Reviews by verityvirtue

This game opens on two well-worn tropes of IF: the school deadline (so favoured by games such as Violet) and the grubby apartment (which also featured, most famously, in Shade). You're in the throes of inertia for your assignment. Of course it's due tomorrow. Of course what you do is everything but actually do the thing.

The story is a little light on actual events or decisions. It isn't particularly introspective. Neither does it have much of a unifying story arc. If, however, it was read as a prototype, then it does work, and it's a working demonstration of an interesting system.

The platform here deserves some mention - it's a home-brew choice-based platform, and it gives the impression of laying out each passage in a grid on a giant field. It's like Prezi, basically. It's worth playing, if at least to check out the interface.

[This game describes violence and suicide.]

[Time to completion: 30-45 minutes]

In this noir-esque parser game, you are a private eye trying to find out what happened to Brian Timmons, and it's a case that will bring you through a mental institution to a creepy cabin.

The good: the game is clearly heavily invested in building atmosphere - flavour messages abound at every turn. Story-wise, the game is based on the Call of Cthulhu RPG and has a nice bit of Lovecraftian mystery at its heart, even if it's a bit predictable.

This game also features an efficient way of transporting the PC to various locations, splitting the story into regions a la Pilgrimage.

I'm playing what I assume is the comp version, and, surprisingly enough, it seems to lack in polish. Dialogue was delivered awkwardly; the cogs and gears of the dialogue system sometimes shows. The messages that ASK [character] ABOUT [topic] produces conflicts with dialogue delivered through cutscenes. There were some typos and punctuation errors; exit listings not always listed. State (i.e. changes in variables) was not remembered elegantly. (Spoiler - click to show)I tried to get past the guard without a pass, eliciting a “Hey, sizzle-chest, no one goes up to the patients’ rooms without a doctor’s pass.”, yet could get into the wards without a problem.

Design-wise, the in-universe stakes presented never seem high enough to deliver a sense of true tension, but I realise that this is a tricky design problem, balancing players' ease of use and creating tension.

One last point: the Lovecraftian legacy and noir atmosphere do not help, but this game pretty much demonises mental illness and sketches the flattest of stereotypes. The femme fatale character feels like she was shoved in without context, making the PC's remarks about her figure and appearance all the more jarring.

The Surprising Case of Brian Timmons treads a familiar path, in both the horror and the mystery-solving aspect - sometimes too familiar - so if you like a straightforward mystery story, and you don't mind cutscenes, you might like this.

[Time to completion: 10 minutes]

You are a lone hitchhiker stranded in Kinsale, the gourmet capital of Ireland. The longer you stay, the weirder things get.

This brand of horror blends elements which wouldn't be amiss in Welcome to Night Vale or Stephen King. There's much which is familiar here: Your standard hollow bells soundtrack. Sinister, suspicious villagers. People behaving weirdly.

The prose is clipped, terse. The author uses small elements - a shop sign, a smell - to build up atmosphere. The setting is grounded by specific details: shop names, landmarks. The ending was... witty, to say the least. It's a relatively short one, so well worth a try if you like Stephen King-style or Lovecraft-style deserted towns with strange happenings.

Three Dragons was designed as a micro-RPG, and is a technically polished Twine with slick text effects. This game has several of the hallmarks of a usual RPG: there's an inventory system, combat, and a completely characterless PC.

Two things of note: stats are presented qualitatively, not quantitatively, meaning you see "You are in good health" or "The dragon is stable" instead of numerical values for health, or any other stat. This, for me, kept it from being a numbers game - it signalled that trying to keep track of health lost and damage dealt was not the point. What you have are tactics: do you feint, or swipe with your weapon, or retreat?

Second, combat is in realtime. This lends a sense of urgency to the fight: if you delay, your options dwindle. In IF and text-based combat games, this is a rare thing indeed.

So far, I haven't found any way to get anything resembling a 'successful' ending, though it's not actually clear why. Three Dragons feels like an introduction more than anything, but it introduces some interesting system which I wouldn't mind seeing in future works.

[Time to completion: 10-15 minutes]

In this small, exploration-based Twine, you are apprentice to root-mother Manya, and in exchange for story, you must help fetch herbs. The challenge here is in interpreting the indirect clues to match the description of the plants you find.

