Ratings and Reviews by Giger Kitty

"A Plotkin?", you say. You are intrigued. You've heard of these before, usually spoken of in reverential tones.

"Indeed, indeed, the genuine article. True creative spirit, the author; just can't stop him. Remarkable plumage, the Norwegian Blue."

"The what?"

"Hmm?" inquires the salesman. "The Plotkin. It's a remarkable little puzzler and no mistake."

"No, but you'd said... never mind", you sigh; best not to start another Python skit.

You take a good look at this Plotkin. It seems rather small, but rather imp-ish, a bit devious. You decide to ask about these characteristics.

"Oh, every Plotkin is devious up to a point, Sir/Madam/Non-Binary. Oh yes. That is part of what makes them fun."

"Fun," you repeat, deadpan.

"Well, certainly, some people find it fun. Others, I admit, less so. It's certainly rather cerebral, possibly for the true conoisseur. A Plotkin may not be everyone's cup of tea, but there are those to whom it is a truly exquisite experience. Nothing like it, no sir/ma'am/non-binary."

"Are they all this small, then?"

The salesman looks positively horrified for a moment. "Oh, NO, sir/ma'am/enn-bee; not at ALL! There are great gargantuan Plotkins, and some Plotkins may be comparateively small but be so tight as to take up a tremendous amount of time and brain-teasing fun! This is indeed one of the smaller models, but it does come together with two other Plotkins which comprise a sort of Tryptich. One feels it would have been more than that, but, life being as it is, these three Plotkins are probably all we will see of that series. Which makes it all the more valuable."

You scratch your chin thoughtfully. "How does it handle the prose?"

The salesman is now positively beaming. "Ah, you are a shrewd one, a shrewd customer, and no mistake! There is no pulling the wool over your eyes! Fear not, it is exactly as you'd expect from any other Plotkin. A superficial glance will show that the prose is utilitarian and practical-minded, but start scratching away at that surface - even an inch, s/m/nb, even just a mere fraction of an inch! - and fascinating wordsmanship will start oozing out, as rich as pus on a festering wound!"

"...what?!"

"What what?"

"What did you just say?!"

"Merely that the writing will astound and mesmerise you, even as it retains that simplicity and utility which most befits a single puzzler."

"But you... no, never mind," you say again; this salesman seems stranger and stranger. "And how does it handle?"

At this, the salesman's countenance darkens for just a second (is that sulfur you smell, very briefly? It goes away as soon as you notice it, though), and his tone is lower as he intones "Ah, there, s/m/nb, I admit there have been some remarks of a less than positive nature. Not that it will not astound you, s/m/nb, once you've realised what it intends to do; it plays with the very laws of physics, and that is a remarkable feat, truly remarkable. Can it really be faulted if sometimes it handles a little bit less than perfectly? But alas, I have heard it say that attempts to use disambiguation to resolve more succint parser inputs"...

...is it just your imagination or is his tone shifting into something that's more similar to an IFDB review?

He continues: "... sometimes doesn't work as well as can be expected. Indeed, very often, when trying to PUT something ON somethingelse, it will disambiguate that somethingelse with something from your inventory. Which is usually the very 'something' that you were trying to use. In order words, although it'll be tempting to reduce your inputs to the smallest possible numeber of words, the parser is likely to try to put something on itself if left to its own disambiguation."

"Are you feeling allright?", you ask, more out of politeness.

"Never better!", he cherfully belts out, returning to his previous style. "And that is because, regardless of whatever little hiccups may occur, you will find this Plotkin to be so streamlined, and so daring in concept, that such trifling details will be completely forgotten as you solve this brief and simple puzzle!"

"Brief and simple?"

"Did I say that? Did I say that? Those very words? Could my very tongue have - well, ok, yes, it's true, relatively speaking the puzzle is concise and will tax the greatest of minds only for an instant, and give merely a passing headache to those of a lesser cerebral nature. BUT", he attempts to rally, "brilliance is not merely in the puzzle itself, but in how it is presented! A Plotkin that is a tasty morsel is no less filling than a gargantuan Plotkin; it is merely the difference between an exquisite snack and a full blown 12 course banquet."

"You've already said 'exquisite' and 'garguantuan' before."

"This is running too long and I'm running out of synonyms", he snaps back at once. His countenance - another word which has already been used - smoothes over as he says "In short, this is well and truly a Plotkin. In every sense of the word. All that you've come to expect from a Plotkin; nothing about its author is diminished."

