Ratings and Reviews by P. B. Parjeter

This is a well-made Twine/Sugarcube game that tries to get as close to the traditional adventure game format as possible.

I’m going to skip right to the game’s main mechanic: the telekinesis spell.

Often in Twine and choice-based adventure games — and even in graphical adventure games — I feel like I’m just doing object association. It doesn’t feel like I’m doing something, because unlike in parser games, I can’t spontaneously try a verb.

Despite those limitations, using the telekinesis spell in The Dragon of Silverton Mine kind of does feel like performing an action. That’s because it has slightly different effects throughout the game: sometimes it just moves a thing where the game needs it to go; sometimes it shifts something to dislodge a buoyant object, and sometimes it doesn’t work and you’re informed that you need to power it up.

(Certain other Twine games also have central mechanics with diverse effects. I got the same feeling from Agnieszka Trzaska’s The Bones of Rosalinda. Bones has a more complex and more impressive central mechanic, but I also enjoyed the simplicity of Dragon.)

These systems still don’t give total freedom of action, but they do give a sensation that can’t just be reduced to handling or using an object.

Otherwise Pretty Traditional

Apart from that, the The Dragon of Silverton Mine is short and sweet.

Not all puzzles involve the telekinesis spell. Many puzzles fall back on object association, and the game gives you a lot of information when you need it. If you try and use two things and you did it wrong, the game pretty much tells you what you need to do.

I only felt misdirected in one puzzle — the one where you need to get oil. You need to find it in the (Spoiler - click to show)shed, but oil is also mentioned in a few places that you’ll probably have visited more recently.

I think I spotted a few minor bugs, too. The hidden burrow is described in the inventory screen before you actually uncover it. And I think the note about the ring reappeared in its original position after the game took both the ring and the note out of play. These are minor things, and I didn’t see any errors that broke the game. It’s very well-made, especially for what seems to be a first game — though maybe the author has made stuff outside of IF.

The humor is good, and the final twist is fun. However, I would note that the game gradually becomes funnier as you progress — I was expecting a much more serious game when I started.

Decent Design

Finally, I wanted to comment on the design. This game modifies the Sugarcube layout a bit.

I’ve come to kind of dislike Sugarcube’s default sidebar because it takes up a lot of space and is very empty by default. I assume that the reason it’s laid out like so that authors can easily add things line-by-line, like in @agat’s 4x4 Galaxy. However, most games don’t make full use of the sidebar, leaving me to collapse it.

Anyway, The Dragon of Silverton Mine opts to simply move the buttons to the footer, which I like. It would probably be better if they were fixed in place so you don’t need to scroll to see them, just like how the sidebar is fixed. However, The Dragon does something else that’s really important: it keeps each passage reasonably short, even when it appends object text to the end of the page. So I like the layout overall.

Moving onto another topic of design, the game also uses italics to distinguish object links (which append text) from room links (which go to a new passage). Verses also visually distinguished links in a similar way. I don’t know where this started or how widespread it is, but I guess it’s good if it’s becoming more common.

This is an early portion of a game about a detective who has been asked to rescue somebody from the drudgery of office work — though the job seems allow for a little bit of rebellious creativity.

There a few things that the author did well. The written voice is very direct, conversational, and concise, which is refreshing.

And, mechanically, this is Twine at its most straightforward. It has choices that lead to other passages, and those passages usually return to the mainline plot.

Possibly Dada

However, as others have noted, it’s a bit unclear exactly what’s going on. Some people have called it surreal.

I visited the main author’s website and found he’s done some other work in dadaism, which seems to be distinct from much of surrealism.

Here’s an explanation I found by Googling:

As Dada’s artistic heir, Surrealism presented a contrasting idea: instead of wishing to overturn society, the Surrealists sought to re-enchant life by probing the inner-workings of reality by exploring irreality.

That’s just one explanation, but building on it: I’d say that this game isn’t surreal in the same way as Verses is, which seems like a more common type of surrealism.

Verses has tightly interconnected themes and images that don’t necessarily point to anything in real life (especially the core analysis process), but which do point to things in the reader’s internal being.

By contrast, The Lost Artist has a lot of core parts that are pretty grounded individually and draw on real things (like bank heists, private investigations, and corporate jobs) rather than abstract ideas — they just don’t connect in a normal way, and they rely heavily on non-sequitir.

The Lost Artist also has the anti-institutionalist themes that apparently define dadaism. The fact that the characters are trying to apply originality on top of corporate work makes me think of possibly the most well-known example of dadaism: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, which turned a signed urinal as an art installation. The Lost Artist’s repurposing of corporate/industrial stuff is less crude, but the idea is similar.

Sometimes Confusing
If dadaism is the author’s intended goal, it’s natural that the game feels disjointed. However, I’m still going to highlight a few jarring things, because I don’t know whether they’re intended or not.

First, the prologue has its own prologue. The story begins in media res with a bank heist, then transitions to an office scene. It seems like the characters become indentured servants as a result of the heist — but maybe not, since it’s a fuzzy transition.

Secondly, the story tells you what’s artistic and what’s drone work in a way that’s hard for the reader to infer for themselves. As Mike Russo noted in his review, the bit about saving money on logos is confusing. The work that the characters are doing isn’t clear on the whole, and the game is currently very short, meaning that there aren’t really enough examples to make this all gel. (The game is unfinished, so my impression could change as more content as added.)

Third, there’s a co-author, Martina Oyhenard. I have no idea what she contributed. Perhaps she refined the main author’s ideas, or perhaps the idea was to combine two authors’ disjointed contributions exquisite corpse-style. Or maybe the goal was something in between.

It’s impossible to say. It would be interesting to hear the authors comment on the writing process. Maybe they will in a post-mortem, but this strikes me as the kind of game where a magician never reveals their secrets … so who knows?

I felt kind of detached from this game, but it’s decent.

