Reviews by Giger Kitty

I think the strangest thing about this game is that I was able to complete it at all, considering it is very linear and I'm not sure that a few actions are what we'd call "classicly properly prompted", especially in a dialog section and in the last scene. I kept expecting to stumble against implementation and hit a dead end, thinking "I'll try this, but I'm not sure it'll do anything, and if it doesn't I won't really know how to proceed". And hey, it did stuff, and I did manage to keep going, all the way to the end (it's a short game).

It's a strange sort of bizarre horror-type thing, that feels like a feverish nightmare the author might had and then transcribed into IF. It plays like that, too. There's even a quite unbelievable pun to keep you entertained.

Gameplay-wise, you'd do best to simply follow the flow. Apart from that, it will depend on whether this surreal lunacy strikes your fancy. Personally, I liked it. It was sufficiently brief, and economical in its prose, that it didn't grate; and even within its bizarre stream of consciousness thing, it had a sort of congruity. Again, the sort of cohesiveness you expect a dream to have.

Pretty good, but possibly not for everyone. If you enjoyed "Deadline Enchanter", or "198Brew", I recommend giving it a go. There's something that this game achieves, atmosphere-wise, that is not easily brushed aside.

EDIT - After reading the ClubFloyd transcript, a word of advice: don't expect deep implementation. This advice is to save you from undue frustration. Keep interactions shallow and surface-level. This lack of implementation is something I'd normally balk at, but... what can I say? I had no trouble navigating the game till the end, so my experience was practically seamless. So my review must reflect that.

This is not a review, and had no rating associated. This is merely an informative note to clarify for whoever might be interested in playing that "Stooping to Diplomacy" is set in the general universe of the author's "The Little Match Girl" and is a sequel to "The Board of Regents". The latter makes no reference to that universe, so it's very likely these can be enjoyed perfectly stand-alone, but for any who would prefer to enjoy settings from the same universe in the same context, this note is here to clarify that.

A puzzler - indeed, a sequence of rooms with a puzzle each. The puzzles revolve around time manipulation, but not, I'm afraid, in any particularly interesting way. I don't want to get into details because there is so little here, what details I do share will just spoil it. It's an Infocom tribute, so it has a couple Infocom elements here and there and tries to evoke a certain minimalism reminiscent of those times.

It is not what I'd call a success. The puzzles are short and pretty obvious. One puzzle in particular involving a conveyor belt seemed complicated and turned out to be anything but; it served only to tire the player and make them think this is going to be quite complex.

The very first room is a Zork-ish pastiche with "ugly" before every noun (a strange choice which... only looks ugly).

I don't know whether I won. When I got a score of 16, an event was triggered which appeared to end the game; I was given a choice to quit or not, and not-quitting just put me in an empty room (with inventory items I was supposed to have lost during the event). The itch.io page specifically says "remember to use undo", which, if a hint, really should also be in the game or in a readme file or here or pretty much just about anywhere sensible; I am very much not impressed when authors decide to leave important notes on their website but not on their games proper. After I download their games, I'm not going to check their websites for instructions; I trust them to have the instructions on the game, or to distribute the games with the instructions and any relevant notes.

At any rate, "undo" at that point did undo the move, but I couldn't get anything to happen differently. Not to mention that that move exposed some pretty awkward writing that seemed nonsensical: (Spoiler - click to show)apparently you have a watch stitched under your skin, and at this point it is removed forcefully and you die as your guts disgust. Maybe the guts "disgut" instead? And where the heck is that watch anyway? I spent the whole game assuming it was on the wrist, but I don't think there are guts on one's wrist.

Either I completed the game, or I didn't because there is at least one more puzzle which I couldn't solve. If the latter, the game tried to be too smart and presented me with a situation in which it pretends to have ended... and, well, I wasn't really having much fun and I couldn't avoid that fate, so if the game asks if I want to quit, at some point I'll just shrug and say "yes". I think this is a cautionary tale for designers... careful when giving your players fake game endings, because they may believe you, or at worst see through your artifice but take the chance to evaluate whether they want to continue and possibly decide not to.

And if I did complete the game, I honestly don't appreciate having wasted time thinking there was a gimmick here, looking for stuff to do, just because the author didn't properly implement an "end of the game".

With insipid time mechanics, I don't know whether it was made under a time constraint that limited how much the author could do. Regardless, most SpeedIFs that I play are better than this; at least they have an ending, and a point to make, even if it's just a bland joke, or even if it's just zany randomness. This is a bunch of uninspired puzzles and an ambiguous ending.