"I'll think about it", you say, thinking mostly about getting the heck out of here - but also thinking about grabbing this Plotkin on your way out.

"A word of caution, however", he remarks.

You look quizzical, showing off your great muscular abilities in raising your right eyebrow a full five inches. You always were proud of that particular trait, useless though it is except for that one TV commercial those many years ago.

"This Plotkin and it companion pieces are best experienced... with a healthy period of pause between each. Think of it as cleansing the palate. The distilled experience of playing all three in a row may be somewhat... overwhelming... for some."

You sense the atmosphere has become rather oppresive, suddenly. With this, and with the clear feeling that the writer of this review has reached the end and doesn't really know how to conclude, you say your goodbyes and decide to visit a cheese shop on your way home. You hear those cheese have beautiful plumage.

I did not get far into the game, but I suspected it was all going to be along certain lines. Reading the reviews, I don't think I was mistaken.

It is an interesting thing to have a game where the actual mechanics are simple, and mundane, but the overall point is actually the story that you reveal as you go through the motions. There is then a balancing act: although the mechanics are not the point, they are what the player will actually be doing, so it needs to be minimally engaging, possibly fun up to a point (doing boring things can also work, but it's very risky; the player may simply decide to go play something else).

In this one, it failed to capture me. Part of it was that I was trying to figure out good places for the things I was unpacking, but at the same time I was also going, "why bother? This is an unpacking-and-dumping mechanic. What difference does it make where I put stuff?" But I still wanted to make it relatively sensible. Some things made sense for me to be in storage. Others made sense for me to be prominently displayed. But even as I was giving it some thought, I was always thinking, and the game never really contradicted me on this, "what is the point of giving it any thought at all?" If I had kept playing I might have just gotten into the routine of unpacking, examining, thinking about, and dumping wherever. I suspected the game might throw a "space optimisation" puzzle at me, and I don't know whether it does or not, but I was dreading it in such a bland setting.

Ultimately what made me decide enough was enough was,

a) finding an item that seemed so worthless I could not think of any reason to keep it: (Spoiler - click to show)a faded receipt used as a bookmark; no longer inside the book, so no longer even serving its fuction. Unpacking into a new office and you come across that? Geez, just throw it away! But that's not an option, we have to Find A Place For It. Even if it's storage. That's a pretty ridiculous item to put in long-term storage, though. That is the mechanics getting very on-the-nose.

b) trying to move boxes out of the way to get to the MISC box second (it was the one that made more sense for having a knife for cutting the tape, all boxes considered, after dealing with "stationery" first) didn't work; and it didn't work in a way that made it clear the game wanted me to go through the boxes in a certain order, which is all fine and dandy for the game but makes no sense as it's trivial to, if I really want to access a certain box first, just move things around. If I try to do anything to a box, I get a message like "All you need to do with the book box is get it open and get it unpacked." I was not expecting it to be on rails like this. Again: mechanics transparently getting in my way Just Because.

c) seeing that the desk was "creaking under the weight" of a calendar and a pencil. Really? Seeing that, I couldn't really muster any kind of motivation to try and make it sensible anymore. And once again, yes, this was Mechanics Transparently Showing Up And Reminding Me That Objects Were Really Nothing But A Size And Weight Property.

I was certainly unpeeling a story, and I don't dislike stories that get revealed this way. In this game, I think it missed the mark. The mechanics were, to me, far too intrusive. It wasn't worth drudging through it, and especially it wasn't worth reducing, in my mind, the objects to their size/weight to find places they fit. I mean, if the game is about giving those objects a history and making them part of a revealed story, asking me then to forget that a pencil and a calendar is certainly not enough to make any desk creak under their weight is far too mimesis-breaking.

(I suggest you don't reveal the next two spoilers unless you've finished the game. Really don't want to spoil anything.) This game feels like the love-child of (Spoiler - click to show)Babel and (Spoiler - click to show)Coloratura. Two games which had a profound emotional impact on me.

This game also impacted me.

I remember when Marco Innocenti entered the scene with Andromeda Awakening. And I was like, yeah, it's ok, but I didn't really see what everyone else was raving about. It simply didn't click.

That was in 2011. In the last three days, I have played two other Marco Innocenti games ("A Train to Picadilly" being the the other one). Well, either I was very short-sighted back then and everyone else could see what he was going to become, or he grew immensely as an author.

