Reviews by Ordon

A short, surreal, and entirely linear Videotome experience. Only two backgrounds but it held my attention throughout.

The story gets progressively more interesting as you proceed. There are some mysterious things going on and I love mysterious lore.

An epileptic warning might be apt. The two backgrounds are very dark and very bright respectively and it's very jarring, switching between them (I read this in a dark room).

Hard to put a finger on this one...

Let's get the obvious out of the way first: this is a demo for a new IF authoring tool called Spiki, presumably developed by the author themself.

Spiki looks like Chapbook from Twine. Like, really similar. I would've thought it was a modified version of Chapbook if I didn't read the blurb first.

The only notable difference is that Spiki has a chapter index, containing all story passages, available from a menu at the top left. Cool, but pretty useless, in my opinion, and practically speaking, since the ordering of passages is static, without any indicator for what passages you've already visited, and with the only differentiator of passages being their names, and a number or letter.

There's a ton of passages and you're likely not remembering what all of them are titled, so navigating with the chapter index is infeasible. So, ignoring that, it's just Chapbook, then.

But this is all secondary. Though it's offered as just another demo, the story's actually really interesting.

Without giving too much away, you follow 3 friends as they look for 'temporal anomalies'. A certain Latin word keeps popping up again and again, and it's driving them crazy. Depending on your choices, you can either leave the site early, or eventually happen upon the real purpose of this story.

Which is, that it's a demo for a dialogue system. A really really complicated dialogue system (to my untrained eyes). You'll get a link to the author's blog where he explains it all. There, you'll find explanations for many of the unexplained terms in the story, like Florean Winograde, and the name origins for our trio (I was like, "OOOh, Aaai get it" when it finally clicked).

All in all, a pleasure to read. The writing teeters just on the edge of too abstract and sheer brilliance. I'm leaning towards brilliance, here. It's honestly way over my paygrade. I had only vague ideas of the setting at any given point in the story. Walking down the river, I conjured, unbidden, an image of a quaint town by the Thames, 19th century. No clue if that is in any way accurate.

Also, I love the trio dynamics. My favourite is Appleby. He's the one who actually gets things done. B and C are inseparable, though, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Would definitely read more of these guys. CFN 2? Here's hoping.

সাউন্ড এফেক্টগুলো ভালো, কিন্তু হঠাৎ হঠাৎ থেমে যায়। ডিজাইনটা সুন্দর। সম্ভবত হারলো ফরম্যাট ব্যবহার করা হয়েছে।

সব কিছুই বুঝলাম "অন্ধকার"। স্টেশন অন্ধকার, রাস্তা ততোধিক অন্ধকার, চালকের চোখ অন্ধকারে ভরপুর। মী লাইক্স।

কিছুটা চলে। ছবিগুলো ছাড়া। একই ছবি ইন্টারনেটে খুঁজে পেলাম। কিছুটা হয়তো উন্মুক্ত লাইসেন্সে, কিন্তু অধিকাংশ বোধহয় কপিরাইট করা। যাই হোক, নিজের কাজ না, এডিটিং ছাড়া (কিছু ছবি একটার ওপর আরেকটা ফটোশপ করা)।

লেখা মাঝে মাঝে বেশ হঠাৎ। স্বপ্ন থেকে ওঠার সাথে সাথেই দেখছি যে গরুর গাড়ি কাপুট। মাঝে কি হলো? আমি কই?

সব মিলিয়ে আসলে গেম বা গল্প না। আরো কাছে হবে "এক্সপেরিমেন্ট"। লেখিকা বোধহয় টোয়াইন আর হারলো টেস্ট করতে এই চিজটা বানিয়েছেন।

ছোট কাজ পড়তে আমার ভালো লাগে, কিন্তু নিজস্ব আর্ট না বলে স্যাড ইমোজি।

I died exactly 27 times over the course of 3 days of playing this game. Took around 5 hours.

This game should NOT take you 5 hours. An hour, max. Because there's a save function. But, I didn't know that till my 23rd death.

So, I basically played this like a Souls game, starting from the beginning every time I died. At the end, I was playing almost out of spite just to finish the game.

I could have saved all that headache by just typing help. This tells you that to save the game, you have to type save game, instead of just save like I was doing. Now, the game doesn't ever tell you about help, but I guess it supposes some experience on your part with playing parser-IFs. I barely have any.

About the story itself, it's nothing special. Whatever's on the blurb isn't really expanded on in-game. Princess Aurora is actually a douche who enjoys the attention. The writing's simple.

The gameplay is even simpler. The puzzles begin quite easy, and slowly get more unintuitive as you go along. But, that's because I didn't type help, cause if you do type help, you'll get common verbs and what the parser expects, i.e. how to actually play the game.

I wouldn't have drowned 5 more times in (Spoiler - click to show)quicksand if I just wrote (Spoiler - click to show)throw rope on stump instead of (Spoiler - click to show)tie rope on stump, tie rope with stump, tether rope to stump, use rope with stump, grab stump with rope, because the help text clearly does not have tether, tie or grab on the common verbs list.

