Ratings and Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

Our protagonist is a street illusionist, but one whose illusionism is true magic: she can really make people see things that don’t exist or not see things that do. It’s not entirely clear (a) how she gets away with this in the world of ubiquitous smartphones, given that her illusions probably don’t show up on film, and (b) why she is living in abject poverty, given the strength of her powers. But living in abject poverty she is, and one of the first choices offered by the game is whether we should try to get some fast food or illusion ourselves into a posh restaurant.

Doing the latter leads to (Spoiler - click to show)a near disaster, as we apparently manage to kill and then resurrect everyone. Or maybe this was an illusion we played on ourselves? We then meet a girl who we can either trust, in which case we learn that she is a superhero with the powers of telekinesis and so are we, or we meet an insane killer who is very resistant to our illusions, in which case we learn that we are a superhero with the power to shoot lightning bolts. The narrative isn’t very coherent either on one or on multiple playthroughs, and I was left wondering what the point of the story really was.

Haywire is well-written and I enjoyed my time with it, but it feels like a small fragment of what should have been a much larger story.

[Note: this review was written in 2018 during the competition. I have now played more Chandler Groover games, especially the brilliant Eat Me. Also, I believe that Groover wasn't impressed by most interpretations of his game, this one included, so possibly it misses the point!]

Chandler Groover has been a massively productive author in the past few years; but I have been a massively absent reader in those same years, so I can’t compare +=x to his other games. (The only Groover game I’ve played is Rape, Pillage, Makane, which has few obvious connections with the current effort.) I originally thought that I would be in a good position to compare +=x to the 1994 game <a game=1z2lxiqua980sedk>+=3</a>, but the affinities between these games end with the title. Conclusion: I’m going into this game like a blank card into a fortune telling machine. What will be written on me?

The production values of +=x are high, from the very nice cover art to the smart drag-and-drop interface. We quickly catch on to the fact that Groover is exploring a sort of inverse of the standard choice-based pitfall of ‘fake choices’: instead of differently looking choices that in fact lead to the same text, +=x gives us identical looking choices that do not lead to the same text. It’s a nice idea, and it suggests a world in which we are mere playthings of some nameless force we cannot comprehend. It reminds me of nothing so much as of a great passage near the beginning of Pratchett and Gaiman’s Good Omens:

God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players (i.e. everybody), to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

Here I sit amongst the cogs, amongst the code, dealing my cards. Some say that I’m a wizard, and some say I’m a machine. I strike two lines, and those two lines determine what I mean. And what I mean is time, and what I mean by time is space, and what I mean by space is who and how and in what place. It’s faster to travel by not traveling. It’s faster to be when you already are. All it takes is a shift in the continuum to make something near turn into something far. And to make something far become something nearby. To move through the galaxy, just multiply. One atom, one hour, one lifetime displaced, and everything as it exists is erased, replaced by another existence equal to the fuel that I burn when I dip my quill pen. Again, I’ll deal another card. Again, I’ll strike another line. These equations are games in the game I’m inside. Now you’re down too inside the text, where numbers crunch, bullfinches nest. We are the stars, the universe, Alpha Centauri, Betelgeuse. Wherever you or I might be, you’re here right now, and you’re with me.

One of the questions that kept nagging me as I played through Railways of Love was whether the game really had a Russian vibe, or whether I was just imagining this, based on the fact that you can choose between Russian and English. Of course, the long train journey might conjure up images of the Trans-Siberian railway, and the failing lights fit well with a perhaps clichéd idea of the state of household technology in the USSR… but there are long railway trips in the rest of the world too, and I’ve seen the lights in Dutch trains fail at times. But then there was the Progress Program, which sounded ever more like a science fiction version of Marxism-Leninism, 5-year plans included. And when I got to an ending in which the protagonists fail to hook up because one of them is praying and the other cannot refrain from making a hard-line atheist comment, I was certain: this is light years away from Hollywood, and very much in the cultural space also inhabited by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.

The structure of Railways of Love is quite original. The two protagonists are sitting in the train, some minor events happen, and all you can do is try to make them confess to each other. But the situation isn’t quite right, and nothing happens. The potential love affair dies in the bud. Then, you get to replay the game; but this time, you are in control of which events happen. Brilliant -– instead of controlling the protagonists, we control the environment, hoping to get them together. We will fail a few times, revealing more about the people and the culture involved as we do so, but with a little perseverance, we can get them together. At which point we get an ending that is at least as negative as the other ones –- finding somebody who loves you turns out not to be, by itself, the recipe for happiness. Light years away from Hollywood, absolutely, and for me this was the point at which I became really impressed by the game. The sad ending rang true. And yet, it was not the end.

In order to reach the real ending, you have to first find all the other endings. I think the developers should put just a little more effort into steering players who get stuck in the right direction. It is very hard to predict which events will lead to which endings, and the possibility space is large enough that one can get lost exploring it. I certainly did, stuck on 6 of 7 endings. In my particular case this was extra unfortunate because there happened to be a bug in the walkthrough, now supposedly fixed; but the game is so nice and atmospheric that having to use the walkthrough at all is a bit of a bummer.