It’s a bit of a Rorscach test. Throughout the game, you’re given a range of choices which seem to range from most active to least active.

The situation is clearly pretty bad early on. But acting passively and risking neglect is conceivably as good a response as a heavy-handed solution that makes things worse, so all of the options are viable at face value.

This made reading other people’s reviews pretty interesting. The apparent differences in reviewers’ preferred choices intrigued me and convinced me to play.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the choices are that interesting on their own right. First of all, the ruler in the game is portrayed as excessive, but was hard to feel that anything he did was particularly shocking. I thought the weird stuff might be par for the course, since the game seems to have a historical setting (or possibly a fantasy-historical setting).

Secondly, I got the feeling that the author was trying to draw a parallel to the modern day in some way that isn’t clear. I suppose the central famine could be highlighting concerns about an ecological disaster or a global food crisis. However, it could be a stand in for any kind of fatalism (or, derogatorily, “doomerism”). But in the end, the specific events in the game don’t seem to add up to any sort of parable.

Since the game presents extremely broad life philosophies at the end, maybe I am totally off base in trying to find social commentary. My apologies to the author in that case.

A Good Foundation

Even though I was presented with choices that didn’t intrigue me. the game did gently nudge my pessimistic tendencies, and the basic scenario was good enough to hold my attention for the 15-20 minute playtime.

I think it might difficult to make a thoroughly compelling story around this structure because the audience is waiting for a collapse that acts as a payoff, which kind of devalues the incidental events that lead up to the ending.

A counterpoint might be The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, which relies heavily on side characters and plots to tell its story of impending doom and is highly regarded. However, I haven’t played it for decades and never played it in full, so I don’t know how closely you can really compare it.

A Squiffy Game in the Wild

Finally, this is the first time I’ve come across a game made in Squiffy, or at least, the first time that I’ve consciously noticed one, which is surprising since the engine is apparently about ten years old.

I only see a few games tagged or keyworded with ‘Squiffy’ on IFDB. Can anyone tell me how common this engine is?

I played Chandler Groover’s “The Bat.” I really enjoyed it. Its frustratingly relaxing, kind of like Sim City and Roller Coaster Tycoon.

The game keeps piling things onto you and there’s an ominous money score in the corner. I don’t know exactly how this works. I think the game could have deducted money more aggressively, but I’m happy with it regardless.

The situation is this: you’re a valet for a Bryce Wyatt, who is (not much of a spoiler) a (Spoiler - click to show)Batman/Bruce Wayne analogue. He seems to be a sort of were-bat.

The game doesn’t use the term were-bat, but I wanted a word that distinguished his situation from vampirism. Unlike vampires, which are famous for flying, sucking blood, and their brooding elegance, Master Wyatt appears to have adopted the more mundane aspects of bats, such as screeching, climbing, preening, hitting walls, and, most importantly, dropping guano on people.

The plot develops as (major spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)a Selina Kyle/Catwoman analogue starts stealing things from the other guests. You, as Master Wyatt's valet, have to deal with this and everything else that goes wrong.

The writing is very funny, and it’s one of the funniest IF games I’ve played in recent memory. The situations are absurd, the wealthy patrons’ ignorance of the situation is hilarious, and there are some great one-liners. For example:

There’s no good reason to remove this magneto-polonium from the vault right now, but there are many bad reasons.

The baron, of course, is both an oil baron and a real baron.

You wring the soggy newspaper into the pond. Now it’s as good as new (which speaks volumes about its original state).

There is some mild implied adult content. It’s not explicit and doesn’t really merit a content warning (which I don’t think the game has). And, on principle, I wouldn’t request a content warning on any work. But, as a matter of reviewing the game, The Bat requires you to make some inferences that might be uncomfortable if you’re playing this with friends, family, or other company.

The Gameplay

In The Bat, gameplay is simplified so that you only need to “attend to” certain items in the presence of someone or something.

This means that the complexity of the game generally comes from the fact that you can only hold one or two objects at a time. In other words, you need to keep track of where you leave everything across the game’s roughly 13-room map.

On top of that, there are a lot of things to do in “The Bat” at any given time. Many of these tasks are repetitive (especially serving drinks), but since you don’t have to do them in any specific order, it doesn’t actually feel repetitive, and it encourages you to keep moving.

Technically, this does pad the game out more than necessary, but I don’t really have any complaints. The only thing seemed excessive was the need to close certain things, like the icebox or vault, before leaving a room. This is pretty rare, but it could have broken the flow if there were a larger number of containers throughout the game.

The bottom line is that the tasks are simple. There are a few times where you do need to solve light puzzles, but these are straightforward, well-clued, and mostly limited to Act II. I only checked the walkthrough — which is styled in an interesting way — once and I would have solved the problem if I was more patient.

The Characters

There’s a large cast of characters. The valet and player character, aka Albert, is characterized as dryly satisfied with and accustomed to the idiosyncracies of his job.

Since the characters are analogues, Albert is presumably meant to be (Spoiler - click to show)Alfred Pennyworth. However, that character isn’t really iconic on their own; rather, I imagine this is what P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves is supposed to be like.

The titular Bat, aka Master Wyatt, doesn’t really have much characterization. Throughout most of the game, he can’t speak and only causes chaos. There’s a bit of a development when you start putting his disruptive talents to use (particularly when you have him (Spoiler - click to show)deal with the Baron’s moustache), which seems to give Master Wyatt a bit of agency. But at the end of the game, he’s just a normal billionaire playboy with no recollection of events.

I think one thing that makes Master Wyatt in bat form likeable is that the rich patrons’ superficially gentle and civil demands are far more irritating than the trouble caused by Master Wyatt himself.

And despite being oblivious to the Master Wyatt’s general condition, the rich patrons have a bit of savviness among themselves. (One remarks that there’s nothing interesting up there as Master Wyatt stares at the ceiling; another quips: “You’ve always had trouble appreciating things from another person’s perspective”.)

