Reviews by verityvirtue

Evita Sempai centres around one woman's adoration/love for Eva Perón, who was the first lady of Argentina from 1946 to 1952. It is told in a series of episodes from the narrator's perspective, centred around encounters with Perón.

This game has social relationships at its core, but where other games allow us to manipulate our position in those relationships, the narrator of Evita Sempai already has a predefined position in her social circle. Dropping the player in all these relationships in medias res felt a little disorienting at first, but it also helped to flesh out a fully-formed protagonist who was not only in love with Eva Perón, but also a sister, daughter and breadwinner.

I went into this game without any knowledge of who Eva Perón was, but it's not strictly necessary. Context will certainly explain the later events in this game, and perhaps explain other NPCs' reactions to the titular first lady.

I found the narrator's relationships with NPCs difficult to follow initially, but this is really a minor quibble. Evita Sempai is neatly styled, with changing backgrounds highlighting the transitions between sections.

I am a sucker for local detail and this game does a nicely subtle job of it, even though (to my memory) city and place names are almost never mentioned. Evita Sempai explores a real-life setting not often found in IF, which is definitely something I'd like to see more of.

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.

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.

You can't sleep. It's like the insomnia your mother told you about: it's like a seed, and every night you can't sleep, it takes root and germinates... what then?

Eidolon is at first a kind of interactive dream sequence, but it quickly becomes something much weirder. The beginning sequences felt a lot like S Woodson's Beautiful Dreamer. The imagery and NPCs have the surreality of Alice in Wonderland, coloured by faerie folklore. Jansen's writing style favours the weird turn of phrase and evocative metaphors, which suited a story which may or may not exist in your own head.

The story is largely linear, but, unusually for a Twine game, involves some puzzles. These had consistent mechanisms and were meticulously done, with lots of moving parts. Because the story world relies on a bit of symbolism and not taking things too literally, I admit I had some difficulty but... this should not be a problem for most. (Disclaimer: I resorted to the walkthrough here.)

Eidolon is well-written, and much deeper than it first appears. If you like dreamlike stories set in a faerie world, of sorts, or subversions of fantasy quests, then you might like this.

(Originally posted on http://verityvirtue.wordpress.com)

I really liked the blurb. It sounds snarky. It sounds like it could be a satire. It sounds like it could be fun. The game itself, though, was none of these, sorry to say. It was hard to understand- if there was something deeper than what I saw, then I missed it entirely.

The intake form of which the blurb speaks doesn't even give you a chance to make sense of things. It doesn't start off normal - it's garbled through and through, and finishing it takes you to a room. Rooms, as it turns out - the content of which changes with your earlier choices in the form. What happens in them... (Spoiler - click to show)also doesn't make much sense. Playing it, I got the persistent feeling that I was missing something somewhere. Should I be understanding this? Is there some textual hint? Read the first letters of each word or something? Apparently not. This made the game vaguely unsatisfying, like an itch your arms are too short to scratch. In short, interesting premise, I guess, but either badly executed or just not for me.

(Removed reference to Twine bugs.)

You are a king in this short little game, and your duties include listening to the cries of the people, giving advice and occasionally invading France. But before that, you have to find your crown and scepter.

True to the blurb, this game has self-deprecating, irreverent humour in buckets. For example:

>x cabinet
An intricately decorated wooden cabinet strengthened outside and in with a cage of the strongest steel in the world. This is where you keep the Royal Crown.

And, sometimes, also snacks.

This game brands itself as a one-puzzle, short game, and indeed, strictly speaking, only six actions are needed to complete the game itself. The author has, however, implemented little bonuses for those who poke a little more at the game, so it’s equally fun - if not more - to try and explore and uncover some of the game’s secrets, including the traditional references to other well-known IF games and pop culture

The humour sometimes backfires, though; the custom parser error messages start out cute at first but quickly become annoying. The parser could definitely be more comprehensive, especially for ambiguous references to nouns. Not a bad play- slightly silly and unsubstantial, but that’s completely excusable. Good for maybe 5 minutes' poking around.

Based on the Vanguard Trilogy by the same author, you play a newbie bike messenger working as one of the cogs in the premier courier company, Packet. One of the perks of working here is meeting the legendary Sorcha Blades... which, of course, is what happens when she needs a decoy messenger.

This game is a moderately branching story which takes the PC through an expansive setting, reminiscent of China Miéville or Emily Short's City of Secrets, and gives the sense of an extensively mapped-out city. Neighbourhoods are given characters of their own; distinct communities live in different parts of the city. The story attempts to illustrate a dangerous city running amok with criminals and secret dangers, in a city so starved of resources that fresh fruit is a minor luxury, but nothing really affects the PC directly. The story structure is simple; clearly, the focus is on the writing itself.

The writing itself, however, is not terribly polished; there are typos and missing punctuation marks, there are missing words, there could be more paragraph breaks to let the text breathe. As a spinoff from the source material, I guess it's no surprise that it ended just as it was getting interesting! If it was expanded to elaborate on the hook mentioned in the last part of the game, and polished a lot more, I think it would make for very interesting reading.

You've been on this quest for so long, you can hardly figure out what's going on. All you know is that if you remain in this snow any longer, you'll die.

I enjoyed playing this game, mainly because it is more than it seems. The writing is descriptive and clear; the sense of pacing faultless. Snowquest is very much a story-based game, rather than character-based or even puzzle-based; establishing a distinctive PC voice isn't an emphasis here.

My playthrough was almost entirely free of mechanical issues, by which I mean problems with guessing verbs, not knowing what to do and so on. The puzzles are largely well-designed, with what you need to solve them usually pretty clear. I found navigation a bit of a chore sometimes, especially in the larger initial world, because the exit lister seemed to disappear without explanation - I suspect this is a technical/interpreter issue, but it disrupted the flow of the game. There is also a guess-the-verb puzzle, through which I bulldozed with the hints.

Overall, Snowquest is a linear, mildly puzzle-y game, making up a little less than an hour's play.

This was made in the newly released platform Texture, created by Juhana Leinonen and Jim Munroe. This system enables players to drag and drop verbs, creating hypertext games which are uniquely suited for mobile devices. The system is still in alpha/beta, having been released late last year, but is available for tinkering (http://texturewriter.com/alpha/) (caution: the site stores stories within your browser's local memory - there doesn't yet seem to be a way to download the story format, only the resulting HTML.)

Here, Zed uses the different verbs as a means for creating story branches. You are a commissary of Mother, gathering data from within your host. You can sense your host's vital signs, but, likewise, your every movement is detectible to your host. The more data you collect, the more you risk detection... and expulsion.

A Gift for Mother uses an elegant dichotomy to create branching, though I felt it didn't quite bring out the full possibilities of Texture. It would have been great if the same verb could have applied to multiple objects, but as it stands, A Gift for Mother is a striking story written from a parasite's point of view.