Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

The merest game that I have ever played, March 27, 2021

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.

Memorable use of debugger, March 27, 2021

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.

A fresh take on dungeoneering, March 27, 2021

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.

Feels like a fragment, March 27, 2021

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.

As mysterious as a blank card, March 27, 2021

[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.

That’s exactly what +=x is, right down to the blank cards. Although in this case, if we are diligent and perceptive enough, or just read the spoilers on the forum, we find out that the dealer is not, perhaps, a personal God. For in the source code of the game, we find this hidden message:

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.

There is a sense, then, in which the two lines are time and space – the + symbol being, of course, not only a symbol of arithmetic but also the basic form taken by a space-time diagram; and the wizard that determines our fates is revealed as the cold, blind, merely calculating laws of nature. We are not the masters of our fate, +=x seems to tell us; we are merely what everything is, playthings in the hands of underlying forces that care about neither us nor meaning. This universe may be beautiful, but it is a beauty cold and austere. It is not human. No wonder, then, that the characters in the game are not truly human, but indeed characters, to be replaced at a moment’s notice by the characters of mathematics: + = x

The game surely contains enough ambiguity to support interpretations different from the one I have just given, but this is one way to make sense of it. Interesting, yes. Compelling in its portrayal of the universe, certainly not. We have free will, mathematics is best thought of as a human activity, and there cannot be a universe without meaning. Call me a humanist, but I resist being equalised.

Surprisingly moving and surprisingly deep, March 27, 2021

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.

Juvenile and hard to play, March 27, 2021

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.

Bare-bones and you'll need a walkthrough, March 26, 2021

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.

Raw, intense, and no longer available, March 25, 2021

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.

Surprisingly awful shareware, March 23, 2021

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.