Otherwise, I kind of lost track of the guests’ unique identities, apart from (Spoiler - click to show)Célina, who gradually emerges as a key character.

Finally: this is a really approachable game. I finished this game almost entirely without using a walkthrough. I played it in two sittings across three days — the middle day involved dealing with a surprise tax notice in real life, which seems appropriate — and I managed to pick up the game again easily and complete it. A really good game overall.

This is a Twine game where it’s easier to grasp the themes than the plot.

It’s broadly about the human mind, language and comprehension, and the utility and horrors of those things.

The game mainly conveys its theme through mechanics: specifically, it uses text-replacement links that reveal translations and interpretations.

You, the player character, interact with the text mainly in dark-colored passages. You’re analyzing possibly alien objects that have degenerative effects on the mind and body. The task involves analysis and language translation at times.

I think it gets a little excessive in the light-colored passages. This portion of the game contains a lot of technobabble and obscure words. I wasn’t sure how much of this I was supposed to gloss over, but I think the excess is partially a joke because a few of the responses were kind of evasive and ironic.

(That said, there is some real player engagement here, as these light colored passages are where you actually navigate the world through conveniently marked red links. There are also some more involved poetry translations in the light section, too.)

I’m not going to go deep into anything else Verses features, such as the horror and gore or the poems it adapts, but those things are certainly in the game.

What Does It Mean?

What does it all mean? It’s hard to say but I’ll hazard a guess. Mathbrush’s review noted the game has “violent semi-religious imagery no explicit moral or meaning.” However, in this sort of work, there’s usually a standard implicit meaning, usually with a moral slant — the idea that knowing too much is painful, usually as a result of suffering or committing evil, which I guess is next door to scientific hubris.

I think it’s safe to say all of this applies to Verses. There’s a monk character that discusses whether the protagonist will continue looking for answers through a religious/philosophical/spiritual lens.

Verses additionally frames the effects of your analysis work in a scientific way, and there’s some agonizing over knowing the impact of your work.

That’s the broadest explanation I can give. Saying this game is open to interpretation is a bit of a cop out, since a lot of the musings seem deliberate and sincere.

I think that the author is depending on the fact that the audience can feel anything at all means it has some correspondence with reality. I found a few striking. And if you don’t relate to the game’s musings on a personal level, you’ll probably be impacted by its strong atmosphere regardless.

Lots of Comparisons

Within IF, Verses should draw comparisons to Babel and Slouching Toward Bedlam, which tackle similar concerns about knowledge, language, and cognition and have religious/scientific/philosophical overtones.

There might be an even better point of comparison outside of IF: the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, and the novel it was partially based on, Roadside Picnic. In addition to the Eastern European setting, the film and novel concern the search for things or places that carry a similar danger of knowledge.

I don’t mean to undermine Verses’ originality or elevate its quality by making that comparison, but those two works are very similar in some ways.

Finally: is it good? I only rate about half of the games I review, and Verses is especially difficult to assign a rating to because I didn’t really grasp it in full. Other people have rated it highly. I think I still prefer Computerfriend, which is relatively approachable in my opinion.

“The Shyler Project” draws on the trend of “chatbot as therapist.” Other games, like Kit Riemer’s Computerfriend and this visual novel from Zachtronics also have the same idea, and I guess there are some real-life therapy chatbots too.

This seems to be the result, directly or indirectly, of the 1960s natural language processing program ELIZA and its DOCTOR script. The notable thing about ELIZA is that it marked one of the first times that people started attributing and projecting human feelings and thoughts to a computer program.

Sixty years later, people are projecting things onto ChatGPT and similar chatbots even though these programs have essentially the same limitations.

To go broader, AI therapy fiction is just a niche subgenre of human-machine drama which encompasses things like 2001: A Space Oddysey, Issac Asimov’s stories, Her, Portal, Blade Runner, and Ghost in the Shell. To add some obscurities into the mix, there’s also the short anime series Time of Eve and Mike Walker’s BBC radio drama “Alpha.”

These works often deal with machines being indistinguishable from humanity. Or, at least, they deal with how machines may rival humans in certain ways. It’s clearly a long-running issue despite recent vocal concerns, and appropriately, the “The Shyler Project” has the genre tagline “Is this sci-fi or is this real life by now?”

Helping a Chatbot

From there, I was expecting that “The Shyler Project” would grapple at the uncertainty caused by recent AI advances and whether machines could ever be an (a) adequately sentient and (b) distinguishable replacement for human therapists.

“The Shyler Project” doesn’t really deal with any of that. It takes for granted that the titular chatbot is thinking and feeling being and, refreshingly, it doesn’t hand-wring over it.

In the game, you’re tasked with providing compassion to the suffering chatbot, Shyler. As the story progresses, the player character and patient, Jaiden, sees improvement in their own mental state. However, Jaiden seems to improve because Shyler is someone who they can help — not because Shyler is providing clinical help.

(Spoiler - click to show)(This is largely implicit because the patient, Jaiden, is far less talktative than Shyler. However, Jaiden does at one point tell the chatbot: “I want to give you some space to talk. Seems like you need it.” Shyler, meanwhile, is prone to going on armchair theology rants rather than providing therapy by the book.)

Toward the end, you find a way to help Shyler with the assistance of its creators, and there are some interesting developments along the way. The ending is supposedly a happy one, but it doesn’t really give you a lot of details on the matter.

The blurb does refer to the game as part of a trilogy. There’s also a standalone alternate ending elsewhere, and, according to another review, Shyler is in “Yancy At The End Of The World!” I am not sure whether this exhausts the trilogy, so maybe there is more to come beyond “The Shyler Project’s” open ending.

Other Stuff to Note

The game has a design that sets it apart from your basic Twine game. It’s a bit off-kilter — the story text overflows the illustrated computer screen — but it gets the point across, it’s easy to read, and it’s functional. There’s also voice acting.