I just don't see the point to this one.

I had a pretty good time with A Paper Moon, and that has everything to do with its puzzles and how far things were implemented. Origami is an important part of the game, but not exclusive; the unlimited supply of origami paper (that you have to find first) is not the only thing you'll need to solve the puzzles, but will feature prominently. You will not be clued as to what you can fold; you will simply examine the situation at hand and come to the conclusion that what can help you here is FOLDing the paper INTO whatever shape you think is appropriate.

I really did have a good time with it, because I felt the puzzles were fair (although, cruelty wise, you can certainly make the game unwinnable. But it's always clear when that's happened. Expect to save/restore a bit, especially when experimenting). And the game is sufficiently well implemented that it allowed me to experiment. Fiddle around. Try stuff. Then I would, at times, just sort of turn away from the screen, close my eyes, and think about what I had at my disposal, and then I'd get a passing thought, and I'd try it out, and sometimes nothing happened, but sometimes nothing happened in a way which gave me a clue. More interestingly, most of the things that I tried did have a result. This was always encouraging.

I had to turn to the hints a few times, but, unlike in other games which make me go "there is no way I ever would have gotten that!" (an experience I abhor, like, I imagine, most players), in this game I always went "huh. Yes, yes, I see that. Fair, very fair. I almost had it, or could have had it. I didn't really need to turn to the hints at all". Which is so satisfying! The hints are mostly oblique anyway, they point you towards a certain direction. And that's quite enough.

I only did have to go to the walkthrough once, but that was an issue with syntax. I had actually solved the puzzle, in a sense, but I was trying to PUT something ON something else. The accepted syntax for that situation was to PUT something IN something else instead.

The game has two possible endings, kinda - and offers therefore two goals at the same time, kinda. I stumbled upon the less-optimal one first, and figured I'd explore that to see how it goes. Here's something I loved about this: I was able to fully explore the alternate path (minus the final command) and then break away and go back to the main quest. I really dislike games with multiple endings or solutions (I'm a minority, I know) because it invariably means that I flounder around with items and puzzles that are no longer relevant because I've already solved what they related to. Often without meaning to. It's not like I see a puzzle and see two possible solutions, which would be ok; I stumble into the first solution, then I kinda learn there was an alternative solution, and then I wonder which was best, and then I restore and try the other one, and... it's a mess and I don't like it and that's that.

Sorry about that rant! That does NOT happen in this game. You can, and indeed it's a fun challenge to, pursue the alternative conclusion (you'll know it when you see it taking shape; the initial actions are unclued, but sensible for the player who is experimenting) and then turn onto the main quest.

Now, there is a lot of snark in the parser's attitude.

Let me be clear: I despise games that insult me. I don't play games to be insulted. Period; non-negotiable.

I was quite comfortable with this game. Because it never insulted me. It always spoke to me as "you" but the PC has a name and a backstory; so I never felt insulted. The parser was insulting the PC. I can live with that. At the very outset, it is very unflattering in describing the PC, and making him adventure in just his underwear. It's a juvenile insult/humilliation, but that's pretty much as far as it goes. It will then usually make jabs at the PCs, expense, and yeah, it'll say "you", but it'll mean this PC. So I was ok with it.

The snark isn't just blatantly insults, either. I was amused at the reponse to XYZZY, where it promises to put me on God mode if I type it 9999 more times. And yes, it decreases that counter every time I do. And no, I didn't try it. And yes, I did try some g.g.g.g.g.g shennaningans with copy/pasting from a text editor, just 'cause.

The setting and descriptions are minimalist, which serves puzzlers like this well. Don't get me wrong; there is fluff, mainly in the way of red herring inventory items. But mostly there isn't stuff that actively distracts you from the puzzles.

Had a bit of a bug where I could (Spoiler - click to show)put stuff inside the pill box, but then couldn't take them out, making it clear I wasn't supposed to have put it in there in the first place. I exploited that to solve the puzzle of (Spoiler - click to show)getting the glass out of the pub. If the game allows it, I roll with it.

I was surprised to have a very good time with this game. The setting is meh, the story is blah, the attitude is shrug; but the puzzles themselves were satisfying, and - and here's the important bit - solving them was actually fun. Challenging, but fair - all the way to the end.

I liked this.

EDIT - Having completed the game, I have to say the cover picture is excellent. Brilliant.

