Reviews by Victor Gijsbers
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If on a Winter's Night a Writer..., October 1, 2023A Dark and Stormy Entry was an entry in LOTECH Comp 2001, a competition in which the most important rule was that the games had to have a multiple-choice parser. The title of the game, and the fact that it appeared under the pseudonym of Lord Lobur-Bytton, suggest that it will be a send-up of the bad, purple writing associated with Lord Bulwer-Lytton and his "It was a dark and stormy night" opening sentence. However, there are only a few story branches (the Scotland/gothic ones in particular) that actually present overwritten prose. And a good thing that is too, because that joke would have worn thin very quickly.
In fact, A Dark and Stormy Entry has less to do with Bulwer-Lytton and more with Italo Calvino's book "If on a Winter Night a Traveller...". In that book, Calvino tells the story of a reader who, in their search for a book, comes across opening chapters of many different books. Again and again a story is started that is then abruptly cut of and never finished. The stories are in widely different genres and styles.
This is what Short does in A Dark and Stormy Entry too, except that the player takes the role, not of a reader, but of a writer. We are looking at a blank page, and our job is to make decisions about which story to tell. These decisions lead us into widely different directions, from Calvino-like stories about a philosopher who ties himself to a kite, only to be rescued by a sensual queen; to autobiographical stories about teenagers having to confess that they have had sex to their prudish parents; to clichéd Macbeth-like stories involving witches on the Scottish highlands; to strange explorations of a world that is a cube. All the branches are short, and we are clearly supposed to play the game many times. Sometimes, we are told that the ideas will lead to a novel. Sometimes, we end up with writer's block, or the writing process fails for some other reason.
It's fun and inventive, but I'm not sure it throws any real light on the creative process. Has any writer ever sat down before a blank page with no idea about what to write? This is the opposite at least of my own experience. But my experience need not be universal. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that anyone's brainstorming process would be as chaotic and random as what happens in A Dark and Stormy Entry.
One's feeling at the end of If on a Winter's Night a Traveller... may well be frustration that the author didn't finish any of the books he started. And that may also be one's feeling at the end of this piece, although it's much less pronounced, since here most of the stories are only outlined, without much of the actual prose appearing. I feel the piece might actually work best for a discussion group, where the topic of discussion is: which branches would you most like to see turned into a real story, and why?
Good interface proof-of-concept, September 25, 2023Agnieszka Trzaska is well-known, perhaps even famous, for using choice-based text interfaces to recreate styles of gaming that are more familiar from either parser text games or visual games. Five Scarabs is no exception, and in fact it is meant as a proof-of-concept for a particular interface, one that mimics a certain style of adventure games. At the bottom we have links that correspond to verbs. Once we select a verb, nouns in the room's description become clickable. So we select "Look At", then "golden mask", and we are rewarded with a description of the golden mask. This is clear and intuitive, though the handling of two-noun actions could be explain a little bit better.
The problem with this style of interface is the classic possibility of lawnmowering. You just try every verb with every object, until something happens. The fact that the verb remains selected, which is arguably an essential quality-of-life feature, combined with the ultra fast response time of text interfaces, makes this even more tempting. It takes only a minute to try to open, then close, then talk to, everything in the room! This ensures we can't really get stuck, but also removes a certain need for thinking. I'm not sure what the solution to that is. (Yes, bigger games generate combinatorial explosion, making lawnmowering more tedious... but it's not ideal to make a strategy less palatable merely by making it more tedious! Gamers tend to accept the tedium.)
The story here is slight but perfectly suitable for a quick puzzle game.
The most fun I've ever had writing a cover letter, February 20, 2023I've Attached My CV And Cover Letter is a short game in which you... write a cover letter. The idea is quite brilliant. You're given a word processor interface and you're simply seeing the current state of the letter. Unsatisfactory parts are underlined in red and can be changed by clicking. There are a few cycling links where you get to choose the final words used, but mostly you'll end up in a pre-determined place. That doesn't matter. This is not a game where choice matters, it is a game where you explore the thought processes of someone trying to write a cover letter.
Writing a cover letter is terrible! You need to make yourself look good, which is already a deeply uncomfortable experience, and there's something tangible riding on the result. You also know that chances of success are low. In addition, it is really hard to get a good grasp of how your letter will strike the people that read it. And so you get to agonise over every word. This agonising is portrayed well by Jaime Monedero March, both in its anguish and in its humour. I had fun with this cover letter.
Recommended, especially since it will take you only ten minutes.
(I played this game as part of an IFDB Spelunking expedition where I try to play through ten random games.)
Possibly the only IF game in which you play yeast, February 20, 2023Zymurgy is a SpeedIF game, which means that it was written in a short period of time to fit a certain prompt. In this case, the prompt was: "Write a game in which the PC is fighting for his religion, which should involve the worship of cheese and/or alcohol. Try to include pasta, Decepticons or Windows XP." Roger Carbol decided to set the game inside a brewery, indeed, inside a vat of beer that is fermenting. The protagonist is a yeast cell trying to do everything it can to please its god, the Brewmeister, and the holy law, the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot.
It's certainly unique, and the implementation is solid. Of course, as a SpeedIF the game is very short and over almost before it has begun. Finding the winning solution also contains a non-trivial element of luck.
(I played this game as part of an IFDB Spelunking expedition where I try to play through ten random games.)
Simplistic game about being online, February 19, 2023IRL: 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.)
Space mission with creative energy and spelling problems, February 19, 2023How 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.)
Nice retro atmosphere, February 18, 2023I'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'll meet a tall dark strangler, February 12, 2023You 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.)
Picturing the process of writing, February 12, 2023In 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.)
Non sequitur football horror, November 30, 2022When 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.
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