Reviews by Teaspoon

Given the nature of interactive fiction, someone had to make this game eventually.

i'm just glad that it was in a context where it was actually sensible for it to have happened.

Recommended for: the commercial break of a show you're only half-watching, on a lazy Saturday morning.

An interesting one - it's a concise game played entirely through keywords. This could very easily be ported to Twine, but it works just as well as an Inform game

The author doesn't seem to have ventured much into IF, which is a shame; I would love to see more such writing. The protagonist is sketched in just a few short lines but is far more knowable and oriented than the heroes of some much longer games.

Recommended for play on a breezy night, with a warm wind. Then go out and look at the stars.

One of the simplest stories in the Apollo collection, but the endings are well-worded and well-chosen. And as brief as it is, there's still a moment to delight the attentive player.

Recommended for: a date with a bowl of ice cream - you'll finish them at the same time.

Brisk yet descriptive, it plays very quickly if you're accustomed to IF. If you're not, this is as good a place to try the genre as any - what you see is exactly what you get.

(The canon of intro-to-IF-games consists of large, intricate games. Which are great, but there's also something to be said for a game with immediate gratification, and this is it for a beginner.)

Recommended for: a pick-me-up when you're stuck on another, much harder IF puzzle.

There's one feature this game lacks that both "What's that Blue Thing Doing Here?" and "Come On and Wreck My Car" had; it literally ends after every single move, forcing you to restart or undo it each time, instead of resetting itself and allowing you to smoothly continue typing. There is a gameplay reason for this, but that doesn't make it less annoying.

(Also there's a typo in the opening text, and while this game was finished in a hectic rush for deadline, it's glaring, especially given the number of times you'll be looking at it.)

(Spoiler - click to show)It's a logic puzzle disguised as a barfight. Restart resets the person trying to punch you this week, while undo allows you to continue playing around until you find the winning move, which is easily found, thankfully. It does what it's trying to do, which is what I give a game three stars for.

Recommended for: any time, if you like reading about bar fights.

An exercise in 'how well do you know your IF parser?' I've compiled a list of actions with unique responses in the spoiler space; it's probably incomplete, but is longer than the Club Floyd list and includes some amusingly silly responses. A few typos, but it's fast and fun.

(There is no apparent reference to Suzanne Vega's 'Small Blue Thing', which I will admit was my go-to visualisation for the Blue Thing - the THMBGs song being slightly vague as to description.)

(Spoiler - click to show)
About
I
N
E
S
W
NE
SE
Up
Sing
Dance
Stop
Cry
Fight me
Remember
Forget
Sleep
Wake up
X ideas
X blue thing
xyzzy
Wait
Pray
Curse
Smell
Listen
Think
X me
X doorway
X road
X stairs
Take stairs
Take doorway
Laugh
Hit stairs
Hit doorway
Hint
Urinate
Eat door
Credits


Recommended for: when you're in a methodical mood.

The author credited "Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die" as an inspiration; the format overlap is evident, but this one's more lovingly described and also has a reassuring score system to let you know when you've discovered everything. Catnip to a multiple-endings-aficionado such as myself.

For a lark, I tried putting together the possible actions in a natural flow. There are a great many variations with which one could approach the game, of course, but some endings suggest other endings, so here's one list.

(Spoiler - click to show)Crash
I
exit
fly
wear sombrero
get tape
open glove box
X severed head
call 999 (or 911, if you prefer)
X windows
X forward
x rear
take guitar
sing
X side
turn off radio
listen harder
take pencil
wake up
push button
X odometer (mileometer does not work for this one)
wake up

The title about sums it up, actually.

(Spoiler - click to show)There are no spoilers.

This is going up front in the hopes of helping someone else - I managed to utterly, utterly miss the point of the game's central mechanic, in which the reader is invited to actively participate by drawing symbols onto their skin, thus dissolving the distinction between player and character. It's implicit in the text, but I'm so used to the experience of a game being purely virtual that I entirely overlooked this, and therefore missed out on an intriguing manner of interactivity. Someday, when the memories have faded, I intend to come back and experience this properly. (Spoiler - click to show) ... And maybe I'll be lucky and met this fabled slime kid, too.

With that said, the game I experienced on screen was so rich an experience that it seemed complete to me. The worldbuilding is deeply, richly apparent, better so than many SF stories I've seen. One is is imbued with the fascination, trauma, and frustration the protagonist finds in - carefully limited - explorations that make up the story's heart.

(Now I'm having a go at Twine myself - my first finished game will have a "makes reference to" credit to this one - and I'm finding that one doesn't appreciate all the subtleties of coloured links and backgrounds until attempting to code. That's the kind of art that works by not drawing attention to itself, and Porpentine is a master at it.)

If there's a more convincing NPC in all of interactive fiction, I've yet to come across her. (I do dearly wish that Emily's updated Versu version in which one can play as Galatea had been made available.) Conversations don't get more plausible than this in a parser format.

It's also worth noting that, along with Aisle, this game introduced me to the peculiar strength of multiple endings in IF - that it's a format in which one needn't assume that any particular reading of the text is the correct one (let's face it, your average Choose Your Own Adventure has a great many bad endings, and tends to implicitly prioritise *winning* ones). This is a delicious storytelling technique for anyone even the slightest bit intrigued by metafiction, and I'm surprised it isn't used more often. Well-written to boot - a joy to play with.