I suspect both.

In this relatively short Punyinform game, which apprently does not constrain him but instead streamlines the gameplaying experience by focusing the action on just as much interaction as necessary (and yet the game feels delightfully responsive all the while), Marco Innocenti treats us to the three best things he brings to IF. He brings exquisite writing, with unexpected turns of phrase that border on the poetic, surprising by the matter-of-fact way they are stated. He bring a fertile imagination. And he brings remarkably solid puzzle design.

And we're talking what I usually call the good stuff in puzzles. The puzzles where you visualize the rooms and the objects, and try to resolve situations as though you were actually there. The puzzles where you experiment (not that experimentation is deeply detailed, but there is just enough - particularly, it skillfully draws your attention away from where you should not focus. That is so hard. I so deeply admire this), maybe with no particular obvious guidance but with a definitive notion, which grows stronger as you play, that this is where you need to direct your efforts.

The writing (at points you can sort of tell English is not his first language, but rather than that resulting in awkwardness and bad communication, it instead appears to enhance the atmosphere. Not many people can get away with that!) and the fertile imagination - and, in the case of this game, the absolutely masterful way in which, over the first handful of moves, you discover a few things about the PC, things that could have been stated immediately but which instead he finds a way to let us stumble upon by ourselves - are the tremendous glue that keep this together in the first half of the game, which is where the puzzles are. In the second half, it becomes a lot more about the story, the mood, the atmosphere. I found this to be an excellent choice. When you're envolved in a story like this, drawn in, sure, you can tackle harder puzzles for a while, but eventually you go "I want to see where this story is going!". Story-heavy games which get harder as the game progress can be very frustrating because of this. But the decision to ease up on the puzzles for the endgame section, and instead dole out story chunks in measured segments (so well measured; the final sections really are just story-dump, but they are told in such different perspectives, using such different techniques, triggered by different things, that it nevel feels like a dump) takes courage.

I had no particular trouble with the puzzles. I loved the manner in which they made me think.

Near the beginning, there's a point where you hear a voice tell you that you need to get to the location physically above you. I was so drawn into the game that I looked up. Me. The player, holding the tablet in my hands, playing the game through Fabularium's internal keyboard. I actually looked up, away from the screen, towards the ceiling of my room, and thought to myself "ok, it's up there, but I don't think I can get there directly from where I am."

Then I realised what I had just done.

...just plain awesome.

Similarly, don't want to spoil anything, but... how can I say this... after a certain revelation, I tried to do something, and I tried for 4 or 5 moves, rewording it. Not because the game prompted me, but because it felt right. Or rather, something felt wrong and I wanted to fix it. The game didn't let me, or the PC was not able to, so I just kept going, but it's so interesting that I felt so uncomfortable that, like an itch I had to scratch, for a few moves after (Spoiler - click to show)seeing what's in the quarantine room, and the other corpse with the same suit, I rather desperately wanted to (Spoiler - click to show)remove my own suit.

YMMV, different strokes for different folks, I don't guarantee that you'll love it as much as I did or that you'll have as great an experience. But I did. And I think it's the type of experience that I will treasure, just like I treasure the experience from those two games in spoiler tags there at the top.

I'm going to wait for a suitable amount of time, and then, next stop: A1RL0CK 2. I'm savouring the antecipation.

PS - Unrelated to IF. The protagonist here shares a name with a character in an anime I particularly enjoy, "Noir". This game has nothing to do with that anime. And yet, and yet, on a certain level, I sort of can see a similarity between both of them - the protagonist here and her namesake in Noir. It's probably just me. But... you know... this stuff lingers.

Sometimes you feel sorry for not sticking with a game, because you can tell there's good stuff there. But there's a reason you stop playing. It's like a breakup where, despite the good stuff, there's just things you can't put up with anymore.

"A Sugared Pill" starts with a rather tense opening. The fact that it seems tense and timed but is actually not timed at all doesn't diminish its effectiveness. It also immediately displays a clickable action bar, which essentially lists exists plus the other occasional convenience. It serves as a good exit lister even if you don't use the mouse.

My issue with the game was, through and through, the experience. For a game which makes a big deal of "convenience" when entering what will soon be your mode of transportation - a car, which you automatically open and close, lock and unlock, and start the ignition of; which is all stuff that a game should probably do anyway, and only the games which are too simualtionistic for their own good implement so deeply as to be an obstacle to the player - there were quite a few sticky places where the parser either exasperated me or just couldn't get what I was trying to achieve.