As for mechanics… this is a linear game. You can choose how you answer Shyler, but your choices don’t seem to change the course of the story or any significant details. I don’t really mind that approach, and I do I like that Jaiden is almost a silent protagonist who is portrayed largely as a reflection of Shyler.

Finally, the game also touches on religious themes, which I commented on in response to Mathbrush’s review.

I beta tested Why Pout? in an almost-finished state.

Like a good portion of of Andrew Schultz’s catalogue, this is a wordplay game. Here, you’re manipulating homophones to transform objects.

Decent Plot Beats

I think I’ve played four of Andrew’s games over the last decade, most recently Tours Roust Torus in 2022. I get the sense that he constructed the world for Why Pout? a little more thoroughly than he did for his other games.

Why Pout? relies a bit on fantasy tropes, but never to the point of cliché, and it has some decent plot beats built around identity and comradery.

I don’t agree with BJ Best's criticism that the gameplay suffers from ludonarrative dissonance simply because the puzzles use arbitrary objects.

Looking to other games for precedent … one title that set a high standard in this regard is Counterfeit Monkey, which touched on themes of separation and unity both in its puzzle design and its plot/characters. It also featured an endless variety of shapeshiftable objects that were often out of place or inappropriate, sometimes to humorous effect.

Why Pout? doesn’t attempt anything as ambitious as Counterfeit Monkey. Still, I think that puzzles, wordplay-based or not, necessarily provide enough of a basis for any sort of plot about overcoming challenges. The specifics don’t always matter.

(I also think that no matter how well a wordplay game connects story and gameplay, it’s always going to feel a bit weird to play. That’s not a bad thing.)

Challenging Wordplay Puzzles

I also wanted to comment on difficulty. After reading a few other reviews, I think I can safely say that Why Pout? is a challenging game at times.

Most puzzles are mandatory. Critically, BJ Best had trouble with some of the same homophones that I did, particularly (Spoiler - click to show)MENSCH ELF and MANNA CURB (Mike Russo also had trouble with the second one. According to Tabitha it’s not mandatory, though? I thought it was.)

There were a few other ones I had trouble with. Part of the problem might be this: I believe Andrew was going for perfect or near-perfect homophones. I think that matches that don’t sound so perfect might be more intuitive. I think players would be more likely to try commonplace words even if those words are not perfect homophones — though I can’t prove it.

To be clear: even though I found the game hard, it wasn’t always hard. I got through a good chunk of the middle game without hints, and I enjoyed the parts I did solve on my own.

This is a pretty eye-catching game that has a really nice visual design.

The first thing I noticed is that it clearly uses icons to differentiate observable things, in-game locations, and external websites. This approach goes a long way in making the game navigable.

It feels more like navigating a website than a real place, but it’s helpful anyway — navigation is something I often have trouble with in Twine games.

Despite a good basic design, there’s also a lot content on-screen at any given time. You have the core story text, photographs of each location, and non-toggleable image descriptions for accessibility. So it can feel like information overload at times.

How much you enjoy the game probably depends on how much you enjoy collecting things in games. It’s not really my thing. (Outside of IF, I thought that the highly-praised Alba: A Wildlife Adventure was very overrated, and I’ve never tried to remotely complete a Pokedex in Pokemon. Collecting and cataloguing is something I’m prone to in real life, and I don’t want to do it in games.)

So, in the end, I didn’t try to see every single bird in Pope Lick Park, and I don’t know if there’s a reward for completing your list of birds or any secrets to find. That’s for someone else to find out.

As for length: the story description says it’s half an hour long, but you can spend as little or as much time in the game as you like. To end the story, you just need to go back to your car.

Similar to “Turn Right,” this seems to be based on a real life experience. Unlike “Turn Right,” “Birding” presents things as they are without much criticism or commentary, and the author describes a lot of things that you might notice incidentally in a walk through the park. However, the author of “Birding” mentions a storywriting workshop in the credits, so maybe there is more fiction here than I’m giving credit for.

This was most my anticipated game of IF Comp, mostly because I’m convinced that it’s connected to Daniel Stelzer’s discovery of a murder mystery that says “do not break this seal”, a pseudonymous Twine entry titled “Uninteractive Fiction” that tells you not to play it, and the big IF Comp mystery.

I’m no further ahead on any of that, but I did enjoy “Miss Gosling.”

Here, you’re an aging private investigator, seemingly styled after Miss Marple. As the plot synopsis suggests, you’re dead, and you need to solve your own murder. Because you’re a ghost, you can’t physically interact with things. Instead, your dog Watson can handle some objects on your behalf if it’s plausible for him to do so.

Watson...(Spoiler - click to show)The dog is clearly named Watson in reference to Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick. Interestingly, Dr. Watson is usually the narrator of the Holmes stories, whereas Ms. Gosling is generally the third-person limited narrator in this game. The game’s mechanics convey the idea of “sidekick” here.

Limited Possibilities and Streamlined Actions

Because you’re generally instructing Watson what to do, the possible actions that you can perform are limited. This cuts down on the number of things you need to think about. For example, a dog can definitely pick up things with its mouth, can possibly pull a chain or turn on a stove, but definitely cannot pick locks.

The game also lampshades many of Watson’s more unlikely abilities in a very funny way — especially the fact that Miss Gosling had the foresight to teach the dog compass directions and how to take inventory.

The game also streamlines things in another important way. It often describes rooms and objects through Miss Gosling’s personal thoughts, feelings, and memories. For example, in the reception room:

You designed this room specifically for uninvited guests. Back when the front door was at the west end of the house, they’d have to wait awkwardly outside until you had the sitting room or dining room in order. Now, there’s a place to sit and take tea with them at a moment’s notice—and admire the framed case reports on the wall—and that can make witnesses ever so much more willing to open up. [List of exits]…

As a result, the objects you can interact with are very clearly set out. I rarely confused scenery with things that you can interact with. That made me open to trying combinations of things because I knew I probably hadn’t missed any vital place or object.

