Astralily is a first IF effort by an enthusiastic young author. It's clearly a labor of love, and gives me a pleasant nostalgia for the unfinished fantasy epics I wrote when I was younger - big jumbles of all the tropes I loved and ideas I thought were neat. There's nothing like really luxuriating in some wish-fulfillment-y genre fiction. I'm also happy to see more magical girl IF, and that it has a lesbian romance and a multiverse plot is even better. There are a number of cute moments here (I enjoyed the bit with the cat), and some well-used multimedia elements. (I liked the newspaper in episode 1 and mostly liked the backgrounds; there are one or two places where the font colors chosen for character names don't contrast well, but I've seen much worse in that regard.)
As is to be expected from an inexperienced author, there are also a number of places where the work could use a little more polish. I would like to see how this looks after a good proofread, especially to fix all the missing periods at the ends of sentences. The cast size also grows very fast, and I think it would be nice if existing characters got some strong establishing moments before more characters were added, as by the end of the currently available story I was having trouble keeping track. And not all the multimedia felt well-integrated; images of characters and locations often felt more like a gesture of giving up on trying to describe things in an evocative way than an integral part of the piece (though I might feel somewhat differently if they were incorporated into the piece rather than linked on external sites). The occasional use of emoji also felt like a substitute for describing how people looked or sounded. In the script format that this piece is written in, you don't even need to be that subtle; an "(excitedly)" or "(with a huge smile)" at the beginning of a line could be a solid replacement for "đđđ" or the like.
Regardless, it's a fun idea executed with a lot of verve, and I hope the writer keeps at it!
You Canât Save Her is a short piece about two friends raised in a monastery in a fantasy setting. One friend finds a forbidden tome that reveals the existence of a different god and becomes a heretic, gaining strange powers in the process. The other remains loyal, and when the heretic becomes a threat, the church sends the loyalist to kill her.
The most interesting part of this piece, to me, is the way it deals with faith. The loyalist, it is suggested, also has her doubts about the god she was raised to believe in; her refusal to follow her friend into apostasy isnât due to an unwavering commitment to the worldview the monastery espouses. Rather, itâs because sheâs also skeptical of the new god her friend has found. To overcome the inertia of her upbringing, itâs not enough to no longer believe in her original faith; she has to find something else she believes in more. (Spoiler - click to show)(Which she does, ultimately, though itâs not a god at all.)
Leaving a highly dogmatic faith that has been a large part of oneâs life to that point is something I donât have personal experience of, so I canât say if this rings true. But it is an interesting contention, and a somewhat unusual angle on this type of narrative.
The prose is fairly laconic, but there are moments of striking imageryâa cathedral that âpierces the sky like a stalagmiteâ, moonlight through stained glass âpainting a rose of rainbows on the floorâ, a rift in space that âcloses like a woundâ. It adds up to an atmosphere thatâs beautiful, nearly empty, and uncanny, enhanced by a droning industrial soundtrack. The sparseness of the words on the screen (most of the time) also feels appropriate to a story thatâs largely about two women alone in a vast desert.
The interactivity was the workâs weak point for me; I found that the choices felt largely cosmetic (does it matter if youâre trudging off to kill your best friend with a saber or a broadsword?). This was thematically appropriate to the earlier parts of the game, in which the loyalistâs perceived lack of choice figures prominently, but later on it might have been fitting to let the loyalistâs belated rebellion be something the player had more of an active hand in. (This not being the case then makes the earlier lack of meaningful choice feel less like a thematic decision, also.) Failing that, I think it would also have been an improvement to stick to the use of cycling links that probe a little deeper into the characterâs psyche with each click, and just get rid of the choices that change a bit of text in the next passage but donât really carry any weight. But it is an enjoyable piece of writing nonetheless.
Where Nothing Is Ever Named is a very short parser game taking place in a mysterious space where⌠well, see title. There are two things in the space with you, and the gameâs one puzzle consists of interacting with the things enough to figure out what they are, whereupon what you need to do becomes clear. It took me five minutes.
I see how this conceit could rapidly become unwieldy from a disambiguation perspective, but I did wish there were a little more to the game. Whatâs there is well-implemented and enjoyable, though, and the game gets some bonus points from me for (Spoiler - click to show)letting me pet not one but two animals.
