Ratings and Reviews by EJ

In Lunium, you are a detective who awakes to find yourself chained up by the killer you have been pursuing. You must both discover the killer’s identity and escape the room you are locked in before they strike again.

The game has been widely compared to an escape room, and with its plethora of combination-lock puzzles, it’s easy to see why. But Lunium does take advantage of its medium to have a player character with a distinct identity, allowing it to do things that an actual escape room would be unable to do. This gives the game a bit of individuality that I enjoyed, and makes it feel like it has a reason to be a Twine game beyond the fact that most people don’t have the opportunity to make their own actual escape room.

As is typical for this style of game, most of the puzzles that you will have to solve are immediately in front of you once you’ve gotten out of being handcuffed to the wall. A common issue with this structure is that if you have too many puzzles requiring number combinations (or any other single format of answer, but it’s usually number combinations), it can become hard to tell whether you have what you need to solve a given puzzle yet. Lunium does fall into this a little, but luckily it has a “hint mode” that you can enable that will give you this information when you look at a puzzle, which I appreciated. There are also more granular hints available, but I didn’t end up using those.

The puzzles largely walked the line of being challenging enough to be satisfying without being too terribly difficult. The only place I really got hung up was the point early on when I didn’t realize that I needed to search my right pocket again after getting uncuffed, and I eventually got past that just by trying every action that was available to me. I did find it a little annoying to have to repeatedly light matches and I’m not sure the light source management added much in the way of legitimate, interesting challenge, but otherwise the gameplay experience was smooth and I moved through the game at a good clip.

The game has a slick visual design that makes good use of images to create atmosphere; the images also have clear and concise alt text for those that need it. The prose largely stays out of its own way, and the plot does what it needs to do to provide an excuse for the puzzles. (It’s all a little improbable when you get right down to it, but puzzle games tend to be.) One aspect of the final twist became apparent to me fairly quickly, but the other did require a little thought and a careful reading of the in-game documents.

I enjoyed the hour I spent playing Lunium, and if I wanted to introduce my escape room friends to IF, I think this would be an excellent place to start.

Beat Witch is a parser game that takes place in a world where some girls, at puberty, suddenly turn into Beat Witches, a sort of energy vampire for whom music takes the place of garlic or holy water. The PC is one of these witches—the well-meaning “reluctant monster” type, who tries not to kill when she feeds—and her goal in the game is to take down another witch, one who has no such compunctions.

The game is fairly linear, not just in the sense that it lacks plot branching, but in the sense that it doesn’t often let you wander and poke around. There’s generally one specific command the game wants you to type at any given time and it won’t recognize much else, other than examining things. And even going that far off-script can be risky; sometimes if you don’t do the thing the game wants you to do immediately, you die.

When you type the right thing, the next bit of the story will be delivered to you in a large multi-paragraph chunk of text. Even on my gaming laptop, which has a large screen by laptop standards, this was almost always more than one screen’s worth of text, and sometimes more than two screens, so I was constantly scrolling back, trying to find where the new text started. This was a bit of a hassle, and to be honest, if I’d been playing on a smaller screen I don’t know if I would have had the patience to make it to the end.

I have to admit that as the game went on, I wondered more and more why the author had chosen to make it a parser game. It isn’t really taking advantage of the strengths of the medium (the sense of space, the object manipulation) or doing anything that hypertext couldn’t do, and I think I would have had a much smoother reading experience had it been a choice-based/hypertext game. The constant back-scrolling was frustrating and undermined the sense of propulsive forward motion that Beat Witch seems to be going for. Besides, if I’m going to be discouraged from interacting with the environment, I’d prefer to just get rid of the illusion that I can do so. It’s distracting to be constantly wondering if maybe this time there might be something interesting off the beaten path. I’d rather be put on some visible rails and know for a fact I can’t deviate from them. (Plus, the game’s recurring problems with unlisted exits couldn’t have existed in a choice-based game, but that at least is relatively easily fixed.)

In a work without much gameplay, the writing has to do most of the heavy lifting; Beat Witch has mixed success on this front. It has an atmospheric depiction of a mostly-abandoned city and some effectively gross horror imagery, and the loosely-sketched worldbuilding was intriguing. The emotional beats, however, didn’t quite land for me; you get too much of the PC’s backstory and motivation in a single infodump, and it feels a little inorganic. I would have loved to get that information parceled out over the first half of the game via the PC’s own memory so that her brother’s recording didn’t have to cover so much ground. I also feel it would have worked better for me if I had actually seen some of her idyllic childhood before everything went wrong. I think that would have made finding out what happened to her more immediately, viscerally painful, which then would have made the ending more satisfying.

There’s some interesting stuff in Beat Witch, but in the end it felt to me like a story that was constantly fighting against its format, and between that and the uneven handling of the main emotional arc, I was never as fully immersed as I wanted to be.