This game is relatively simple, and certainly has few frills. Nonetheless, I enjoyed this; I've found precious little IF about botany and plants (apart from Starry Seeksorrow; recommendations would be welcome), even though the act of collecting plants suits itself well to the traditional treasure hunt mechanic.

[Time to completion: 5 minutes]

This was written for the Tiny Utopias jam (https://catacalypto.wordpress.com/2016/04/13/possibilities-in-the-tinyutopias-if-jam), organised by Cat Manning (and is still ongoing!).

Skulls are not usual fare for utopias. Skulls mean death. Death means filth. But here, skulls are just another part of the PC's family trade, and what skull-scraper promises is plenty, abundance, enough for generations to come. Each skull holds a little vignette of experience, a ritual of transformation. Your role as a skull-scraper is not certain; what is certain is that there will be enough (see also Hannah Powell-Smith's take on the tiny utopia, Enough.)

Porpentine's Twiny Jam has sparked off a multitude of tiny Twines, each using 300 words or less, and it has been a veritable education seeing how people use those 300 words.

In The Tiniest Room, the author opts for a minimalist escape the room game. It provides the bare minimum you need to know, yet has all the usual keys and combination locks that you might expect from an escape game.

What really puts the cream on the cake is the ending, and so, as the Chinese idiom says (no, it actually exists), the sparrow may be small, it's nonetheless complete (麻雀虽小，五脏俱全). A good exercise in what you can do with very little.

[Time to completion: 45-60 mins]

Your Uncle Zebulon has died, and while you're sure you were his favourite nephew, he bequeathed you just one item - it can be any item from his house, but you can only take one out. Your relatives have been all over the house, though, so will there be anything left?

This game is one of the games I've played this year with longer parser puzzles. One of the reasons I have stayed so far from these is because I am very bad at visualising and manipulating machines in IF - I do better when I can actually move things with my hands, which is a bit of a feat in IF. The puzzles here, however, are well-hinted. As befits an old wizard's house, Uncle Zebulon's Will makes use of some simple mechanics which work once, but are consistently implemented.

The writing is enjoyable, and I know some have called it terse or economical. This was typical of the time, but it felt natural to me; also, as others have mentioned, the one NPC that you get to talk to feels convincingly bored, with in-character 'error' messages when the player breaks the game's rules (most notably being the one object restriction when exiting the house).

A very solid game with good implementation and enjoyable writing. Would safely withstand the so-called test of time.

[Time to completion: 10-15 minutes]

You're Amity, and you're out in the park to meet Li Anderson, your girlfriend, when somebody starts yelling for help. This starts as a cozy story about two girls, but abruptly turns into a story about fighting monsters.

The writing in the beginning is not as inspired, not as sharp as one might expect. There's some self-examination along the lines of "This is my average high school life", which is not entirely unwarranted. The conversation between the PC and Li touches on deeper issues, such as how sexuality is portrayed in media.

The later part moves faster, but I sensed that it was trying to hint at something greater through elements from mythology and metaphor and cultural references - as far as I could tell, anyway. It felt incongruous - perhaps because there was too little space, narrative-wise, to lead up to this.

I had strong vibes of Birdland and Astrid Dalmady's Yesterday, You Saved the World in this game, but the emotional impact didn't quite hit it for me. Birdland did it by establishing Bridget's and Bell's character and weaknesses earlier on, making their eventual triumph more satisfying. Here, there's a lot less tension from the start, which loosens the driving force for the resolution.

Some interesting elements in this one, and this game seems to have angled at invoking fuzzy good feelings, so it's probably good for a short diversion.

[Time to completion: 5-10 minutes]

Here, you are a husband to a grieving wife, and you have the curious power to rewind time. Each time you do this, it comes with a physical toll. Ever since the accident shattered your small family, you've been making more and more use of this skill.

This game is not always polished - in some places, the prose would have benefited from a rigorous editing. What this game does well, though, is give a sense of weariness as the narrator deals with what is now nothing more than routine - emotionally taxing and unusual it may be, but routine.

The in-game action of rewinding essentially gives a reason for undoing, but makes the reader think hard about the act. Do you want to risk hurting an already-unwell wife, or do you want to spare yourself an act you have been performing thousands of times? There are no happy endings in this game. It is not lighthearted playing.