Welcome to the Universe is an homage to/parody of Alter Ego, a 1986 choice-based game. Alter Ego was created by, I believe, a psychologist, and purported to be able to accurately model the playerâs personality and life up to that point and show them what the outcome of their life choices might be, as well as allowing them to experiment with other life paths and identities. Alter Egoâs claim that it would âchange your lifeâ was a little tongue-in-cheek (because you can model the outcomes of making different choices, get it?), but it was earnestly meant to be thought-provoking and somewhat educational, claimed to be rooted in a deep understanding of human psychology, and was perhaps even intended to provoke empathy for others in bad situations, in a âthere but for fortuneâ kind of way. A contemporary review called it âconsciousness-raising.â Of course, it also made a number of normative assumptions about the player, and in a game thatâs supposed to be so all-encompassing of the human experience, thereâs a particular kind of discomfort that that causes for a player who finds that the array of choices on offer hasnât taken into account the possible existence of a person like them.
You may wonder why Iâve spent a whole paragraph of this review talking about an entirely different game, but I think if I had not already been familiar with Alter Egoânot only the game itself, but the way it was marketed and receivedâI would have been pretty baffled by Welcome to the Universe. The latter game is framed as the creation of a fictional academic, Dr. Balamer, who believes in the importance of âlife-changing video gamesâ and their ability to provoke empathy by drawing on universal human experiences. His earnest ambition to connect humans by creating a universally relatable game produces something that is both obviously filtered through the perspective of a middle-class, suburban, white American man (witness, for example, the schoolchildren arguing about the merits of their hometown based on the presence or absence of particular chain restaurantsâcan a town really be said to be good if it doesnât have an Applebeeâs???) and frequently absurd (featuring heated arguments about Parisian dentistry and a placeholder for an incident involving âgoopâ that somehow leads to you declaring yourself the âgoop masterâ or âgoop servantâ). I wonât spoil where exactly this goes, but my read is that Welcome to the Universe affectionately mocks some of Alter Egoâs grand ambitions and gestures towards universality while ultimately affirming the impulse towards human connection that underlies it.
I found this pretty entertaining (the high point for me was probably (Spoiler - click to show)the mid-game survey that asked you if you thought the game should add an incident involving a stranger in an unmarked van and then asked you if you thought it would be fair if your character died if they interacted with the stranger in any way, a reference to an infamously jarring episode in the childhood section of Alter Ego where your character can be kidnapped and murdered). But at the same time, Iâm not quite sure if thereâs much of a point to this mockery of a specific aspect of a specific game that didnât exactly spawn a host of imitators. On the other hand, maybe itâs just a monument to someoneâs complicated feelings about an ambitious but flawed game, and maybe thatâs all it needs to be.
There is one aspect that I felt might rise to the level of a commentary on choice games in general rather than Alter Ego in particular. Alter Ego was a game that gave you choices of actions and determined your (or rather, the PCâs) qualities based on what you did, and that has remained a popular model for choice IF (see the whole Choice of Games oeuvreâin fact, Alter Egoâs latest incarnation seems to be in Choicescript). Welcome to the Universe, on the other hand, allows you to choose what you are (a traveller or a homebody? Cool or uncool?), and determines your actions based on those qualities. It inverts the usual framework, perhaps calling into question how much choice we really have in what we do versus how much our actions are the inevitable result of who we are as people. (Of course, this has particular relevance to Alter Egoâs claim that you can create a perfect replica of yourself but then see what happens if you make different life choices, and a little less relevance to the majority of choice games, in which youâre not supposed to be playing a character whoâs Literally You. But on the other hand, Iâve often heard people lament that they replayed a game planning to make different choices this time, but couldnât bring themselves to do itâŚ.)
Thereâs also something there about the inadequacy of binary choices to really capture the range of human experience, but this falls a little flat when you consider that most games donât have purely binary choices, including Alter Ego itself.
All Alter Ego considerations aside, I didnât consistently love the experience of Welcome to the Universe; the humor was a little hit or miss for me, and also I donât really like playing as Literally Me in any game and so I didnât and then I felt like Iâd undermined the intended experience of the ending. (This is a me problem, I know.) But itâs definitely unique, and it gave me some ideas to chew on, and I appreciate that.
The one-way street I live on dead-ends at a busy four-lane road onto which I frequently have to turn left (the US equivalent of the gameâs UK right turn). Often, as Iâm sitting there waiting for this to be possible, some jerk in an unnecessarily large vehicle will get impatient and try to go around me, although the street is not really designed for that. Of course, the reason Iâm just sitting there is because there are no openings, so the overly large vehicle will just sit there for a while blocking my view of traffic, and then take the first opening that comes along before I can get to it, even though I was there first!!!
