Ratings and 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.