The game feels cosy. Like a comfort game. Something you play as a kid and come back to years later. I would definitely play this as a little kid.

The default UI is amazing. Coming from Gargoyle, that thing looks like a notepad file on the default. I never bothered to tinker with the settings, so judging from first impressions, this looks way better, and probably why I was able to stick with it for so long.

This seems like more of a big deal than just a porting of a game. Here's the author's Reddit post on it: Nightmare Planet 2025 by Candy64

Looks like they made a 'system' for porting C64 games to web. I have no clue about the C64 but I want to make a game with this.

Also, I would love to play the original game. The author mentioned slight changes.

Bugs? Yeah, a few, occasional inventory glitches, I think. Like, sometimes it says my inv is full but I move around/reload the game and try again, and it lets me pick stuff up, and small things like that. Makes it better, in my opinion.

The author's comment from the STF website: “My first piece of interactive fiction. You’ve got to start somewhere, right?”

Yes! And this is an amazing place to start.

While I didn't get practically anything, I did learn that saunas are (supposedly) a common sight in Finnish buildings.

To win, and I'm basing this off of the walkthrough since I couldn't finish it myself: you have to (Spoiler - click to show)infuse a cup with the putrid stench of (?) oil, make the two guards of a prison cell holding some political leaders/councillors/long-dead heads of state inside sniff it, making them sick, while you free the guys inside.

10/10 idea, (but) flawful execution.

Before that though, you have to perform a strangely specific set of seemingly random actions that the average player would obviously never arrive to without being high on LSD. Just look at the walkthrough to see what I mean.

And speaking of the walkthrough. The game seems to have been updated since then, so the walkthrough's outdated, atleast in my experience, cause when I tried (Spoiler - click to show)giving the left guard and the right guard (I love it) my bewitched cup, they sniffed it and promptly returned it to me... I feel inadequate...

This transcends from one-star to two-star territory purely because of the fact that (Spoiler - click to show)the lift "makes some regular lift noises" while lifting you through all the lifting places. I LIFT IT.

And the politicians... say some confusing stuff right after (Spoiler - click to show)being released... before George V runs off to a (World War 1 Era — I looked it up — bi-) plane conveniently parked in the basement, and flies off... "Crisis averted", though I have no clue what. (Spoiler - click to show)(an invasion on Finland? Rereading it right now, I feel like I get it a bit more...)

Yeah, title of the review.

EDIT: I completely forgot to mention (Spoiler - click to show)Untitled. Untitled is an enigma. Behold the in-game description: "175 lbs of hard-boiled sweets, of many flavours. They seem to have mostly melted together because of the heat."

Weird, right? But this hits the perfect itch for me, one that I didn't even realise was there. Gives (the utmost vague) vibes of stuff like (Spoiler - click to show)MissingNo. from Pokémon or the Far Lands from Minecraft; it's like the start of a creepypasta or an ARG.

What you gotta do is (Spoiler - click to show)"hit" Untitled, whereupon you receive a drop of (randomly flavoured, I tested this unwittingly) "boiled sweet".

Yeah, it was probably never intended as any of those things, and I'm stretching it a bit, but it makes you wonder... An IF where you solve an ARG as the player would be epic. Even better if the IF itself is just one piece of the puzzle, and you gotta play a bunch of them to figure it all out.

I'd settle for either, honestly (seeing other people solve ARGs is entertainment enough for me), though the former would be more accessible for more people.

3 stars for inspiring me.

The Bengali was what I was most interested in, and I was thoroughly disappointed.

The transliteration is egregious. I had first thought that our character was speaking in some dialect, but no. He just spontaneously starts spouting nonsense whenever he opens his mouth.

The translation is also unnatural. Looks like you used Google translate for most things. Calling a bank, "taka poysha jomanor jayga" was just funny. It's just 'bank'.

Also, the pronunciation 'guide' or whatever is way too long, to the point where you have to read a whole page worth of convincingly confident and terribly inaccurate spiel just for a line of awkward Bengali.

Then, there's the grammar and spelling slips, which were too frequent to ignore. Something was going on with the story, but I couldn't care enough to notice.

Halfway through, the game throws me an error. A missing if conditional, or something. I couldn't even finish the game.

Overall, this just feels like it had the minimum amount of effort put in to be able to call it an IF.

You know, I was just promenading around itch, looking for an entirely different IF (the Abyssal Song, actually, which is also great), when I happenchanced upon this fine specimen.

Its short, but filled with detail, polish and lore. The visuals look really clean. The sound design isn't obnoxious and fits in with everything else.

But what really gets me is the writing. It's so good.

If there was anything negative I'd have to say, it's that you can't scroll up while the text is rendering, which is irritating on replays where you're stuck waiting for it to load so you can scroll back up and see if you missed any of the lore.

And I just love the premise. There could be so many offshoots off of this whole idea.

Highly recommend.