When a similar incident happened in Turn Right, I may have started yelling out loud. Just a little.
This short parser game simulates the experience of attempting to turn right onto a busy road. Iâve been vocal over the years about my dislike of games that simulate boring and/or frustrating experiences, but Turn Rightâs spot-on observational humor makes it work. At first, out of some sort of contrarian instinct, I tried everything I could think of besides what the game wanted me to do, but while it was all implemented, the responses were terse enough that I gave in and committed to my fate of repeatedly trying TURN RIGHT. I was then rewarded with a surprisingly varied set of exasperating events, related in wry tones. (Although I am glad I tried (Spoiler - click to show)examining the car park and saw that the van responsible for the aforementioned incident was taking up two parking spaces, foreshadowing that the driver was an asshole.)
I did experience a touch of cultural dissonance; you see, Iâm from Boston, and to get anywhere in this godforsaken city, you have to drive aggressively. So on one of the several occasions when someone in the near lane stopped to try to let the PC through, I would have just barged on out there on the assumption that someone on the far lane would let me through sooner rather than later once I was conspicuously blocking traffic. But I understand that in most of the US, to say nothing of the rest of the world, people are too polite for that sort of thing.
Turn Right is probably not nearly as funny to people who donât drive, but I would recommend it to anyone who does.
Final Call is the tale of a small-time crook who gets kidnapped and chucked into something that resembles a cross between an escape room and a Saw trap. Itâs a solid premise; not groundbreaking, but thereâs definitely an audience (one that includes me!) that will happily take several dozen of this kind of thing as long as itâs well-executed.
The game, which took me about a half hour to complete, is ambitious and very unpolished. There are a lot of rooms, but most of them donât serve any actual purpose. The puzzles are entirely lawnmower-able, which is just as well because the logic can be shaky. Sometimes sentences are capitalized and sometimes they arenât; sometimes they have punctuation and sometimes they donât. Thereâs timed text. There are intimations of backstory, but nothing is ever really explained. The ending comes abruptly and is somewhat confusing. (At least, that was true of the ending I got. I did wonder if things might have wrapped up more sensibly if Iâd made a different choice, but the timed text dissuaded me from trying again.)
Final Call is aiming for a little more emotional depth than your average âwhat if escape room but lethalâ tale via the PCâs relationships with his girlfriend Roxy and partner-in-crime Mike, but none of the characters quite gets enough development to rise above stereotype status. As such, I wasnât sufficiently invested for the crime-doesnât-pay message to hit home in the way it was obviously meant to. (So I will be blithely carrying on robbing casinos IRLâsorry, authors!)
That said, the authors of Final Call do have excellent instincts for quality-of-life features (timed text notwithstanding). I was initially disheartened to encounter a list of links to âDoor #1â, âDoor #2â, et cetera, but once each passage has been visited, the link text is replaced with a more descriptive phrase. Every clue you come across and every puzzle you encounter is listed in the sidebar for easy reference, which was great. Thereâs a text entry bit thatâs case-sensitive, and the game specifically tells you itâs case-sensitiveâwhich may seem like damning with faint praise, but a lot of newbie Twine authors donât think to do that. (My personal preference is for these things to not be case-sensitive in the first place, but you do have to dig into JS a little to figure out how to do that, so I donât blame people for not realizing you can.)
And despite the issues with the writing and game design, on a technical level, Final Call was a very smooth experience for meâI didnât encounter any bugs. Which is pretty good for a first outing, especially considering that the game is doing some things I would consider at least advanced-beginner-level, SugarCube-wise.
All things considered, while Final Call was overall rough, I did come away with the feeling that the authors had promise and might someday make an escape room thriller I would really enjoy. They just need some practiceâand maybe a proofreader.
In this game, the PC is run over by a car that veers onto the sidewalk and killedâand then regains consciousness in the body of the last passer-by they looked at. They loop through the events surrounding their death, trying to manipulate their environment so that everything aligns in such a way that the car doesnât hit them. It is essentially what in board-gaming circles we would call a programming game, where youâre queuing up a set of actions for each participant that will then execute the next time through the loop.
As far as Iâm concerned this is a fantastic premise, and I love the unusual elements of the gameplay structure, too. The writing also serves the concept well; itâs pithy and funny (if more in a wry-smile than a laugh-out-loud kind of way). I can imagine a version of this game that would be one of my favorite games of IFComp 2024.