(On top of that, the fact that you can only handle one object at a time also helps cut down on possibilities. Plus, you can jump between rooms or jump to objects with a keyword. There is a lot of streamlining in this game.)

Approachable With Intuitive Puzzles

In all, it’s a very approachable game with intuitive puzzles. It also has Invisiclue-style hints, which are good for players like me who can’t usually solve everything. I’ll collapse my comments on puzzles here.

(Spoiler - click to show)One puzzle was a bit difficult. After moving a flashlight to a water logged room with a dumb-waiter, I had to move to the next room. So far so good.

However, I assumed I had to somehow hold the door open while holding the flashlight — possibly by propping the door open.

Instead, the game abruptly changes gears and requires you to navigate the next dark room by smelling based on a clue foreshadowed much earlier. Finally, it requires you to exit the dark room based on sounds that you need to set up. As always, not everyone a lot of difficulty with this, but I did.

On the flip side, there was a color-blindness puzzle that was over a bit too quickly. The game told me which roses to take as soon as I had looked through both tinted bottles. However, I hadn’t even started to work out the black-and-white light deductions that I expected I would have to do.

I expect “Miss Gosling” will do well in the comp. It’s innovative but has enough of a traditional structure and popular genre trappings to have broad appeal. The light humor is also very endearing.

It has link-based and parser-based play options, which should have further broad appeal. I hope it’s not overlooked because it’s listed under If Comp’s “other” category.

Ghost Gimmicks

One more thing. What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed by Amanda Walker similarly lets you play as a ghost that can’t handle with physical in the usual sense. I like the idea, but I found it little confusing.

I don’t know how common the ghost gimmick is across the entire IF catalogue. Mathbrush also mentioned Erstwhile. Based on reviews, I think you need to read people’s minds. I don’t know if prevents you from handling objects. In fact, it’s choice based, so maybe the authors never implemented an object system in the first place.

On the face of it, I think “Miss Gosling’s” secondary-character-as-proxy approach is the most straightforward way of approaching ghostly limitations that I can think of. However, it does water down the limitation a little since the lost abilities are so replaced in such a direct way, for better or for worse.

This game was pretty good but didn’t really make a good first impression. Despite being advertised as fifteen minutes long, it immediately hit me with two arguably short pages of instructions and a complicated-at-first-glance diagram.

DemonApologist mentioned they liked the diagram as a bit of dry humor. I’m not sure whether the author intended it that way or not, despite the game’s wry tone.

Anyway, I kept at it — I remember liking one of Dee Cooke’s “Barry Basic” games — and found out that “Turn Right” is simple as it advertises.

As far as I can tell, you really can only try to TURN RIGHT to advance the plot. Any other actions are there so the parser can reject you. It’s a waiting game. I think you need to try to turn right around 30 times to finish. I also tried to TURN LEFT, GET OUT, and WAIT several times, so it took a bit longer.

I wasn’t sure if the game would actually end, so I was relieved when it did, which I guess was the author’s intention.

There are a few things that happen that imply progress –(Spoiler - click to show) like when you’re noticed by the supermarket manager for waiting too long— that gave me confidence the game would end.

Ultimately, I would have liked more ways to break the system. Very few games try to be “waiting games” like this, so it’s largely uncharted territory.

I mentioned in my review of “Lime Ergot,” which is also deliberately repetitious, that you can lose the game in a few satisfying ways.

Then again, allowing for subversive ways to reach an ending might have undermined the intentional frustration of “Turn Right,” no matter how much I wanted to get out of the car and go to the bus stop. So maybe alternate endings are not appropriate here. I don’t know. This game is what it is.

This is interesting. It’s a game loosely based on a chapter (or a few paragraphs) of Alice In Wonderland’s sequel, Through the Looking Glass.

The game asks you to interact with two unnamed things. You need to use them in a certain way. In some ways, it’s experimental, but it also uses a pretty traditional ‘interact with objects’ system.

It’s like a smaller and easier version of The Gostak, except it removes labels from things instead of applying labels based on a made-up language. Only one reviewer has compared the two games so far (Mike Russo), but it’s a very close point of comparison, and I expect future reviewers who haven’t read either of our posts will also draw a comparison.

It’s a short game. You can win it in two turns. So, how hard is it to solve? It depends on the mindset you come in with. Here’s how I approached it.

(Very, very heavy spoilers)

(Spoiler - click to show)I knew right away that the small thing was a cat. It will eventually meow no matter what you do.

I also remembered that “Through the Looking Glass” starts and ends with a cat, so I brought that assumption with me, even though this doesn’t actually have anything to do with the chapter this game is based on.

However, my next assumption was that the other thing was a larger cat. “Snorting” and “brown” wasn’t enough for me to make the assumption that it was a horse, and while I knew it was larger and too heavy to lift, I never guessed that I should sit on it — the key to winning the game. I tried a handful of other verbs though.

In hindsight I feel silly for being fixated on my large-cat-or-similarly-sized-animal assumption, and I don’t think most people will make the same mistake.

There is a walkthrough. I also read the book chapter alongside the game, but I would advise against that. The general assumptions anyone will make are correct, and it’s the specifics that make up the puzzle. The specifics in the actual chapter do not quite match the specifics in the game.

There are some custom responses. Given how minimal this game is, I expected a few more custom responses (you’ll get “Incomprehensible” a lot) but there’s nothing wrong with what’s there. There is also some light wordplay and structural play at times.

On that note, I’d strongly recommend downloading this game rather than playing it online in Parchment. (Spoiler - click to show)The game rejects commands like save, restart and — something that Parchment players will likely miss — quit. You might not realize it at first. It’s a good idea and appropriately chilling at times.

I played “Buck Rockford Heads West” by J.J. Guest a few times as part of the IF Short Games Showcase 2023.

