a virus that suddenly gives you free will. And at that point, the hyperlink interface turns into an interface where you can type anything you want.

The strong aspect of the game is the atmosphere. Using a minimal amount of prose, it paints a distinctive future society, it shows us the peculiar mindset of the protagonist and it manages to create real tension about the stranger. Well done.

The weak aspect of the game is the story it tells. In theory, it’s a nice idea to (Spoiler - click to show)link the two different interfaces to the notion of free will. But it certainly takes a lot more to actually make it work. There is another game about (Spoiler - click to show)robots developing free will in this very competition, and there I complained that it didn’t really confront the problem –- the solution it presented was just too easy. But I Should Have Been That I Am presents a solution that is even easier. (Spoiler - click to show)A virus, and boom! Type in anything you like! Okay, so we should be aware of the immense space of possibilities available to us. But that’s a statement of the problem, not of the solution. And the current effort is weakened further by the fact that the game cannot actually process what you type, so your ‘free’ choice turns out to be even less consequential than the constrained choices you made earlier.

So: great atmosphere, impressive variability of the text, but it’s disappointing that it all boils down to the message: (Spoiler - click to show)you are free! (Really!) I’d like to see a more ambitious, more sustained effort from this author, since the writing skills are certainly here.