Unfortunately the puzzles all had moments where they were pretty obtuse, and Traffic doesnât quite know how to nudge the player in the right direction through helpful error responses or other environmental info. Since there are also no hints, whenever I got stuck, I really hit a wall. My experience of the game was largely one of getting 2/3 of the way to the solution of a puzzle, getting stumped for an extended period of time, and finally turning to the walkthrough (which very bluntly gives the shortest possible path to the solution).
For example, when playing as the baby, (Spoiler - click to show)I found the pacifier and I had the idea to throw it, but the response to trying to throw the pacifier without a target is simply, âFutile.â Therefore I assumed I was on the wrong track with throwing it, and gave up. If the response had been something like âYou donât think the woman will notice if you just throw it in a random directionâ (much less funny, I know), that would have been really helpful. I then at one point tried TAKE PHONE, which just got the response that I couldnât reach it. This, too, seems like a missed opportunity to steer the player towards the solution (âYour arms are too short, but maybe thereâs another wayâŚâ or what have you). The former suggestion and the latter combined would probably have added up to THROW PACIFIER AT PHONE in my brain; nothing currently in the game did.
In general, even just a VERBS command listing the verbs needed to complete the game would have been a big help. Anything to point me in the right direction just a little bit.
This string of almost-but-not-quite-figuring-out-the-puzzle-myself experiences left me feeling vaguely disappointed and unsatisfied; like a cat chasing a laser pointer, I have stalked my prey (the puzzles) at length but not, ultimately, gotten my kill (the triumph of actually solving one). So I walked away mostly feeling cranky about the whole experience, which is a shame because thereâs so much going on here that I do like.
In this game, the PC leads a team of specialists to explore a mysterious castle. Itâs a choice-based game that tries to emulate a parser experience, having the player click to select a subject, verb, and object before submitting the action.
The concept of gameplay that revolves around figuring out not just what action should be taken, but who should be taking it, is unusual and intriguing. In practice, however, I found this game's implementation of it unwieldy. It just takes so many clicks to complete any action (except for moving around the map). Having the subject default to âmeâ unless otherwise specified would have helped, I think, though that still leaves a lot of clicking and Iâm not really sure what else could be done to streamline this interface.
Between this and the white text that contrasts poorly with the busy pixel backdrops and lacks paragraph spacing, I have to say that I experienced so much friction in the process of trying to play the game that I wasnât really able to appreciate the content. Iâm sure thereâs a lot to like here if youâre less frustrated by the interface, but I didnât have a good time. That said, I do have to give it some respect for its success in bending Twine into a pretzel without breaking itâwhich is to say, itâs a highly technically ambitious game that clearly has had a lot of care and attention put into ensuring that itâs bug-free.
Redjackets is a paranormal thriller about a sort of vampire bounty hunting agency, which is to say that they hunt vampires and also some of them are vampires. I will confess: there was a time in my life when this was my shit. But I delved too greedily and too deep in the vampire fiction mines and unleashed the terrible spectre of vampire burnout, so I am not the ideal audience for this game. Nevertheless, Iâve tried to give it a fair review.
So, the game starts by having you choose one of the characters to play as: the naive one, the cynical one, or the brave one. (This is pretty much all you get to know about them in advance.) I picked the cynical one, who turned out to be seasoned vampire hunter Lynette (who is a vampire). Her version of events opens with a few lines about Lynette trying to find someone (unspecified at this point), and then it hits you with this:
âAnd it looked like the database was frozen to boot. If someone forgot to renew the license again, you were going to lose it. You always wondered if you'd snap one of these days. You just didn't know that a licensing agreement to a database would be the thing that did it.â
Honestly, I loved this as an opening move. Itâs so specific! So unexpected! So real! There is a long list of reasons why work might make me snap one of these days, but people not renewing the fucking license on the fucking software I need to do my fucking job is definitely on that list. Vampires: theyâre just like us!
Despite the vagaries of software access, Lynette and Declan (the brave one, not a vampire) soon succeed in capturing Fiia (the naive one, a vampire); this turns out to be because they want to recruit her to go after her sire, Rosco Jeppson, an art-loving mob boss. (As vampire baddies go, he seemed a little tame from Lynetteâs perspective, but I understand Fiiaâs route contains more gory details.) The Redjacketsâ scheme to take Rosco down proceeds from there, mostly unfolding as dynamic fiction with the occasional choice. In most cases, these choicesâ effects, if any, were unclear, although the choice of who to place in which role for the assassination clearly does change things considerably (enough that one combination in Lynetteâs route causes a game-breaking bug, or did when I played).