But getting to 7 of 7 endings is certainly worth it, (Spoiler - click to show)for when we accept our fate, rather than try to change it, the game turns into a neat little comment on the human condition. There are all these wild possibilities that we can fall in love with, but pursuing them will ruin the quiet happiness that is ours. Life is choice, and that means it is sadness, for every choice precludes an infinity of other paths we might have taken. But if we learn to accept the sadness, it is also a joy. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina never learns this lesson; but the protagonists of Railways of Love do. For what is, after all, only a little game, I found it surprisingly moving and surprisingly deep.

After playing two random Spectrum adventures (the very good Celtic Carnage and the decent Time Quest), I was perhaps getting unrealistic expectations about works coming from this community. If so, Shore Leave put me squarely back on my feet.

In this game, you take on the role of a minor character on a big space ship with the aim of getting it to a nice place for your shore leave. I can't say much more than that, because I found the experience deeply off-putting and never got very far. Part of that is the difficulty of getting the game to understand you. For instance, there is a cinema where you have to buy a ticket in order to see a film. There's someone who sells ticket, and someone who keeps you from seeing the film if you don't have one. Now the documentation specifically lists the verb "buy", but no variation of "buy ticket" that I tried had any effect; nor did "get ticket", "buy" by itself, and so on. There were already various points in the game where I knew what I wanted to do, but didn't find the syntax to actually do it.

Possibly I would have tried harder if the content of the game had been more to my liking. But this is a game that is desperate to be funny, yet only made me cringe. Here's an example. When you take the elevator to the main bridge, you end up in a location that is a bridge across a river. That's actually kind of funny. But the room description goes on to say: "As this location is nothing more than a cheap joke you are advised to proceed back to the lift." That really kills the joke for me. Worse are rooms like this: "You are on the main engineering concourse. This is a really boring place and I'm finding it difficult to make it sound otherwise." This is a cardinal sin -- boring the player and then treating the boredom as a joke. And then there's the Terminal Illness ward: "The people here are doomed to spend the rest of their days in this room. [...] South leads to the spare parts room." "You are now in the spare parts room. Bits of body are hanging from the ceiling on large metal hooks."

To me, it all feels as the worst kind of juvenile humour; utterly tasteless and unlikely to get better as the game proceeds. So I'm not exploring it any further. Nevertheless two stars, since from what I've seen this probably is a competently programmed puzzle adventure. There are those to whom it might appeal.

Escape from S.S.A.D.B. is a very primitive adventure game in every respect: prose, story, puzzles, parser. Although it is a very small game with maybe a dozen locations and only a handful of puzzles, it is easy to get stuck because of the unhelpful descriptions and many guess-the-command situations. For example, the very first puzzle is perhaps the most clichéd of all adventure puzzles: retrieving a key that is in the keyhole on the other side of the door, using nothing but a newspaper. However, due to a very unclear description of the situation and an unhelpful parser, I had to resort to the walkthrough to solve it.

It seems that the parser understands only one and two word commands. Okay, I guess you can work around that. But the parser will happily act as if it understood the entire command. So you may write "put X in Y", and the game says "okay", but actually it has only acted on "put X" which it apparently sees as a synonym for "drop X". Of course this is nothing compared to the elevator where the room description tells you that there are buttons labeled 1, 2 and 3... but the game only understand your commands if you write those numbers out as "one", "two" and "three".

Does the story or world or cleverness of the puzzles in any way make up for the pain of interacting with Escape from S.S.A.D.B.? Alas, no. It's just a bare-bones escape scenario involving some crazy adventure logic and an off-hand killing of a 'worker'.

Best avoided.

My review of 9/21: My Story must start with an explanation of how I came to play it, especially since readers of the review will most likely not be able to play it for themselves. I was doing an 'IFDB Spelunking' expedition, where I let the IFDB generate a random list of ten games and then try to play and review them all. One of the games on my list, this one, didn't seem to be available on the internet any longer. Instead of giving up, however, I decided to track down and contact the author, Kronosaurus.

Kronosaurus was very helpful, explaining to me that 9/21: My Story was a very intense and personal game they made when they were around 14 years old. Kronosaurus took it offline a few years later because they thought it was in certain ways immature and not something they wanted out there attached to their name. However, Kronosaurus was also kind enough to send me a copy for my personal perusal, allowing me to write a review of it if it didn't contain any quotes or screenshots. And so that's why I'm able to write this even though you will be unable to find a working download link on this page.

Clearly, my playing experience was heavily coloured by all of this. Had I encountered 9/21: My Story without any context, I would probably have spent a lot more time being annoyed at spelling errors or wondering at the author's artistic intentions. But I hope that even then I would have been open enough to the experience to appreciate this game for what it is: a raw, intense story about how personality and creativity can be killed off at school; how it hurts when you are forced into a mould you don't fit and when your most cherished artistic designs are discarded as worthless trash. The protagonist of our story gets through the day at school by designing maps for a computer game. Their thoughts about this are actually quite detailed and subtle. But they face an abusive teacher who, through contempt, almost succeeds in erasing this part of their life. Almost. For the game -- which even includes an almost-suicide -- ends on a hopeful note.

