Reviews by verityvirtue

Time to completion: 10-20 minutes

Written for Porpentine's Twiny Jam, vale of singing metals presents a dream-like maze in a strange landscape. Landmarks like boiling streams and oil lakes give the impression of a volcanic landscape, life creeping in fields of grass and flowers. And, yes, it is that now-rare thing in IF, a maze. Yet, it feels less of a hassle than an exploration through an empty space.

vale of singing metals is a lovely little piece, scenic in the way that Kitty Horrorshow's work is, and an interesting take on how mazes can be implemented in very little space.

weird tape in the mail was highlighted by Porpentine in her interview with Emily Short as featuring lots of art and 'piss ethos', so of course I had to check it out. This game features .gifs and animations with flashing effects.

You found a tape at your door last night. Your uncle is the only one who has a tape machine.

One of the most striking features about this game is the all-lowercase, no-punctuation, almost conversational or stream-of-consciousness writing style, similar to some of Porpentine's work, which could be dubbed 'flattened affect'. It suggests the weariness that comes with routine and less-than-pleasant living conditions. The writing sometimes feels rough - it wasn't written necessarily to be pleasing on the ear - but definitely not without thought. The art adds to the sense of tiredness with the same hand-drawn (or mouse-drawn, perhaps), scribbly quality of Nekra Psaria.

The game hints at consumerism and the idea of worth vs. value as a theme, but this was never explored beyond allusions and exaggerated statements. I found this a pity! It could have served as a backbone to the ideas floating around in the game.

weird tape in the mail is a strange, strange game, verging on hallucinatory, but it never really delved into any one idea far enough to use the strangeness to its advantage.

A Bucket Filled with Sand is a short adventure in building a city. In a hundred years a dragon will come, but for now, you start with the simplest of building materials: a bucket filled with sand.

This game presents simple binary choices, each of which build up your sand-kingdom. You can choose between war or negotiation; between building trust and pre-empting treachery. I found it interesting how the writing maintained the tone of detached resignation throughout - even the expansion of your empire is never truly counted as a victory, but rather an opportunity for more problems to arise.

What really makes the game is its illustrations. They give a visual portrayal of your budding kingdom, as it grows from just one castle to a veritable empire. The arrival of the dragon also served as a rather effective pacing device, giving the story a sure structure, and tying the story up at the end rather neatly.

One grouse - and my main one - is that there are lots of typos. Given that some thought appears to have been put into this, it just feels so out of place. Otherwise, though, A Bucket Filled with Sand is a melancholic, highly branching game which touches on the impermanence of human endeavours.

Klara has fallen asleep in her parents' charmed garden - no, not asleep - but catatonic. This is surely the work of an enemy sorcerer! As one of the dolls enchanted to guard and protect Klara, it is your duty to find you what's wrong and reverse it.

Starry Seeksorrow is delightfully charming in its writing - the flora featured are given descriptive, sometimes whimsical names linked to their function (reminding me of Caelyn Sandel's Seeds and Solutions). Yet, there's a sinister overtone: a good number of the plants you encounter are harmful. I would have loved to explore the flowers' abilities further, and explored the different ways they could be used, but that is likely beyond the remit of this game.

The puzzles in Starry Seeksorrow are well-hinted, with the systems behind the puzzles behaving consistently. But the memories that the PC carries add a much greater emotional depth to the story, fleshing the story out to something that could be placed in a wider fictional world, as well as shaping the setting as a result of its creators' personalities and pasts, instead of being merely 'magical cute garden'.

Starry Seeksorrow doesn't play with the parser as much as in Wilson's other works (I'm thinking of The Northnorth Passage and Lime Ergot, specifically), but it's nonetheless a great piece of writing.

I can't give much context on this piece, because every word in this Twine is a link. Without scenery text - text to set the scene - you see the game world solely through the decisions available to you. It's like peeking through a pinhole. Even then, the author suggests a dream sequences and segments of real life, with eerie parallels. The same actions repeat themselves, but take on deeper meanings in different contexts.

The format really works for the story. Reading only the links keeps the rhythm of the writing going. Circuitous conversations are shown through cycling links; social interactions crescendo in a series of seemingly trivial choices.

When acting as a particle was created for the Fear of Twine exhibition, organised by Richard Goodness, a collation of Twine games featuring a broad variety of styles and ways of using words. It's fairly short - reminiscent of the party game where you have to guess the story by asking the storyteller only yes/no questions - and well worth a look to consider how Twine can be used differently.

Time to completion: 20-30 minutes

(There is also a commercial/paid version of SABBAT with art and a soundtrack. This was based on the free version, linked above.)

[Warning: this game contains mentions of sexual content and self-harm, also optional animal abuse.]

It's hard to have a sabbat of one, but hopefully, once you get all the materials together, you'll be able to gather power for yourself.

SABBAT's narrator is friendly and encouraging. It was kind of like having a friend to guide and cheer you on, and in a game about making blood sacrifices to gain power, it was unexpected, but oddly cheering: I cannot hate a game which calls me witchdumpling. The mildly cynical humour here is refreshing. Instead of making trite remarks about how awful everything is, the humours slants toward the self-referential. You've made candles infused with centipede venom, and you muse how hard it was to get that venom in the first place and why did you buy a centipede again?

