Reviews by verityvirtue

[Time to completion: 20-30 minutes]

The PC is grieving for the loss of their husband, a professor, and they now have to clear his office. This is a short, one-room parser game in which the things you uncover reveal something new in the room.

The tone is weary and cynical: much of the trappings associated with academia elicit remarks on its futility, and the lack of lasting meaning - fitting, considering that the PC is rifling through the trappings of a life in academia.

Implementation is a bit spotty. It's not immediately obvious what triggers the appearance of new items, and some changes are triggered after a seemingly arbitrary number of turns, so it was hard for me to figure out how to finish the game. Some seemingly obvious nouns/actions were unimplemented (Spoiler - click to show)such as >OPEN CARDBOARD giving me "That's not something you can open.".

Boxes is a short meditation on futility and disillusionment, but is unfortunately marred by its less-than-comprehensive implementation.

[Time to completion: ~5 minutes]

This short poem, presented in Twine, is about the experience of walking home as a person of colour, and the fear of being seen as a monster and being attacked.

Links, here, act as punctuation, giving it the rhythm of song. So yes, it's better if it's read aloud, but it needs the player's interaction - of clicking on the link - to drive in the rhythm.

walking home uses the symbology of religion to represent the power of weapons, of always staying more dangerous than other people out there - there are lines such as "pray to the brand on its edge for protection" - but it is, ultimately, born of fear. And despite this, fatalism is everywhere - a fatalism born of weariness, born of helplessness.

It may be "just" dynamic fiction. It may not be technically spectacular. But it's powerful stuff.

[Time to completion: 20-30 minutes]

This cyberpunk-styled Twine is based on the Shufflecomp release. I could not access version 1.5.

You are a space baker in a galaxy where everyone's voice is surgically removed at birth. For entertainment and relaxation, people watch ASMR videos; in fact, people have implants to enhance the effect of such videos.

This game is broadly branching, with a few major decision-making points leading to different and distinct endings. The author has really thought about the setting, here, and merges the incongruous (Viennese pastries, ASMR) with the typically dystopian (a great plague, a disfigured people) to create something wonderful.

[Time to completion: 45 minutes-1 hour]

This is a short, surreal parser game which opens in front of a theatre on its opening night. You are here to see the actress Miranda Lily, but you're not well-dressed enough.

I underestimated this game at first, taking it for your usual puzzle game. The puzzles, though, used a bit of adventure game logic: (Spoiler - click to show)searching through a dumpster after attending a concert seems a bit off to me.

Opening Night is much more than the puzzles: it's almost dreamlike, and the single setting - the theatre - changes as you progress, reflecting the player's knowledge. The PC's identity also changes as you go through the game, ultimately revealing them to be (Spoiler - click to show)an unreliable narrator. The final reveal of their identity was not exactly unexpected, but was still satisfying.

Worth a whirl, it's not too long.

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.)