I found 9/21: My Story engaging and moving. I can also understand the author's desire to keep some distance from it; it is perhaps too personal, too much a document of a particular moment in one's life, and does one want to keep this around for every random person on the internet to give a star rating to? It's not art that rises to the level of objectivity. But the lack of an 'objective perspective' (whatever that may be) is surely part of both the intense pain and the unbelievable glory of being 14.

Not being 14 any more, I rejoice and despair.

In Hippy's Quest you play a young man trying to become a hippy. This reminds me of Frank Zappa's satirical album "We're Only in It for the Money", and there does seem to be a connection between these two works of art. But before we get there, a little about the gameplay. Hippy's Quest is choice-based. Often you choose from a list of option, though now and then there is also free text input. Many options lead to instant death, after which you will have to restart the game. For the rest you'll just have to try everything, hoping to hit on the path that will give you the items you will need -- I assume -- to proceed on your quest.

Ah, yes, the quest. Apparently, this involves entering a hippy hotel in order to register as a hippy; wearing hippy clothes; and then, for reasons that remain obscure, walking to a cliff and climbing down a rope, jumping into a dangerous river, and swimming past a series of lethal rocks.

These lethal rocks are the shareware protection. You need to enter some combination of numbers, but only by sending $10 to John Blake for full registration (or, if you're not rich, maybe sending $5 for 'just the hint kit') will you be told which numbers they are. So it seems that John Blake is, after all, only in it for the money.

Whether anyone enjoyed their random deaths enough to actually send him their hard-earned bucks is a question to which we may never know the answer. If you want my two cents, I'd advise any aspiring hippy to spend it on pot and an acoustic Bob Dylan album instead.

For the first minutes, Three Mile is utterly unremarkable. You and some friends are on a midnight trip towards a haunted road. There's the usual characterisation of the protagonists (the couple who aren't happy together; the socially awkward guy; the girl he's in love with). There's the linear interaction mechanic, which basically just involves clicking on the text to see a new piece of text. Any tension is the tension of anticipation. What will go wrong? What horrors will appear in the night?

And then things change. And I continue behind spoiler tags.

(Spoiler - click to show)The horror never happens to us. The horror is us. Of course it's an old trick to give us only fragments of a story and make us guess at what happened -- what we vaguely imagine is always more horrifying than anything spelled out in detail. And using technological breakdown to create this fragmentary nature is effective, but also a well-worn trope. But what makes Three Mile original and powerful is the fact that the protagonist-author is a manipulative, creepy bastard; and we know that he (he's probably male) is writing and rewriting with the specific goal of manipulating us. This gives everything that we read or see, and every act of interpretation that we perform, an added element of dreadful doubt. If this is what we are shown, if this is the bast face he can put on it, then what really happened? Psychological abysses open up before us.

One more thing: take the trigger warning about self-harm seriously. It's not really the focus of the story, but when it appears it has impact.

Hyper Rift is a choice-based interactive fiction for mobile platforms (Android, iOS, and perhaps also Windows Mobile). It's partly graphical -- you navigate between rooms using arrows on a map -- but almost all information is conveyed to you through text. The game is free, with some small ads in the bottom, and (I believe) the option to purchase an ad-free version if desired. I found the ads no distraction at all.

In Hyper Rift, we find ourselves waking up without memory in the medical bay of a spaceship full of horrors. So far so System Shock, but Hyper Rift is actually centered of saving and leading a large cast of NPCs. While these will mostly silently follow you to the point that they function more as inventory items, in certain situations they will do or say something that has a significant impact on the game. As you lead your (hopefully) growing band of equally amnesiac shipmates through the four levels of the spaceship, you will solve some mathematical puzzles and learn more and more about what was going on on the ship and what might be done to put things right.

Making everything come out in the optimal way seems to be a complex puzzle, requiring significant trial and error as well as careful exploration. From what I've seen, the puzzles have been carefully constructed; and there are more than ten different endings to be reached. While I'm personally not the kind of completionist who will search for them all, and while I'm also not motivated enough to try to get a better ending than my own (probably middle-of-the-road) ending L, I do think that there are many IF enthusiasts for whom this game can mean hours of fun. I certainly enjoyed the 2 to 3 hours I spent with it. Recommended.

In Assignment 46 (a sequel to Assignment 45: A Harry Flynn Adventure) you take on the role of captain Harry Flint, who has to save the galaxy by tracking down a shipment of plutonium. The first thing that happens to you, is that you find a poisonous lizard in your bed; and approximately the second is that you meet a beautiful woman in a casino; so, yes, this is pretty much James Bond in space.

What this also is, is CYOA of the most terrible sort. At every choice point you get a little menu of options, most of which lead to instant or near-instant death. BOOM! Your mission is a failure. You then have to restart the entire game, sitting through some timed text, and try a new option. BOOM! Getting through this partiuclar assignment will require much more patience than this particular reviewer has.