This game follows Dr. Ludwig, a Dr. Faust/Victor Frankenstein mashup, as he tries to make a deal with the Devil for godlike powers of creation without actually giving up his soul. Meanwhile, there’s an angry mob at his doorstep—though its leader is quite handsome….

Dr. Ludwig (the game) is entirely narrated in the Mad Scientist Classic™ voice of Dr. Ludwig (the character). Whenever you take an item, for example, the response is “The [noun] was mine! All mine!” You can practically hear the evil laughter that must follow. The tone this sets is a large part of the game’s charm. It may be a little too much for some—Ludwig is a rather excitable fellow with a great love for exclamation points—but I enjoyed it.

The game delights in its cheesy genre tropes, and in juxtaposing them with the boring minutiae of real life. The torch-and-pitchfork mob just wants Ludwig to sign a neighborhood charter to agree to avoid experimentation on weekends and holidays (“with the exception of Hallowe’en for historical reasons”) and stop making loud noises after 8 PM. The woman who works at the mysteriously appearing and disappearing magic shop is thinking of forming a union because she doesn’t get enough vacation days. There’s a Terry Pratchett-esque sensibility to it, also evidenced in its approach to deities—the magic shopkeeper, for example, knows that God and the Devil exist, but she doesn’t believe in them, because “there’s really no reason to go about encouraging them, is there?"

The puzzles are well done, but mostly pretty typical medium-dry-goods fare (though the ones that incorporate ordering the Devil to do your bidding have some unique flair). Where the game really shines is in the character interactions—with the shopkeeper, with the Devil, and with the aforementioned handsome pitchfork-waver Hans. These interactions take place via an ask/tell conversation system with topic listing, which is my favorite kind of ask/tell conversation system. (Although it might have been nice to have some indication, in the list, of whether I’d asked about the topic yet or not—I did, at least once, miss out on asking about something puzzle-critical because I lost track.)

It’s easy, in comedy, to make characters that are one-note, or who behave in whatever way they need to in order to serve the joke of the moment. Here, the characters are humorous, but the humor is grounded in characterization that is consistent and recognizably human (if somewhat heightened), which also drives how each character interacts with the puzzles and the plot. (For example, Hans’s mention that (Spoiler - click to show)he doesn’t really mind if you dig up the remains of his ancestors—they’re dead, what do they care?—presages his admission that he (Spoiler - click to show)doesn’t believe in God, both of which are key bits of information needed to solve puzzles. And the former, at least, is also pretty funny.) Ultimately, I found them all quite endearing (and was pleased that Ludwig had the opportunity to (Spoiler - click to show)ask Hans out on a date).

Dr. Ludwig has humor, heart, and a high level of polish, and I had a great time playing it. I would happily follow the good(?) doctor’s further adventures if that was something the author was interested in pursuing.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of Bubble Gumshoe’s first outing, Who Killed Gum E. Bear; it hinges entirely on noticing a single aspect of the central gag and most of the investigating you do is utterly pointless. It’s an approach to detective IF that’s bound to be hit or miss, and for me it was a miss, even if the candy-coated noir setting was delightful. So I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Who Iced Mayor McFreeze. I didn’t doubt that it would be funny, but would it be enjoyable as a game?

Fortunately, the answer was yes. Rather than having you guess the identity of the culprit like its predecessor, Mayor McFreeze traps Bubble Gumshoe in an abandoned factory that is also a crime scene. She must both search for clues and find a way out, giving the player quite a bit more to sink their teeth into than Gum E. Bear provided.

The puzzle design worked well and made clever use of a smallish inventory of objects. The implementation was a little rough, though, and after figuring out what I needed to do I occasionally experienced some friction trying to communicate that to the game. (You’ve heard of “guess the verb,” now get ready for “guess the preposition”!) But I was having a good time in general, so I didn’t mind too much.

All of the clues are technically missable—that is, you can escape the factory without finding any of them—but most of them are wildly unlikely to be missed by a player with enough adventure game experience to instinctively poke into every nook and cranny. The clue that incontrovertibly proves the killer’s identity may elude some players, though; it relies on a mechanic that I remember being emphasized in the previous game, but that isn’t highlighted here. It is covered in the handy list of verbs the game provides, though, so those who didn’t play Gum E. Bear should still be able to figure it out; it just requires a little extra thought/insight compared to the other clues.

The summation at the end is handled by Bubble Gumshoe without input from the player, but varies depending on how many of the clues were found, which I thought worked well. Some players might prefer to have a quiz here, but to me it felt like the real challenge was in solving the puzzles, and once the clues were in hand, interpreting them was fairly straightforward, so I didn’t mind letting the PC do it for me.