Even though, in this day and age, roguelikes are plentiful for most devices - if I play on Android, I can enjoy Pathos as the latest generation Nethack clone - it is still very pleasurable to load up a zMachine interpreter and play the grandaddy of them all, in the zMachine format. There is always a sense of wonder at seeing these abuses. Tetris, programming languages, Sokoban, Snake. Sometimes it's simply fun to load up my IF terp and use it for something else.

This game is clearly marked non-IF, so I won't criticise it for not being IF. It's a port of Rogue. Sometimes one does get a hankering for a roguelike. Hmm? What's that you say? One doesn't? Ah. Well, this one does, and this one is writing this review. :) The added portability is always a bonus, even if these days it may seem less important; after all, why bother with a zMachine Rogue when I can download a roguelike app?

Honestly? Sometimes you just can't beat oldschool. In its oldschool presentation. @ going around ..... S'ing |_ for secret +'rs and wielding your bow to throw arrows at a distant K, for $ and loot; wondering whether to Q that latest ! you found, or put on that funny-looking unknown =; and looking for the > (which is % in this version).

Maybe it's nostalgia, I'll admit. Nothing I can do about that. I have fun playing this. Maybe it's simplicity; so much has been added on to Rogue over the decades that it's become amazingly deep, and, you know, sometimes one prefers a little simplicity. What's that? One doesn- will you shut up already, One? Ahem.

Great port, great work. As fun to play as the original. It's not IF, but it's not meant to be. Gevan Dutton, I'm grateful for your hard work. So far, only two things have behaved unexpectedly: in this port my savegame is not deleted after it's restored (hehehe, that's not altogether a bad thing for me 😇 ) and "c"alling something, naming it, doesn't seem to work, at least not in the interpreter I tried.

A short story which is well-written enough to make me feel uncomfortable for the PC and make me intensely dislike the object of his affection - as I usually say, if if makes the reader feel stuff then it must be doing something right - but really doesn't use the medium to its advantage.

Being extremely linear and on rails isn't necessarily a problem (cue Rameses, Constraints (Martin Bays), et al), the problem is when, say, you have a sequence in which you travel through a set of rooms; there is only one way forward and one way back, and you're meant to keep going forward; after the room description paragraph you're treated to "story" paragraphs; and you find yourself zipping past the locations, not even reading them, thinking (rightly) that they are mere stepping stones and an excuse for the game to dole out the PC's internal monologue.

Like I said, if the story makes the reader feel stuff, it must be doing something right. But if the game makes the reader ignore stuff, it must be doing something... hmmm... left? Well, not-as-right.

Parser IF has always been tricky, which is why choice-based IF came into existence and Twine in particular gained such traction. As much as I love parser IF, I believe this story would have been better served by Twine (being from 1999, I think - not certain - it is, instead, one of a growing number of pieces where authors were getting frustated by the parser-IF medium; the frustration which came to, in time, develop Twine. But I'm not certain about this).

One of the most galling things about the game is how it doesn't update the response to "x me", which makes a lot of sense - and builds character and story - in the first room, then stops being relevant in later scenes. I was also personally miffed at the scene in which it didn't recognise my commands, because the command I wanted to try was "undo" (I wanted to try certain minimal interaction in the previous scene, to see what happened). After the game ignored my input for 3 or 4 turns, I gave up on "undo"ing back to where I'd been.

The story is, I think, relatable. To some, painfully so. It's certainly the best part of the game, well served by the writing. At most points, interactivity does very little for the story (">READ MESSAGE / >G / >G / >G" is pretty awkward), but in the first scene it's actually used really interestingly, by having a hyperanxious, fidgeting PC waiting for time to pass - which it does excruciatingly slow (and is possibly tied to actions, forcing the player to eke out interactions in a room very sparse of objects, trying to will time to move forward at more than a snail's pace. This is, simply, a great representation of every single time anyone has had to wait, anxiously, for something and had nothing to do but wait and watch the unmoving clock hands). After that, interactivity stops complementing the story and becomes a bit of a burden.

Worth experiencing once, and, I think, no more. May be triggering. I certainly felt it was unpleasant - but only because it felt plausible and realistic. More's the pity.

I don't know what the story is with this game. There is no game; we instantly get the game-over screen, being told the game is being reworked, and to stay tuned for updates.