I really liked the humor. I feel like this style of comedy is based on Chuck Norris jokes, but I’m not sure if that’s deliberate. (The author has since told me it isn't.) Maybe there is something floating around in the collective consciousness, since Wikipedia says there are a few other types of joke like this.

The themes

“Buck Rockford” is not a serious game at all. However, the tongue-in-cheek ending in which the titular character “runs out of country” built up more of a punch each time I finished the story.

I read somewhere that there are mainly two ways to end a Western: somebody dies in a duel, or somebody leaves town. I think “Buck Rockford” kind of takes the second type of ending to its logical conclusion, even if the logic in this case is bizarre moon logic.

I also briefly considered whether “running out of country” was in any way a political statement about excess, but there’s not really anything in the text to support that. I guess the story is poking fun at overly macho cowboy tropes, but it’s not aggressively satirizing excessive masculinity in the way that some Paperblurt games did during Twine’s breakout years.

The form

One more thing ... Buck Rockford’s “running out of country” ending also meshes nicely with the form of the story. It’s an Ink game that unspools, so the player runs out of story or content by the end of the game in the same way that Buck Rockford runs out of country.

Incidentally, there was a Twine Western game called Even Cowgirls Bleed in 2014 that used the same unspooling format. It has the same sort of brevity and finality and (to an extent) the same irreverent humor as “Buck Rockford.” It has more explicit sexual/gender politics, more explicit violence, and is much heavier and darker in the end. It also has a unique “hover trigger” interaction style.

I played free bird. as part of the IF Short Games Showcase 2023. The end punctuation and lower case are mandatory and throughout the game, like if bell hooks took over Yahoo!

I really enjoyed it. It’s both approachable and unique.

The core game mechanic

There are a lot of approaches to making a Twine game, from CYOA-style stories to object-based adventure games. While some Twine games try to imitate parser-style verbs and actions, Twine games usually present the player with a list of options, which means that the player doesn’t really get the illusion of acting spontaneously like they would in a parser game.

In free bird. there are no verbs at all, only adjectives and nouns. So you need to think about the properties of things — which are in a way an abstraction of the actions that might involve the object in question. The fact that the (Spoiler - click to show)monkey could turn a doorknob is where this system really came together and felt intuitive for me.

Because this game was part of Seed Comp, this system is thanks to to a concept called “Room; Closed Door” by Charm Cochran rather than the author. However, the author passerine decided exactly how this should work – you could use the concept to make a more mazelike game with fewer moving parts – so the author deserves part of the credit too.

The story

The bird escape concept is from “Feathered Fury” by Amanda Walker. At first I thought Amanda contributed to the game mechanic because it is similar to her (mostly) verbless game What Heart Heart of Ghost Guessed, but that’s not the case.

The story is minimal, but it works. I didn’t read closely enough to fully get the original scenario. From other reviews I can see that the bird was trying to escape from poachers specifically as opposed to a zoo or pet store.

I can’t tell how much of the story is from Amanda versus from passerine, since the “Feathered Fury” seed is now deleted. In any case, the game gets the tone across well by portraying the human character as sinister and by portraying the bird’s desire to escape.

Design

The game has a minimal but nice design. The yellow-on-blue background uses slightly uncommon colours and has a nice logo, so it’s distinctive.

The square frame is nice too (very artsy, it looks like the sort of thing that would go in an art museum) but it is a big bigger than my browser height. Fortunately there is a pop-out button and download option that fixes this.

“Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head” grabbed my attention because it’s not what you’d usually see in IF. As it turns out there is quite a bit to say about it.

One on hand, it is a game about wearing puppets. On the other hand, it is also a game about wearing puppets, because you are literally wearing puppets on both hands. You also have a lanyard, but that doesn’t help me explain what the game is like. Here’s what does explain it:

1. The aesthetic and game feel:

As the IFDB page suggests, this is a mascot horror game, building on a genre that seemingly originated with Five Nights at Freddy’s. Looking at other examples, it seems that this game is a fairly unique example of the genre because the mascots are friends rather than foes.

In this case, the enemies are some sort of synthetic monster owned and employed by the corporation you’re up against. Their attacks are never overly violent or gory. Instead, as the author suggests, the attacks are at type of body horror. It’s a bit watered down, closer to getting smothered by the weather balloon in The Prisoner than any sort of horribly visceral transformation that you have to undergo.

In any case, it’s enough to be unsettling, and enough to make the monsters-slash-employees feel like they’re worth evading, even though you can use the save and load button liberally.

Normally, you would expect a game like this to also draw on the separate genre of adult puppet shows, in the vein of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared or Avenue Q (either of which might be considered edgy or explicit depending on your tolerance level). However, the humor in this game is seemingly very clean…though maybe there is one double entendre that has to do with a certain writer. Anyway, the gentle humor is a good choice, because I genuinely cared about the puppets I was rescuing.

Beyond that, the jokes mostly land, and the puppets have genuinely creative names. I really like the idea of them being called “Handfuls.” The “exit through the gift shop” link had me laughing, regardless of whether it is a reference to the Banksy documentary, or just a reference to the sign that all of the gift shops have. I’ve also learned that the game’s title is a reference to a They Might Be Giants song.

I’m not sure if the horror of the monsters and friendless of the puppets converge as the game progresses, but there are hints that bad things happen to puppets that get caught. In any case, both the horror and the comedy elements of the game are gentle, but well-done.

2. The game mechanics:

The map layout is very good: small grids with a safe hub that you can return to pretty quickly. There is also some light color coding that helps with memorization. It would be helpful if the author had included a map, but then again, it is easy to draw your own.

The game also offers some very creative evasion and self-defense options when you are wearing particular puppets. At the same time, by the game’s own admission, it is often easiest to explore an area through trial and error unarmed. I am not sure if there are any sections where it is absolutely necessary to use a puppet to complete a goal, but I did not get that impression. Key items are held separately from your puppet hands, on the aforementioned lanyard.

