Ratings and Reviews by EJ

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. It’s a solid premise; not groundbreaking, but there’s definitely an audience (one that includes me!) that will happily take several dozen of this kind of thing as long as it’s 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 don’t 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 aren’t; sometimes they have punctuation and sometimes they don’t. There’s 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 I’d 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 “what if escape room but lethal” tale via the PC’s 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 wasn’t sufficiently invested for the crime-doesn’t-pay message to hit home in the way it was obviously meant to. (So I will be blithely carrying on robbing casinos IRL—sorry, 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 “Door #1”, “Door #2”, 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. There’s a text entry bit that’s case-sensitive, and the game specifically tells you it’s case-sensitive—which may seem like damning with faint praise, but a lot of newbie Twine authors don’t 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 don’t 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 me—I didn’t 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 practice—and maybe a proofreader.

In this game, the PC leads a team of specialists to explore a mysterious castle. It’s 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 “me” unless otherwise specified would have helped, I think, though that still leaves a lot of clicking and I’m 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 wasn’t really able to appreciate the content. I’m sure there’s a lot to like here if you’re less frustrated by the interface, but I didn’t 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 it—which is to say, it’s a highly technically ambitious game that clearly has had a lot of care and attention put into ensuring that it’s 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, I’ve 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:

“And 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.”

Honestly, I loved this as an opening move. It’s 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: they’re 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 Lynette’s perspective, but I understand Fiia’s route contains more gory details.) The Redjackets’ scheme to take Rosco down proceeds from there, mostly unfolding as dynamic fiction with the occasional choice. In most cases, these choices’ 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 Lynette’s 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 there’s not much new ground to be broken in the area of human/vampire relationship angst, so it’s 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 “one of you is immortal and the other is not” aspect, since the game makes a point of saying that Lynette isn’t tempted by Declan’s blood).

Most of the prose is pretty transparent—casual, 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: “An unnatural dysphoria winds its way into the many emaciated oxbow bends of your insides.” I would say I enjoy ornate prose more than the average person, but I think you’ve got to commit to it more than this. If you just drop it in one sentence in twenty, it’s jarring.

The aesthetic is slick, with the obligatory red-and-black color scheme and attractive character portraits (mainly to help you remember whose POV you’re in, I think), but the portraits were a little buggy. Sometimes they covered the text; at least once I got Fiia’s 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, I’d 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 don’t often see combined—it’s 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 Redjackets’ 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 setting—especially 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 it—a quest that will take her into a spooky forest, a poison swamp, a wizard’s 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 people’s 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 isn’t a million miles away from the same author’s 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 you’re 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 didn’t get your teacup.) This is still in the territory of “RPG protagonists are thieving murderhobos and also have bizarre priorities,” but the wizard’s 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 other’s behavior, and they simultaneously are correct and really don’t have room to criticize.

I’m also a sucker for a “we’re going to make you deal with this legendarily annoying game mechanic—haha just kidding” gag, so I enjoyed the poison swamp ((Spoiler - click to show)it just insta-kills you, and the PC has an “I don’t know what I expected” moment).

If RPG parodies are the kind of thing you can’t get enough of, Quest for the Teacup is a well-executed entry in the genre and you’ll probably have a great time. In its best moments, it entertained me too—and it’s a half-hour game with a concentration of good moments that’s fairly high, so I would say I enjoyed it more than I didn’t. But I did always have that nagging sense of deja vu.

This is a murder mystery game in which you play as an FBI agent who’s been called in to investigate a string of murders (possibly the work of a serial killer, possibly not) in a small town in Washington. Over the course of several days, the player must choose how to spend their investigation time, and at the end they are asked a series of questions to see how much they’ve managed to figure out.

The Killings in Wasacona clearly takes heavy inspiration from tabletop games, starting out by making you distribute your character’s stats and then having skill checks done via a link that says “Roll a d20.” The simulated dice were kind to me in my playthrough and I passed most checks for skills that I didn’t have penalties to, so my experience wasn’t frustrating in this regard, but I still didn’t love this as a design choice. I found it made me feel like, rather than playing a game that was simulating solving a murder, I was playing a game that was simulating playing another game that was simulating solving a murder, which had a distancing effect that kept me from ever truly getting invested. The many spelling/grammar/punctuation errors and occasional clunky attempts at poetic language in high-drama scenes also distracted me, although as an editor I’m aware that I notice these things more than most people do.