Add to that a beginning which becomes somewhat aimless and has you doing stuff "just because it's there", and I soon realised I didn't want to continue. My rating of "1" is because of my personal metric. If the game made me want to stop so abruptly, I can't really consider its good spots; what good are they, if the game made me want to stop?

The first time I felt a pang of annoyance was in the very first puzzle. I'll spoil it here. Really, don't read this if you haven't solved the first puzzle. Essentially, it shows the parser annyoing me by first not properly responding to what seems like disambiguation, and then not accepting the word which it itself used to describe an object. And no, I did not go out of my way to look for these annoyances, this is what I did on my playthrough.(Spoiler - click to show) >BURN BEAR: "Not a bad idea. But what will you light it with?" >lighter: "There's no verb in that sentence!" >burn bear with lighter: "Woah! The bear ignites far too easily and burns brightly. Molten pieces of plastic fur begin to drip onto the ground and within seconds it's not so much a soft toy as a fireball." >throw fireball at hitman: "I don't know the word "fireball"."

Soon after this sequence you arrive to another location where you start finding yourself doing things for little reason. Partly because all your attention is focused on a certain building, but all your attempts to enter the building fail - apparently because the game doesn't understand your attempts to enter the building, or go building, or climb stairs (which are explicitly mentioned), or go in (if you "go in", you enter the car instead). So instead of the very important building, you go off in the opposite direction into a hotel. You rent a room (not really a spoiler) for no reason or motivation at all. You start doing stuff in the hotel for really no reason.

The hotel room door sometimes seems to allow you to cross it by going in its direction. Sometimes, though, it stops you and tells you its closed. If you try to open it, it may tell you it's locked. If you try to unlock it, it may ask you what with, and if you answer "key", it may ask you which do you mean, the hotel room key or the car key. Once you go through the door once, apparently it does these things more automatically, unless you happen to lock the door behind you after you leave, as I did. In which case the whole thing starts again when you want to get into the room.

Sorry, but this is where the "convenience" really should have been programmed in, instead of making a very simulated car and then making shortcuts for it (a less simulated car would have done just as well. Implementing something just deeply enough is an artform).

The thing about all of this is that whenever I try something the game isn't expecting, the game just fails to acknowledge it. Where's the simulation now? I try to throw a hose out the window to get it out of the hotel, I try to attach that hose to the sink, and, just as when I was trying to get into the building, my problem is not that the game doesn't allow me; the problem is that the game seems not to understand what I'm attempting at all, prompting me to reword it many times in increasing frustration.

What you do get is a detailedly implemented television which has channels you can flip through and volume you can raise or lower. Dunno whether it's used in any puzzles. There's a feeling of the author having focused on the wrong things.

The point at which I gave up was when I checked the walkthrough and saw I had to "look behind" something, to reveal something that really should have been revealed by a simple "examine". "Look behind" is a doozy to have in any game, because, just like you don't know whether something is interesting until you "examine" it and so you have to "examine" everything, "look behind" is the same. It's a can of worms. Unless you give the player reason to look behind something (and this game doesn't), then do you expect to player to look behind every item you implement? Because, since the player doesn't know what you implemented, the player will have to do that.

In this case, there is really no reason for this unprompted "look behind X" (the description only contains prompting in hindsight. It's insufficient), as what gets reveled is perfectly in scope for being part of a regular "examine".

At this point, I'd had enough. I felt that whatever the game was doing well (the premise is not uninteresting) it was more than offset by the aimlesness, the unmotivated actions, the struggles with the parser, and this last "puzzle". I did not wish to continue the experience.

Oh, another thing which annoyed me. The player's gender. It is unstated for quite a while, and for some reason I thought the player was female. Probably because in the intro it says they won a stuffed bear in karaoke by singing Whitney Houston. >X ME says "You look about the same as always." You can accuse me of stereotyping, if you wish, but a player kinda needs something to latch on to; as I visualise the action, it helps to visualise who the PC is. When I saw that other people were addressing the PC as "sir", it was jarring, and then I realised that the PC was male. I simply would have wished for more clarity from the get go. It doesn't change anything in the game or the story, from what I saw, but it was yet another wrench in the works. If the PC is gendered, be it binary or non-binary, and the player doesn't get it and builds a mental image that turns out to be wrong later, that's a negative experience for the player which the author could have avoided by being clearer.

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.