Ratings and Reviews by P. B. Parjeter
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A good multimedia game with varying intuitive-ness, October 25, 2021I 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.
An IF game that deserves its classic status, August 16, 2021I 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.
A great short game that borrows from word-tile games, June 28, 2021I 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.
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