I was also kind of uneasy at the way that it used the possibility of a racist cop committing violence against people of color as a red herring, and at the way that procedural red tape that exists to protect people’s rights, such as the need to obtain warrants, was treated as an annoying and unfair imposition. (The latter is of course very common in the genre, but that doesn’t mean I like to see it, and the fact that the game doesn’t even give you the option to actually do this stuff—you can either circumvent it via intimidation or give up—doesn’t help. I gather there are negatives to taking the intimidation route, but there are also negatives to just not getting the information, so it doesn’t quite feel like a “giving the player enough rope to hang themself” situation.)

Also, I don’t like picking on this kind of thing because in real life people can have all kinds of names, but when you have one singular Latina character in your game, naming her “Jamal” gives the unfortunate impression that the writer reached for a name that seemed “exotic” without bothering to check which cultures it’s commonly used in or which gender it’s commonly used for. The Somali refugee siblings also have the somewhat unlikely surname "Brown", and the country they come from is referred to as “Somali” instead of Somalia. Individually all of this seems like nitpicking, but it adds up to a sense that not a lot of care is being taken.

On the positive side, I liked the built-in graphical map, and I think the mystery was well-constructed (I managed to solve all the pieces of it and didn’t feel like I was wildly guessing on any of them). I liked the way the game laid out your evidence for each possible culprit before asking you to answer questions at the end, although I did wish it had used the suspects’ names (titles like "the drifter" may be clear enough, but there are a bunch of suspects who are professors at a local college, and they’re listed in this end-of-game evidence rundown as “the $subject professor”, which I had trouble keeping straight). And I enjoyed seeing the statistics at the end that showed what percentage of players had gotten various outcomes.

So the game does have a number of good aspects, and as far as I can tell most players liked it substantially more than I did and my opinion is not terribly representative of most people’s experiences. But I thought these points were worth raising, in case anyone else is particularly bothered by any of these things.

Forsaken Denizen is a survival horror game taking place in a far-future space monarchy. An extradimensional investment group has corrupted everyone’s cybernetic implants, and now most people are trapped in the roots of a giant golden tree, while monstrous figures roam the city. Left to stand against the Accretion Group are Doris (the PC), a member of the noncitizen underclass who’s clawed her way up to being a regular working stiff, and her girlfriend, Princess Cathabel X (the narrator). (They met when Dor tried to rob Cath at gunpoint. It’s a long story.)

The gameplay is simple: you shoot at enemies; mostly you hit, sometimes you miss, even more rarely you crit. They attack you; mostly they hit, sometimes they miss (I don’t think they can crit, which is good because you only have three HP). On a first playthrough, at least, you don’t really get any meaningful upgrades or additional options or anything that would change the formula. There’s some strategy involved, but it’s mostly “do I have enough bullets that I feel OK expending them on this enemy or should I move one room over and hit Z until said enemy leaves?” (Of course, this is more or less typical of survival horror, but I think the thing that gets me here is that it’s all RNG-based and there’s no way for the player’s skill to come into the equation the way it usually does in graphical examples of the genre.)

I have to admit that I wished there were a little more dimension to it, but you know what, it doesn’t matter that much, because I loved the vividly weird setting, loved scouring the map for missable tidbits of lore, and, most of all, loved Dor and Cath and the relationship between them. Dor is scrappy and wary and already well accustomed to doing what it takes to survive at all costs, but she still manages a surprising degree of compassion for others. Cath is spoiled and naive and not really used to thinking of the masses as people, but she genuinely loves Dor and that ultimately enables her growth.

And this growth is, really, the core of the story. There’s a lot of sci-fi worldbuilding and some very straightforward sociopolitical allegory (to the tune of “you can’t fix an unjust system by playing by its rules, and you especially cannot do this in a top-down way as someone highly privileged by this system”), but the real meat of the thing is the emotional journey of a young woman who has her general worldview (and the power dynamics of her romantic relationship) first unsettled and eventually upended entirely and has to cope with that.

(And if you tilt your head at a weird angle to try to see outside of Cath’s point of view, it might also be a story about a woman who’s gotten a little complacent about letting her girlfriend take care of things, perhaps because that was a pleasant novelty after years of having no one but herself to rely on, and has to regain a little of that self-reliance and find a better balance in the relationship as well. Since we don’t get to peek at Dor’s thoughts, it’s a lot more ambiguous—it’s entirely possible that she just spends most of the game in shock and eventually snaps out of it—but I do like to think that she has her own arc going on.)

So although I didn’t find the gameplay especially engaging on its own, I quickly became invested enough in the characters and their relationship that I never considered giving up, and I was absolutely satisfied with where their story went and on the whole felt like my time was well spent.