Now, there is a not-insignificant number of IF games which play clever tricks on players, and a 208kb .gblorb seemed a bit much for just this joke. So I tried a few commands, in case the game was pulling one on me. As far as I can tell, there really is no game here, but I was amused at the types of things I tried. I tried all the options it spells out, naturally, to see if any of them would "kick-start" the game. I tried UNDO, though it isn't listed - which would actually make for a cool beginning of a game, if it started with the death screen and you had to undo. I tried "restarting" a few times in a row to see if the game kept a counter and started reacting. I checked to see whether the game was saving a file silently. I tried to SAVE. I tried other regular verbs, just in case the game would respond to them. Finally, I even tried "stay tuned", thinking it'd be really cool if this worked. Alas...

...so, nothing worked, but I was rather surprised at my own patience, and my default position that "there must be a game here, and I'm being tricked". I possibly tricked myself in the end! And maybe this was the point of this entry? Or probably I'm reading too much into it.

Ultimately, though, it's a non-game, a non-entity. The fun that I had with it was me shouting into the echo chamber of my mind, for no other reason than curiosity. It was interesting to see how much the very clever and original people who make adventure games and interactive fiction (especially parser IF, which I predominantly play) have conditioned me to see puzzles where there aren't any.

...oh, on the off-chance that there IS a game here and I just didn't find the magic command (which I find unlikely)... then it's too well-hidden. And it does happen that some games hide some stuff too well, and many players never get to see them... I don't think that's a good thing.

Not a review, really, but a warning: the postcomp release isn't winnable without the walkthrough. While it still recognises some critical objects you need to interact with in the first room, it no longer lists them anywhere in any way; if you don't check out the original release, and instead try to play the second release, and give up and turn to the walkthrough, you'll be going "Huh? Where in the description of the room and objects does it list that particular object?" The answer being, it doesn't. It only did in the original release.

I'm not rating, but I'm not playing any further either. This is a pretty huge oversight. I can't trust the game from this point on.

Writing this to, essentially, warn and leave a record of this situation.

First off: I'm probably not going to add anything new to the reviews already in here. I'll be highlighting the effective writing, the wonderful moodsetting, and I'll explain where I got terminally stuck - and why; why the interactions up to that point, and especially the parser responses I had encountered, which had taught me that a crucial command would not be worth thinking about.

So feel free to skip this review, although I always think it's important when a player explains why they got stuck in a puzzle.

First, I must acknowledge the best about the game: the writing, though sparse, is, as we've come to expect from Plotkin, amazingly effective. He doesn't need to drown us in rivers of prose (which is what I usually do); he tells us things as they are. The words he chooses, his vocabulary, the things he focuses on - that is where his art lies, and with only a few brushstrokes he paints compelling settings. In the game's second act, I can feel the cold and wet rain falling on me, I can feel the urgency of the situation, it is all extremely vivid.

This is accompanied by well-known technical excellence that needs no introduction. I will merely highlight the "moment of light", and how it reflects in the descriptions of most rooms. Not to mention the importance of such a final magical moment before things gradually start taking a turn for the worse. Yes, his prowess at world-setting and wordsmithing extends to pacing.

Ok, let's talk about the crux of the game. When I played it, the game was very clear to me that it is cruel in the Zarfian scale, and how is earns that rating. So I knew what to expect, and I kept savegames, and I really intended to finish this one by myself. I wanted to have faith in this puzzler, tackle it by its own terms, see what makes it tick, and solve it.

HAH!

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

What a laugh, hey? I mean, how naïve can you be?

Naturally, I failed. But I want to explain why, in hopes that this information is useful to designers.

I was failing in the second act, and I don't think it's possible to avoid spoilers from this point on, so... I'll use multiple spoiler tags because it seems the spoiler tag doesn't like paragraphs.

Cue the walkthrough. And in a game like this, once you hit the walkthrough, you can't go back. In fact, I find that's true for every game I play, and that's why I avoid hints and walkthroughs: once I start, I have a very hard time going back to thinking by myself, normally because all the time I put in has proved useless; worthless. I have no motivation to try and think my way around any more puzzles.

The exception is when I look at the solution and I go, "huh. I actually could have gotten that."

NOT the case here.

So, this game is beautiful, and intricate, and excellent, until it makes you give up. From that point on, if you enjoy playing games from a walkthrough, you may enjoy this. I don't.

I hope this feedback is useful to authors.

I remember playing this author's first few games when they came out, and I had memories of something that was promising but not quite there yet; something idiosyncratic, with a strong narrative sense but technical shortcomings.

As of today, this game seems to be his penultimate-latest game, after a quite prolific burst in a small amount of time. It all comes flooding back to me; the same strengths and the same shortcomings are still there.

