Ratings and Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

This is the third game I played in the 2018 IF Comp in which the protagonist’s not being (strictly) heterosexual is important, making it something of a theme in the competition. That said, Time Passed actually doesn’t make a big deal about it. The story is essentially about an unconfessed teenage love and the protagonist’s desire to find out, years afterwards, what would have happened if he had found the nerve to speak out; the fact that the object of desire was another boy does not heavily impact the narrative.

In terms of structure, the first few pages gives us some links that lead to optional extras; and then we arrive at a single choice moment that determines which ending we get. (Spoiler - click to show)We either never meant anything to the person we had a crush on, or it turns out that they might have responded somewhat favourably.

The writing is quite good, although I felt that the diary entry didn’t really capture the tone of a teenage diary. For instance:

It’s true that I would give anything to feel Billy’s love, but I’d also do anything to avoid the feeling of rejection, and those two desires are in conflict with each other.

Nightmare Adventure comes an an executable file that has to be opened, at least under Linux, in the terminal. A bit weird, but it works. Unfortunately, the home-brew parser seems to have been built in complete ignorance of conveniences that have been standard for, I don’t know, three or four decades? You cannot abbreviate “examine” to “x”, “inventory” to “i” or “go east” to “e” or even “go e”. You cannot refer to the ruby amulet as “amulet”, but have to type out the entire name. I tried to wear or drop the amulet, but was unable to do so. What doesn’t help is that “verbs” gives you a gigantic list of all the synonyms of every verb. (Friendly advice to the developers: players don’t need to know synonyms! They only need to know which base verbs are supported.) Also, there’s no save/restore/undo. So why exactly are we using this system instead of Inform or TADS or Quest or Adrift?

The game itself is rather sparsely implemented, but clued well enough that I proceeded through it without much trouble. I (Spoiler - click to show)walked through the village, collected amulets, entered the towers, visited all the rooms, and ended up in a dream world among the stars. And then: instant death. In a game which does not support save/restore or undo. I’m afraid that equaled instantly losing this player.

In a sense it’s impressive that a home-brew system works this well, but the designers/authors really need to play some modern parser games in order to get a good sense of what are and what are not acceptable standards today.

In Pegasus, we play a commando on a mission gone horribly wrong: you and your team mate are trapped and she will sacrifice herself so you can get out. At that point, the game turns into a series of flashbacks that tell the story of how you got to be in this situation. This is really quite neat: they are tightly choreographed scenes in which you are continually doing non-standard things that move the plot forward at a brisk page. The early scene where your teamwork is tested, for instance, is a great example of how to do something like that in a parser game. Really nice. I seem to recall that The Duel That Spanned the Ages had a bit of a similar feel, although that game was even more about straight action scenes.

The narrative development isn’t quite up to the same standards. The personalities of the two protagonists remain rather vague, as does the nature of the Pegasus organisation. We learn that (Spoiler - click to show)Sarah was pressed into service, but this fact isn’t developed any further. In the end, what it comes down to is that the game is simply too short: I was extremely surprised when the game ended, because it felt like I had just played through the first chapter of what was going to be at least a three chapter story: disaster, investigation, revenge. Instead, we have a sort of moral choice, but we’re not invested enough to give this a real punch.

Should have been significantly longer. That’s a complaint, but also a compliment.

In Junior Arithmancer, we play a prospective student of magic doing an entrance examination in arithmancy, which is more or less the magic of the integers. More or less: the range of numbers is restricted to a finite interval, with overflows wrapping around; and the laws of magic turn out to have a curious in-built preference for the decimal system. Anyway, during the examination we are supposed to learn and then cast spells that add, subtract, multiply, and so on, in order to create specific sequences of numbers. Meanwhile, three examiners comment on our progress.

It is really only that last element that turns the game into a fiction: the comments of the examiners form a satirical story about university politics and cast severe doubt on the wisdom of trying to enter this particular academy. (Unless we like indoor swimming pools.) It’s fun, but there’s not much here, and if someone were to complain that Junior Arithmancer is hardly interactive fiction at all… well, I wouldn’t have a principled counterargument, although I certainly could point at similar puzzle games that are part of the IF canon.

