Ratings and Reviews by P. B. Parjeter
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Hilarious short game with a simple ending that made me think, January 7, 2024I 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.
Approachable with a unique game mechanic, January 3, 2024I 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.
A retro-styled choice-based game for ZX Spectrum, February 5, 2022This 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.
The best designed game at IF Comp 2021, November 23, 2021This 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.
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