While I would not say that, as in some cases, his games are just static fiction with a thin veneer of interactivity "just because" - I don't believe they are - it is true that the best part of his games is the story, the setting, the worldbuilding. Perhaps unavoidably in a game that is more narrative than simulationist, the portion of "A Castle of Thread" that I played through (I did not finish it) consists essentially of a sequence of scenes. Not in the claustrophobic sense of one-room situations, thankfully; these scenes can have you in a few rooms, give you space to talk to a few characters, even have some roaming characters.

But then you realise that, for instance, the characters essentially just respond to whatever comes up when you type TOPICS, and little (or nothing) else (might as well code a conversation tree instead), and their roaming around doesn't really mean much. It feels like an exercise in making people alive by not being in the same place, and giving them random lines of text to describe some sort of pseudo-action. Also, certain topics might wield results that are very specific and include, in their results, a reference to the place you're in... and you might have the choice to ask that character the same thing afterwards, in a different place... and you get the same reply... as though in were in a previous location that you're currently not.

There are objects clearly listed in the room's description that aren't implemented (a sink in an unusual bathroom; a closed window in a bedroom; stuff that does call for some sort of interaction or close examination). You cannot "fill container", you must "get liquid" with the container in your posession. Characters are listed by Inform's default system in very innoportune ways; when you first meet an antagonist, whom you pointedly do not know, Inform very helpfully has already told you "So-and-so is standing here, looking such-and-such". Plus, attempts to make characters seem alive by giving them actions ("So-and-so looks at your haversack") jar when they appear in the middle of, say, a tense fight scene. If, upon finding (Spoiler - click to show)the body of Deviah, you try to search it without examining first, you find yourself in the silly position of allowing another character to come into a room where there is something they should react do, but don't; because you didn't trigger a piece of the story by examining that element. This could easily have been avoided by a simple "before doing anything to ___" line.

So there is simply a lack of care to these details; care which is instead given to the narrative. Indeed, the best parts of the game are the story and the narrative sequences. Simulationism is clearly not the point; but if you try to do something that is more narrative-based, like (Spoiler - click to show)trying to attack the bad guy in the Vulgar Unicorn while he fights with your guardian, you are sensibly rewarded by a reaction that makes sense and is visually stimulating, (Spoiler - click to show)of yourself being thrown into another location, where you find another character cowering. Also, the characters that walk around, and appear to take actions of their own, do serve as scenery that makes the scene more lively. I don't know that it makes it all more "alive", because Inform announces them in its default way all the time (the way that the cat follows you around in the tavern section is so strangely unremarked upon I thought maybe it was a bug), so rather than "living", they seem "lively decorations".

Narrative focus is all well and good, but if the technical aspects don't follow suit, it damages the final result. The game doesn't have to be full simulationist, and maybe trying to be so is part of its problem. A more narrative-focused game should accept its strengths. The issue is that, when the player is stuck and trying to solve a puzzle, that's when the illusion will come apart at the (many) seams. When you don't know what you need to solve a puzzle, and start to experiment, and realise that most everything is cardboard scenery, it damages the experience. Again, there is no need to go full simulationist if one doesn't want to; but there is an art to that, an art to describing just enough to lead the player's attention to, and away from, things. An author who doesn't master this art will have players poking where the author would rather they didn't; and if the author didn't also make provisions to gently dissuade them from that, well, then the result is... a game like this. Not bad, but without the proper care.

Not to mention, some puzzle solutions are a bit strange; I did solve the first "proper" puzzle on my own, but that was because I was just doing "stuff" just because the items were there. Every step of the way I thought "surely this won't work, but lemme try it to see what happens". Not only it did work, it was the solution. Well, it's not a spoiler to say I would never think of unclogging a pipe THAT way!

Ultimately, I did not finish this. At a certain point I had the opportunity to ask a new character about an item in my inventory, and their response renamed that inventory item and gave me a new topic. Let's say that the item was revealed to be a Schnoodligan (my made-up word, not in the game) item, and I was now encouraged to ask who the Schnoodligans are.

Well, I entered the vicious disambiguation cycle that is well known. Every time I asked about the Schnoodligans, the game asked me which I meant; the Schnoodligan item or the Schnoodligans. Nothing I input made a difference (incidently, if I'm not mistaken there's an I7 extension called Numbered Disambiguation or something which would have helped here).

I can only tolerate poor implementation up to a point, and this was that point. My trust in the game had been steadily decreasing; with this, I had no reason to trust it anymore. And without trust in the game, how can a player expect to have any enjoyment? Maybe this should have been static fiction instead, after all. Or possibly a choice-based game, instead of a parser.