Reviews by verityvirtue
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Time to completion: 30-40 minutes
You are a traveller - whether you be scavenger or dustrunner - and, on your steed, you traverse the hostile lands.
Ruiness is set in what I term 'dystopian wilderness': not quite post-apocalyptic, but barren, harsh, downright caustic environments. The prose is purple and abstract; the story typically abstruse. The florid prose thrums with purpose, though: each place has a distinct climate and role, and the different races or roles you can assume remain thematically consistent.
This game has all the hallmarks of a Porpentine game, but what I found the most interesting was the map/travel system. You travel by typing in your destination in a text field. Whilst in new locations, you discover new names, and the cities you have discovered are mapped out on a chart you carry. This allows for Easter eggs, for openness, for a sense of discovery.
Ruiness is a mid-length confection of a game which affords slightly different perspectives with different characters. The travel system is definitely worth having a look at.
The Role of Music in Your Life is, on first glance, an odd thing: a questionnaire? Seriously? Is this really IF?
The Role of Music in Your Life expands out into a dialogue-driven, minimal story about an anxious mother and her kid. The character development is handled deftly, especially when the kid in question speaks up, forming a good foil to his mother's perspective. Telling this story through just dialogue raised the possibility of an unreliable narrator, which gave a sinister edge to the mother's lines.
I was disappointed to find that, despite the choices, the story doesn't actually branch. It would have been satisfying, or at least fun, to see how different answers to the personality quiz-type questions affected how the mother treated the PC. Nonetheless, this minimal piece of CYOA has some very clever writing and a delicious use of unreliable narrator. I enjoyed it.
Time to completion: 20-30 minutes
When you escaped, you were childless. Now, away from the City and its cells, you have two daughters, both special and peculiar in their own ways. Their stories will shape the future of Claro Largo.
The narrator in this game is pretty much invisible, compared to what the titular sisters do (and end up doing). The story is grim, melancholic; the village setting suggests claustrophobia, despite its promise of freedom. To me, this called to mind stories such as The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula Le Guin, or Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle. (Of course, these comparisons are far from perfect, though they share similar tones and atmospheres.)
This game uses telescopic text (similar to what this tool does) to slowly reveal the story. This gimmick is purely mechanical (technically, there's nothing really to stop this being a linear story), but the order in which text is presented makes clear the conceptual links, the story's chronological order. Sisters is very simple, but tells a good story.
Tapes is a linear work about, as the author states, sex and disability. At its centre, though, it is a close-up look into a moment of intimacy. Both characters are shown naked in the game art and they hug-wrestle, but this is not sexual intimacy. This is emotional intimacy: about showing vulnerability to a loved one.
The exact disability from which the PC suffers is never really stated, but from context, we gather that the PC experiences painful muscle spasms which are relieved by kinesiology tape. Is the name important, though?
The sole two reviewers on IFDB (as of this writing) express their distaste at the linearity of this game, but it might be worth having a think on Linear IF, or dynamic fiction, is becoming increasingly accepted. Dynamic fiction borrows the structures and conventions (e.g. second person narrative, platforms) of branching IF to enhance storytelling, either through visual text effects, or by inviting the player to participate in revealing the story step by step. Tapes veers toward the latter, with the game art in each passage illustrating the dialogue.
Tapes is a sweet, peaceful vignette of an intimate moment. Play if you like linear, dialogue-driven scenes and 8-bit art.
You are a suburban teen and you're tired of your boring, non-magical, human life. Maybe if you go out into the woods where the faeries roam, you can join them - maybe... Of course, that depends on whether they'd want you or not.
Like Beware the Faerie Food You Eat, Get Lost! is a riff on fairy-related tropes, but where BtFFYE is grim, Get Lost! is a merry romp through encounters with jaded, ill-tempered fae. The protagonist's idealistic conceptions of the fae, combined with a comprehensive knowledge of folklore, is quickly frustrated by the ironically mundane nature of the fae themselves.
Woodson's writing sparkles with life, and the broadly branching game structure makes replay richly rewarding. This game is quite short - it took me about 15 minutes to play it through once - so it should make for excellent lunchtime play.
Polished deep sea exploration, April 9, 2016*Time to completion: 20-30 minutes
In Tangaroa Deep, you are a marine biologist going down to document creatures of the deep in SS Tangaroa. The deeper you go, the stranger these creatures become. After all, there is so much we don't know about the deep sea.
The PC's only link with the outside world is their connection with Jackie, their research partner, and their banter is a delightful foil to the creatures living down below, which get weirder and weirder. Like parser IF, the world model is location-based, which means story branching is dependent on where you move, meshing wonderfully with the overall story.
Several visual features illustrate atmospheric changes as the PC goes further and further down. The air meter ticks down. The background deepens from aqua to black. The description of creatures gets weirder and weirder. Where Dalmady's writing shines, I think, is in the late game, if you choose to go as deep as you can, and then some.