This game taps on the 'Living Alone in My Sad Apartment' genre, but uses this to highlight the contrast between your current state and the power that you eventually attain. Amongst other things, SABBAT draws on the idea of power through sex. Part of the PC's transformation involves a change in sexual organs, and one of the ways the transformed PC gets power from people is by having sex (or at least attempting to).

The game could be a bit of a mixed bag. The subject matter involves mixing with unknown forces, a theme usually given a more serious treatment in other fiction, but here it feels almost everyday. Yet the game remains self-aware as the PC acknowledges the strangeness of it all.

The branching reminded me of Magical Makeover, where combinations of items combine to produce different outcomes. Like MM, there are no 'bad' combinations in SABBAT (though there are some which are more amusing than others).

I wouldn't usually have plumped for the storyline, but the narrator really made the game for me. It can be polarising, but, for me, it was a charming game about the powerless seeking power and the lonely seeking companionship.

(This was originally published here: https://verityvirtue.wordpress.com/2016/01/24/sabbat/)

You are the last living inhabitant of your Habitat, your only companions the robots that maintain your living spaces. But there is hope... if you can collect enough data to feed the central computer in your Habitat, maybe you can avert catastrophe.

First, the interesting stuff. Icepunk features a procedurally generated landscape, represented on an ASCII map. Likewise, each setting is illustrated with ASCII art. I'm sure this took effort.

Data, in Icepunk's setting, takes myriad forms. Some comes from the lingering traces of mechanical life - ice golems, families and so forth - but in building your future, you must destroy them. Data also comes in the form of excerpts from (public domain) books and, in one memorable instance, tweets (which nets you '5 TB of Frivolous data'...).

However, where Icepunk is weaker is its reliance on lawn-mowering. You have to make repeated trips out into the wastes and return to your home base to deposit the data in the central computer - this is not in itself anything bad, but there seems to be little enough variation in the landscape that regions start feeling homogenous. Also, you can only travel by clicking on a map symbol adjacent to where you are - making travel back to your home base at best, mundane; at worst, frustrating. The delay that I encountered in loading the page only added to the frustration. I imagine this would deter people from playing it through to completion.

Nonetheless, Icepunk is an interesting experiment in exploration in IF, one which gives a different meaning to 'datamining', even if it was let down by tedium.

(This was first published here: https://verityvirtue.wordpress.com/2016/02/03/icepunk)

It's winter, and he's run out of food. He's hungry, he's cold, and if he doesn't go hunting, he'll freeze soon. But something wanders into his house. If he doesn't eat it, he will starve.

[This game contains sound effects.]

Tailypo belongs solidly in the desperation-horror genre: the horror that comes from doing something loathsome, even though it is a choice between that and dying. Groover makes judicious use of timed effects in Twine and repetition, building tension as creak, creak did.

Like Taghairm, Tailypo derives its premise from a creature from Appalachian folklore. While it might be easily repurposed as a story for campfires, or otherwise sanitised, I think Groover's take on this creature captures some of the desperation and terror - a terror from knowing that you are the only human in a mile's radius, and that no matter what, you have to do something - that probably inspired the original folk tale.

A short-ish Twine, published on Sub-Q, well worth playing.

Time to completion: 20-30 minutes

The family curse has activated. If you do not go north, you will die.

The Northnorth Passage plays around with restricted actions, and this is what makes it so extraordinarily suited for the parser, because the parser gives the impression of freedom, yet you can only really do one thing. Obeying the parser, though, brings you through a series of self-contained scenes, colourful and detailed; Wilson's writing sparks with life, with the kind of evocativeness reminiscent of Sunless Sea.

Yet, in each scene, you must forever remain at arm's length. In this sense, it is similar to dynamic fiction, the term coined to describe linear games which nevertheless require the player's interaction and participation to reveal the story. The PC's travel north also seems to reflect the passing of time (the movement over swathes of space and time reminded me of Victor Ojuel's Pilgrimage).

There was a very, very clever move right at the end of the game - an invisible puzzle, if you'd like - which wrapped it up perfectly. If I were to mention a game with a similar move, it would be very spoilery, but there is one...

Originally published here: https://verityvirtue.wordpress.com/2016/01/30/the-northnorth-passage/

When you agreed to meet him, you thought it would all end amicably. That you could go away and close this chapter of your life. Instead, you're now running from him. Bad news: no cell phone reception. You can't call for help. You're stuck. Good news: this is familiar territory. This is your lab. Can you get out of this alive?

Be warned: this game contains mentions of abuse and violence.

The game is simply done and technically well-thought-out, with an inventory system and a navigation system using a compass, a la The Axolotl Project. Item descriptions of things in the lab reveal a close attention to accuracy and detail; you can pick up a beaker of isopropyl and trust that the information you get will be like something you might find on an MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet).

The writing steers clear of florid detail or elaborate tricks with language, instead reminding the player of the urgency of the chase at every other turn ("He's near"). Some might find it too technical or clinical; I found it struck a good balance.

Chemistry and Physics uses no fancy tricks, does nothing neat with multimedia, but instead relies on the strength of its writing to convey the animal fear of being chased.