Because it’s all about the puzzles. And if you like puzzles about numbers, then these ones are glorious. They’re brilliant. At first, the aim is to use your limited repertoire of spells to get as far as possible in recreating the given number sequences. Then, as your repertoire grows, it’s all about completing the sequences. And once you have all the spells at your disposal, you have to try to optimise your solutions and solve an entirely independent set of puzzles that are all about getting to a specific end point. (And about factorisation.) It’s great fun, and I think the difficulty scales up nicely: most(?) players will be able to get to a winning ending, and diehards can try to achieve a perfect score.

I’m a diehard, and I did get a perfect score.

Junior Arithmancer is certainly not a game for everyone. You have to like number puzzles. (I won’t say ‘mathematics’, because the puzzles are not really mathematics. If I had been required to prove that a certain sequence is the only one you can solve in three moves, that would have been mathematics. Equally glorious, but a lot harder to turn into a game.) But if you do, well, Mike Spivey has prepared a real treat for you. Highly recommended.

Birmingham IV is quite polished; nothing wrong with it in terms of basic craft. A couple of things soon rubbed me the wrong way, though, especially the annoying sentence you see after every examining action, and the inventory limit. The “I’ll drop you in the middle of something but won’t tell you who you are or what you are supposed to be doing” school of plotting is also not my favourite. Still, I was willing to persevere.

Then I hit the puzzles. The solution for getting past the guy on the bridge was so far out that I seriously doubt I would ever have arrived at it even if I had found all the necessary objects; but getting one of those objects in fact requires you to go into a direction that is not mentioned in the relevant room description! That bumps the puzzle into the unfair-and-impossible category. The next puzzle is getting past the troll, and here the solution doesn’t even make any sense. Why on earth does a troll go away if (Spoiler - click to show)I give it a portrait of my brother? Having lost all faith in my –- or anyone’s –- ability to solve this game’s puzzles, I decided to abandon it.

The pictures are nice, that’s for sure, but three things made Space Punk Moon Tour hard to play for me. First, the immense number of objects. I thought it would just be the first room, but then the second room printed out a whole list of things as well. Every object takes up some of the player’s mental space, and this is really pushing it. This is aggravated by the second point: lack of implementation. Many of the objects don’t have a description… so why do they exist? Or you can’t do obvious actions with them, such as climbing the bed or the Air Fresh -– the latter being a big thing clearly right under the cat, and so the apparently obvious solution to the getting-the-cat-puzzle. Sometimes, even actions that the game expressly tells you to perform are not implemented: if you open the Air Fresh, the game tells you to read its inner contents with your phone, but none of the four objects inside the Air Fresh can be read with your phone.

But the third and main problem is the constant battle with the parser. Exchanges like this were fairly typical of my play experience:

get on bed
I can’t see that.

enter bed
I don’t understand your command.

climb bed
You can’t climb it.

get in bed
I can’t see that.

take science book
Do you want to pack it?

yes
I don’t see that.

A game of smooch.click consists of three to four small vignettes, each of which ends when you make one of three choices; and then… a kiss! Of varying quality. Immensely varying quality, if you take into account the most negative ending, which is certainly worse than any real kiss has ever been. In the accompanying walkthrough the author explains the underlying mechanics, which I appreciate (and which motivated me to seek both special endings).

The vignettes are taken in random order from a pool of possibilities, which means that the emerging narrative is quite disjointed. In most cases, I would not be a big fan of such an approach, but for smooch.click, it works. What, after all, do you remember from the date leading up to that first kiss? Some moments, not a coherent story. And it really brings home the message that that delicate thing that maybe we can call ‘mood’, and that determines how our kiss will be received, that this mood depends on the smallest of events, barely noticeable, often indeed unnoticed.

This theme reminds me very much of Railways of Love. But that game worked towards a more serious, more profound conclusion, where smooch.click is happy to remain as fleeting as a kiss. Which is, in its own way, appropriate. Light but recommended

As far as I could determine by playing through the game twice, Campfire Tales is an extremely short horror story in which a few bits of text are randomly determined, but not enough to make any real difference to the narrative. Interaction consists of typing in some names, clicking a next-button a few times, and answering two open questions that do not, I think, affect the story at all.

The prose is at best barely coherent. Your group is, for instance, described in the following way: “They owned a collection of lonesome owl figurines and they spent their days dreaming about getting super fit.” That makes little sense, but a lot more than the next sentence, which makes no sense at all: “Most people would describe them as the merest person that they have ever met”. What? A few sentences later, I’m walking on “the parametric ground” and I’m told that “[t]hey culturally grabbed the nearest stone”. The English language should sue the author for assault and battery.