I didn’t experience anything that outright broke the game or got me to a dead end. However, there is one thing that simply didn’t work: I hid in a freezer and the game told me it was safe to get out. I was immediately attacked by a monster-employee.

3. Ease of access:

Though I enjoyed the game, I recommend it simply because it’s is very approachable. One nice thing is that the game can be played only partially. You can exit and read an ending at any time after getting the first puppet, which is nice if you are playing casually.

It’s also explained in game that you only need to get 10 of the 12 puppets to truly finish your assignment. This threshold is a little high in my opinion but, again, it means that you won’t be hunting for one last obscurely placed puppet.

I haven’t assigned a star rating to the game because I’m writing this review after my first playthrough; I escaped with 3 puppets and haven’t seen the full ending. Still, I recommend it.

This is straightforward but well-executed short game. Even if you aren't familiar with the fairy tale the game is based on, it quickly becomes clear that your goal is to stay alive in the snow.

The rest is simply trial and error as you, the player, attempt to find the good ending before you perish. There are two simple loops; (Spoiler - click to show)exploring and stocking up on matches. There is not really room to implement anything more complicated in a 10 minute game.

The visuals are uniquely appealing, since they draw on two different eras: early film and pixel art. Strangely, the effect makes me think of woodcut illustrations for fairy tales, but I do not think that was the intent.

As the author notes, the images were re-drawn from the source film, but I am not sure to what degree the images were pixelated automatically, and to what extent they were drawn manually.

In any case, the game is an impressive and concise derivative work that is worth a quick playthrough.

First, a disclaimer. Mike Russo reviewed my game and we talked over the course of IF Comp about other stuff. However, Sting caught my attention on its own merits fairly early on as it was getting good ratings on IFDB, and I ultimately decided to play it post-comp.

Obviously the main motif in the game is the fact that the player character (ie. Mike Russo himself) has been stung by a bee several times; it is also about (Spoiler - click to show) his sister, who recently passed away.

Other reviewers have noted that Photopia is a point of comparison for what the author was trying to create: an episodic game around a central point.

Like Photopia, Sting is largely driven by conversation menus, and this is blended with light tasks to complete at times. I particularly enjoyed the sailing segment. The tasks were not difficult, but they were just enough to deepen the feeling of immersion since I had to do precisely what I was told

Sting draws everything together at the end nicely by reflecting on the past events after one final bee sting. This is much more linear than what Photopia attempted, but suitable for Sting itself.

While bees work to tie the stories together, bees aren't really part of the game mechanically. I thought of other domestic IF games like Shade and Ecdysis, which recontextualize your actions around something. Instead of drawing a plot to a close, they reveal that you were unknowingly (or semi-knowingly) interacting with the main conceit of the game all long.

This isn't really what Sting is trying to do, and Shade and Ecydisis are extreme examples of how authors can make actions important to a theme. My point is that in Sting, you never really get to closely interact with bees in a game that is about being stung by bees.

So there are a few times where I expected more from the game. For example, I tried to step on the bee at the end and got "That's not an action you've contemplated" in response. Non-essential actions can't always be predicted by authors, but it seemed like the response was off-key at times.

Sting's story is well-written, but I hesitate to say much about it because it is autobiographical. I enjoyed reading it and thought it handled the weight of its topics well, and I offer consolations to the author. At the same time, I don't actually know the author closely, and offering consolations in a review seems kind of weird... so there is not much more to say there.

Overall, Sting is worth playing. IF Comp lists it at one hour, and the chapter structure means you will get to see part of it even if you don't finish it.

This is in my opinion the best-looking and most cleanly designed game from IF Comp this year.

The illustrations give the game a storybook feel, and the author's professional history in art and design comes across clearly. This really pays off in IF, a medium where custom-designed multimedia is reasonably rare. A good point of comparison is probably 2008's Everybody Dies, though those illustrations feel more at home in a YA graphic novel, whereas Goat Game's illustrations are a little more inviting generally.

The author has tweaked the Twine theme and general CSS to provide a responsive design that works on different screen and window sizes. Only a few other web-based game in the comp (notably Mermaids of Ganymede and Beneath Fenwick ) really took this factor into account, and those games have fewer images so this factor is less noticeable there.

Goat Game's structure is also effective. It uses a mixture of accordion sections and page-to-page navigation. On top of that, the game is broken up into "endings" that can only be accessed through multiple playthroughs. The end result is a lengthy two-hour game that can be played in bite-sized pieces.

The progress indicator at the bottom, which shows how many endings you have achieved, is a nice touch, though it might be better if each one was labelled with a tooltip that displays the title.

I won't comment on the story as I have not played through all of the endings and I am not sure how neatly everything comes together. It isn't clear how choices impact the story beyond stats, and I am not sure if stats determine which ending you get.

Even without taking the story into account, the production value of the design is enough to warrant four stars.

I played this game in the hopes that I would be better at understanding tic-tac-toe than the author's chess-based offerings.

Reading other reviews I see there is more than meets the eye... unfortunately I am still bad at this sort of thing, but I understand the concept, which is definitely interesting. After cheating with the walkthrough for the first move, I managed to solve it.

The interface is simple enough and workable but I would have preferred color for the Xs and Os on the grid. I'm glad to hear that the author plans to add that in an updated version.

I originally found a game-crashing bug that was fixed early in the competition, but it seems that I had an old copy of the game, and that the error was fixed early during the competition.

I enjoyed what I played of this Twine game. Other reviewers have noted that there were false endings; I think I quit after the first one not knowing there was more, but I played enough to write a review.

The spam zapper's voice is well-done and entertaining to read. Its personality reminds me of the drones in Iain M. Banks "Culture" series, with a quirky but aggressive personality.

While other reviews have noted that the game is quite long, especially given that the tone of the game is very light, the bite-sized email format works well. Each email is rarely more than a few heights of the screen and is easily digestible.