Recommended.
In Rough Draft, you’re helping Denise, a writer suffering from writer’s block, decide the course of her story, a fairly generic fantasy-type story. At some points, though, the narrator decides that the story can go no further; you, as invisible editor, can go back and get her to rewrite at a certain decision-making point. It takes the concept of the meta-writing game and really runs with it.
What makes this game unusual is being able to visualise the story structure. I liked how information from one rejected branch unlocked decisions in other branches – a reflection, perhaps, of how brainstorming sparks off ideas, even if the original ideas never do make it into the final product.
Story branches are quickly pruned off, which means that players must do a bit of lawn-mowering (this is not necessarily meant as a harsh critique, goodness knows I’m guilty of that myself) to find the ‘right’ story branch that allows progress. It would have been great to be able to complete the story using a variety of ways – that, after all, is the power of the imagination.
It’s a pity that the meta-story (the fantasy story the player helps to write) is relatively bland. The fantasy story seems to follow stock tropes and template-like encounters; dialogue sometimes feels stilted. Nonetheless, it is evident that the author has spent much effort on this – the screens which show the story in progress are in reality separate images, as is the story map – and its implementation of this idea, which has so often been talked about, is laudable.
Time to completion: 30-40 minutes
You are 10-year-old Allison. When you were very young you were in a horrible accident, and since then you've used a cyborg body. But today, your parents have prepared a surprise for you... your own spaceship body!
The game is set in a space colony, in which AIs make up a major part of society. Despite that, there is still a distinct division between AIs and 'true' humans, leaving cyborgs like Allison in a grey area. The author takes full advantage of the world building by focusing more on exploration rather than plot - its approach felt a little like some of the moon scenes in Creatures Such as We. The writing is rightly described as charming.
Allison is, on the surface, about a girl's adventures, but the story world has enough detail to allow it to touch on more contentious subjects like discrimination, about identity, about growing up. It feels like a gentler version of Birdland, with its focus on relationships at school (even if those in Allison are entirely platonic), its child protagonist and its themes. Allison is a thoughtful, charming game with a nicely fleshed-out world - recommended.
In this mid-length work, you play as Wendy Little, secretary in Pickleby, Otis and Meyer, a position your father got you. You’re engaged to Derek, and, well, everything… is peachy.
Tough Beans is, on the surface, a going-to-work simulator – go to work, perform menial errands and so forth – but the story stands out. It highlights how women – especially those who fit the archetypes of femininity – are so often belittled and infantilised. The game opens with an extended musing on the names that people call you – in fact, barely anyone apart from the PC herself calls her by her given name:
Baby. Babe? Babe?
For as long as you can remember, you’ve never really had a name–never needed one. For 22 years people have swaddled you in epithets, letting you know that even though you’re not quite on the right track, the world is there to hold your hand. Your father, your friends, your boyfriend. Gas station attendants.
This game is heavily reliant on cutscenes (do I hear accusations of “not interactive enough!”?) to tell the PC’s account of a lifetime of being put down. Given that the game focuses on the story of an established character, I’d argue that it works, just that it can look daunting sometimes.
What would have made the game better would be work on the technical aspects and hinting actions that I needed to do to progress were not always obvious. The choice of verbs is not always intuitive (for me, anyway). If it were not for the walkthrough, I would have missed a puzzle altogether. Changes in location were not always clearly indicated in the text.
The story arc reminded me of Hedda Gabler’s play A Doll’s House, with the PC’s progress palpable through the story and contrasted clearly at the end. And I liked that (Spoiler - click to show)the asides, too, were written in a way that foreshadow troubles in the PC’s relationship (in response to examining the PC’s boyfriend’s books, you get “You’re trying to get moving, not put yourself to sleep.”
Time to completion: 20-30 minutes
From the creator of When acting as a particle / when acting as a wave comes a polished work of linear fiction about the creator of QUIMER-B, a virtual consciousness so powerful it could take over the running of a city, and, ever since its conception, a source of moral outrage. To prove QUIMER is capable of running a city, you're going to put your whole facility under its control for one day. If you can prove that, then maybe it can handle the pressure from everyone else.
Except it never really goes to plan, does it?
QUIMER-B is part epistolary, part first-person narration of an apocalypse in action. This game has a good grasp of pacing, creating tension through static and dynamic text. It sometimes uses the mechanic of clicking to draw out a scene, or to contrast it with the timed appearance of a piece of text.
Compellingly written and story-driven, this game's strength is in sketching out the story - and the relationships between the PC and NPCs - and in letting the reader draw their own conclusions from these snippets. It's a bit like watching an opera with minimal backdrops, where it just takes a few props to suggest a palace, or a battlefield.
It's worth having a click through this short, polished game.
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