Institute for Advanced Genetics or Incomplete Adventure Game: I.A.G. Alpha presents itself as an unfinished alpha version of a game set in a dubious research facility. The purported story is hackneyed in the extreme, with an obsessed scientist failing to ask questions about the ethics of his work until one day he finds out that his partner has not really been finding ‘volunteers’ at all… after which there’s a dramatic rooftop fight and the good and the bad guy both die. Fortunately, this story is merely the backdrop for something much more interesting: our quest to get through the game using the debugger.

There are, in essence, three stages to the game. In the first, we use the debugger to solve puzzles. For instance, we (Spoiler - click to show)click on a plant and find out that it contains a key, after which we obtain it. This use of the debugger is optional, but it was already fun, and I found myself relying on it extensively. In the second, we learn to use the debugger’s single active power, which is the power to rename objects. Our insights into the source code of the different objects in the world allows us to solve puzzles through smart renaming. Serhii Mozhaiskyi does a good job of guiding us through progressively harder versions of this puzzle, although I must admit that I got stuck at (Spoiler - click to show)the axe. (I spent a lot of time trying something far too complex: rename an object to axe", is_fixed = true –, in order to add real source code to the object. Of course that didn’t work, and the solution was far simpler.) In the third stage, (Spoiler - click to show)we are invited to use our expertise to change the plot against the fictional author’s wishes, exploiting a bug-like feature in the source code of one of the objects.

All of this was a lot of fun and I.A.G. Alpha is a very memorable game. I do think the author could have been more subtle about the third stage: it would have been much more satisfying to (Spoiler - click to show)defeat the fictional author’s plot without first having been told, quite explicitly, that this was the idea of the game. Perhaps the real author was afraid that too many people would then miss this possibility? Perhaps – but I think that’s a risk very much worth taking.

Dungeon Detective is a game with a lot of promise, but it doesn’t quite live up to it. Let’s start with the promise. The idea of somehow lampooning old-school dungeon crawl adventures is, of course, almost as hackneyed as those adventures themselves. But Dungeon Detective finds a way of doing this that I have never seen before, which is pretty impressive. A dungeon has been looted by a band of adventurers, and you are the detective tasked with finding out who the culprits were, so that they can be persecuted. Nice.

The second good thing about the game is the player character. You play as a gnoll, and especially the early game suggests a fictional world and a character of some originality: you have been sent to university by the Spotmother, apparently a matriarch ruling over a rather diverse community of gnolls, some of whom embrace violence, and some of whom, like the player character, are pacifist. Add ADHD kobolds and a civilised dragon, and we’re in a fantasy world that manages to be utterly D&D and yet fresh.

Finally, the game manages to set up a fair challenge by requiring close attention to detail and good memorisation of important details. In order to solve the mystery, for instance, you have to (Spoiler - click to show)connect a herb later on in the game to a seemingly throwaway remark about that same herb much earlier. I thought this worked well, although I might think that simply because I could still recall the details and got a sense of satisfaction from this.

With all this set-up, it is a bit disappointing that there isn’t that much to the game proper. Once you enter the dungeon, you simply walk around and spot a few important clues that reveal the identities of the culprits in a very straightforward way. I was expecting a bigger dungeon, a need for more complicated reasoning, and certainly much more emphasis on the special abilities of the protagonist. He isn’t called ‘Sniff’ for nothing, but his sense of smell plays only a minor role in the solution to the mystery. I was also expecting the game to go on after the dungeon, with the protagonist having to track down the culprits and help bring them to justice –- this was certainly foreshadowed by some of the dragon’s remarks –- but instead the game ends rather abruptly once you have found all the clues. I thought this didn’t do enough justice to the interesting world and character. For instance, then protagonist’s pacifism doesn’t come into play at any time during the game.

There were also some unfortunate bugs, indeed, a somewhat surprising amount. For instance, my character made a torch that would last for the entire dungeon several times in the dungeon, as if the game just forgot to set the right flag. Certain investigative actions suddenly disappeared from the list of options for no discernible reason. Most irritatingly, as the game came near its end, the list of clues was suddenly empty –- I couldn’t review what I had discovered! Luckily, I still remembered it all, including the name of the city, but otherwise this would have been extremely unpleasant.

I wanted to really like Dungeon Detective, and to some extent I did… but it needs polish and also, in my opinion, extension.