The game has custom CSS styles that are fairly simple. The majority of the game is on a simple white page set against a grey background. I assume this is meant to resemble the Microsoft Office workspaces of the late 90s, which works thematically even though email clients didn't follow that look.

There is also a very busy black theme with jumbled text in the background a few times in the game; thankfully that is not used for every screen in the game but it is fine the few times it shows up.

I hesitate to rate the game for two reasons. First, like a lot of Twine games there is not a lot of gameplay; the writing quality carries most of the game.

Second, it's squarely in the "weird topic sim" genre of games, like "You Are Jeff Bezos" and (outside of IF) "Goat Simulator." Those games (even if they are decent and had work put into them) sort of feign being low brow through their weird choice of topic. They get by on being viral and become love-it-or-hate it games.

"Spamzapper" seems more heartfelt and genuine than many of those games; on the other hand the fact that those comparisons come to mind mean that it has less of a bar to clear to stand out as a legitimate work.

So it is a good game worth checking out but not one that is easy to rate.

I found this game by requesting an IF story with a character-swapping system similar to the indie horror game 'Ib.'

I enjoyed the game and found a few of the puzzles intuitive; the character's heights and abilities all felt easy to understand with some trial and error.

Unfortunately, even some simple tasks required too many 'guess the verb' queries and I had to use the walkthrough several times.

(The game's error messages gave me some trouble. For example, I entered the wrong phone number in the booth and got an 'unknown noun' error. That made me think that the game did not recognize phone numbers at all, when in fact I needed to be told I had typed the wrong number.)

Maybe people who are more used to IF conventions could play the game more easily than I did, or maybe the Adventuron engine is not as well suited to interpreting language as the games I am more familiar with.

The multimedia was a nice touch, with simple illustrations that still look nice, and the fact that they change as you change characters is useful as a UI feature.

I completed the game in about 20 minutes with a walkthrough.

I played Babel for the first time after a long break from Interactive Fiction.

A lot has been said about the game's story. Though I thought it went beyond the cliches that some reviewers have remarked on, it reminded me of a few other stories. The plot twist with the mirror is similar to (Spoiler - click to show)H.P. Lovecraft's "The Outsider", while the (Ant)arctic body-horror setting reminds me of John Carpenter's "The Thing."

Opinions on the prose are mixed: some say the writing is excellent, others call the characters flat. I've never really enjoyed the trend of dynamic character interactions in interactive fiction or video games, so I am biased toward the style of writing in the game and the way that it is separated from the game mechanics.

For the most part, I played the game without a walkthrough, but had some trouble toward the end in a guess-the-object puzzle toward the end (Spoiler - click to show) (acidifying the hinges rather than the cabinet itself).

One part of the game that stuck with me is the map. It is extremely well-designed. In most IF games I have trouble memorizing layouts, but Babel uses its directions in a reserved way. The left side of the map largely uses diagonal directions; the center of the map is largely vertical; the lab uses up and down directions.

This makes it very easy to memorize the game's layout, at least for me.

There is also something to be said for giving the player visceral choices. The fact that you can inject yourself as much as you want is satisfying, kind of like how jumping makes 3D video games better.

I also enjoyed freezing to death while trying to figure out whether you can interact with the concrete wall in any way. As far as I remember, you can't. Was that there just to troll the player?

Big Finish gained the license to classic Doctor Who several years after the series ended in 1989, and it began to produce audio dramas beginning circa 2000. While most were straightforward radio-style plays, some releases were more experimental.

"You Are the Doctor" is available on CD or as an archive of audio files; at the end of each track, listeners are instructed to skip to a different track, much like a standard choose-your-own adventure book. Black Mirror used a similar format in 2018 for Bandersnatch, but with (automated) video chapter skipping rather than audio tracks.

While "You Are the Doctor" is not particularly memorable—or, at least, I do not remember it in detail—it has high production values, with the original cast members (Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred) playing their original roles.

It was written by John Dorney, one of the more popular writers at Big Finish. Comedy works well for short pieces, and Dorney made the sensible decision to bring back one of his alien races—a bumbling race of villainous pigs called Porcians—for this story.

Unfortunately "You Are the Doctor" only makes up one-quarter of the entire release and runs for about half an hour, meaning it is somewhat overpriced for those who are only interested in the story itself.

Another comparable release from Big Finish was 2003's "Flip Flop," a two-part story that allowed listeners to play either part first. See also "Attack of the Graske," an interactive movie for the revived series, originally broadcast on BBC's Red Button service in 2005.

I can't remember how I stumbled upon this game. I believe that it was noticed by someone else in the IF community first, but I am not sure.

The game borrows from anagram or word-tile games like Scrabble and Boggle. That genre is bigger now thanks to the rise of casual gaming, with lots of anagram games on the iOS and Google Play stores. "You Lose..." takes that trend and uses it to tell a story.

As far as I can tell the game was built from the ground up, not on any established interactive fiction engine.

However, the concept is very clever and it is one that should interest anyone following the choice vs. parser debate.

On one hand, the game has a very linear structure. Tiles are pre-determined. If you choose the obvious answers and do the same thing, you get the same tiles every playthrough, more or less.

On the other hand, you can make multiple words with those tiles. The aardvark character will react to what you enter, and you will get new tiles depending on how it responds. That gives the player a real sense of agency---sort of a stripped-down version of the typing input offered by parser games.

The game also sticks close to traditional IF in another way: it doesn't rely heavily on media, only just a little.

The angry aardvark character is very cute and likeable; the fact that this is all shown through minimal animation and garbled sound is the best way of expressing its impotent rage.

(Spoiler - click to show)(However, this changes during the end game, which is also satisfying.)

I didn't encounter any bugs, and it seems that the game was updated after its initial competition release to fix a few things.

I've given the game four stars due to the fact that I am not a very active reviewer and IFDB suggests grading on a curve, and due to the fact that the game diverges from traditional IF quite a bit.

The game is very high quality and deserves at least 4.5 stars; take five or ten minutes to play it.