On the whole, though, what I found myself most invested in was not the action and intrigue, but the low-key moments of vampiric slice-of-life, as Lynette deals with red tape and gives young vampires printouts on how to control their hunger. The romance between Lynette and Declan also has some nice writing around it, although I was a little surprised that the interspecies aspect was treated as a total nonissue. I mean, on the one hand thereâs not much new ground to be broken in the area of human/vampire relationship angst, so itâs almost refreshing to just skip the whole thing, but on the other hand, it does seem a bit odd for the characters not to feel some kind of way about it (at least the âone of you is immortal and the other is notâ aspect, since the game makes a point of saying that Lynette isnât tempted by Declanâs blood).
Most of the prose is pretty transparentâcasual, modern, not too fancy. This works fine. Every now and then, though, it tries to get ornate, and out of nowhere you get a description like: âAn unnatural dysphoria winds its way into the many emaciated oxbow bends of your insides.â I would say I enjoy ornate prose more than the average person, but I think youâve got to commit to it more than this. If you just drop it in one sentence in twenty, itâs jarring.
The aesthetic is slick, with the obligatory red-and-black color scheme and attractive character portraits (mainly to help you remember whose POV youâre in, I think), but the portraits were a little buggy. Sometimes they covered the text; at least once I got Fiiaâs while the POV character was still supposed to be Lynette; on another occasion I got two portraits (both Lynette) next to each other for some reason. If this were cleaned up, though, Iâd have no complaints about the visual design.
There were also polish issues with the writing, mainly tense slippage between past and present. Initially the dialogue punctuation was also consistently wrong (in ways I donât often see combinedâitâs rare for the same work to have both dialogue ending in a period followed by a capitalized dialogue tag and dialogue ending in a comma followed by an uncapitalized stage direction, but Redjackets manages to get the rules exactly backwards on this front for a while). It does get cleaner after the introduction, although the errors never totally disappear.
But although Redjacketsâ reach exceeds its grasp in various ways, I did enjoy a lot about it, and I would probably check out more works with these characters and/or in this settingâespecially if they focused less on the hunt and more on the downtime and the vampire office work.
In this game, the protagonist finds her favorite teacup missing, and embarks upon a quest to retrieve itâa quest that will take her into a spooky forest, a poison swamp, a wizardâs tower, and maybe even the depths of hell. The game was created in RPGMaker to achieve the correct aesthetic (which it does in charming and attractive fashion), but functions as a gauntlet in which one choice will progress the main plot and the other(s) will lead to a bad end.
This is all in service of a parody of RPG tropes, which is not exactly untrodden ground. Observations about RPG characters breaking into peopleâs houses and taking their stuff have been made before. Commentary on the lengths to which a PC will go, risking life and limb, for relatively inconsequential sidequests is not new either (and in fact this isnât a million miles away from the same authorâs Elftor and the Quest of the Screaming King, although the main focus there was more on the also-much-mocked convention of messing around with sidequests while the fate of the kingdom hangs in the balance and youâre supposed to be saving it).
The wizard tower was my favorite bit: (Spoiler - click to show)he has a fake teleport pad at the base of his tower that actually vaporizes intruders hoping for an easy way up, and when you prove your worth by taking the stairs, he offers you a perfect magical teacup that will never chip or allow its contents to go cold. (You can accept, but this is a Bad End because you didnât get your teacup.) This is still in the territory of âRPG protagonists are thieving murderhobos and also have bizarre priorities,â but the wizardâs involvement (less as a straight-man comedic partner than a different kind of weirdo) adds an entertaining extra layer. The two of them are both baffled to minorly horrified at aspects of each otherâs behavior, and they simultaneously are correct and really donât have room to criticize.
Iâm also a sucker for a âweâre going to make you deal with this legendarily annoying game mechanicâhaha just kiddingâ gag, so I enjoyed the poison swamp ((Spoiler - click to show)it just insta-kills you, and the PC has an âI donât know what I expectedâ moment).
If RPG parodies are the kind of thing you canât get enough of, Quest for the Teacup is a well-executed entry in the genre and youâll probably have a great time. In its best moments, it entertained me tooâand itâs a half-hour game with a concentration of good moments thatâs fairly high, so I would say I enjoyed it more than I didnât. But I did always have that nagging sense of deja vu.