Reviews by verityvirtue

[Time to completion: 15-20 mins]

You are the mayor of the hilariously named Buttsville and, as you deal with the various problems (like the city breaking down around you), there’s a mysterious tool, left to you by your predecessor. A button that allows direct contact to… the Authority. How much will you rely on that omniscient, omnipotent force?

For such a jokey setup, most of the game is quite earnest in following through all the awful things that can happen to a city.

One playthrough is relatively short, but with frequent branching and checkpoints, it’s quite replayable.

If you like Jasper Fforde’s Jack Sprat series, a novel series giving a noir spin to nursery rhymes, you’ll probably enjoy this. All the field mice have been leaving town; someone’s been bopping heads - and it’s up to you, Fairy Detective, to find out why.

Hudson’s writing is extremely readable, and while the characters may be talking fluffy animals, there is sharpness underneath. The forces working in the town are the familiar push and pull of racism and the search for better opportunities, anthropomorphism or not.

Foo Foo is directed enough that I could figure most things out with just a little guidance and some in-game hints. Overall a well-written murder mystery, with an intriguing setting that I enjoyed.

A short, minimal puzzle parser game, with a similar concept to Clue, in which you have to figure out the location of a murderer, the weapon used and the murderer. As a slight complication, you can’t use the same element (location, weapon or murderer) in consecutive accusations.

There are some self-referencing Easter egg-style props, and characters that sound like they could be condiments on a fried egg, but the game is basically that. If you’re used to this kind of game, one playthrough could take about 5 minutes. A little rough around the edges, but it’s a bit like one of those little plastic toys you can fidget with.

You're on the train to meet your family for the weekend, and the thought fills you with dread.

The cover suggests a cutesy story aimed at younger readers; the blurb suggests something deeper, with a hint of unhappy family life.

Vague allusions to emotional baggage (at least in the branches that I played through) and a mundane beginning taps on a common urge in IF, though not necessarily the most attention-grabbing. Infrequent binary choices are sprinkled in the midst of linear text. The sheer amount of linearity actually hides the broad branching, and players might be put off from replaying by the verbosity. Conciseness would have helped this game, but at least one of the branches is weird enough to warrant all this.

Off the Rails has some good ideas, but could be more compellingly presented.

You are a maverick (and frankly dangerous) scientist, and, at long last, you have your crowning glory: the time scryer! Allowing you to see into the future - well, ten minutes - it might finally be your way out of obscurity…

The premise - which you might have guessed from the “escape your fate adventure” description - was intriguing. I’d expected something like (Spoiler - click to show)My Angel or The Art of Fugue, which play around with delayed actions, but Inevitable is so short that that never really comes into play. There simply isn’t space for repeated themes, because there’s no space for repetition.

This game’s style is jocular in the way that, say, Peregrine Wade’s work is. Its brevity means that the humour and style never gets overbearing; on the other hand, the payoff could definitely have been more dramatic.

I’ll admit that I’m not fond of the “mad scientist” genre. Works in this genre rarely seem to acknowledge the incremental nature of empirical scientific research. Also: unappreciated brilliance does not a maverick scientist make — rather, it is the lack of accountability; the refusal to document anything; the insistence on unsafe practices. But that has little to do with this game - so that’s all I will say now.

You play a very old witch who’s not quite at the end of her life… and she feels like something is missing.

Witchcraft, here, runs along the lines of Pratchett’s practical, world-wise witches. Our witch is fully equipped with hexes and curses, but also browses mail catalogues for entertainment. Her attempts at plugging the gap in her life are quite old-style witch, though, including seeking out motherhood. Women finding their fulfilment in motherhood is not a new story. This game subverts it - though I would have been delighted if this had been lampshaded with a bit more of the spunk that the witch PC herself shows.

The Very Old Witch eschews anything more than a veneer of branching narrative, making this mostly a work of dynamic fiction. Nonetheless, it’s not too tedious to click through this linear story - and indeed I think I would have enjoyed this as a short story. There are areas where I would have appreciated a more biting wit - the titular characters don’t quite take things lying down, yet this isn’t always conveyed so well in their dialogue. Overall, The Very Old Witch reads with the simplicity of a children’s story, with some uniquely urban/modern twists.

It’s Christmas, or thereabouts, and you have to go… but first, you need to charge up your sceptre. Well, at least that’ll give you some precious last minutes with your boyfriend.

Rainbow Bridge is a cosy treasure hunt - cosy both in scope and in-game universe. For something focused on colours, though, I had expected more… colourful descriptions; it seems a little bare at the moment. The game would definitely benefit from a little editing; a few more details would give the impression of a much richer world.

There are some touches which made this game a little more interesting - the choice of names, for instance - though the premise struck me as a little… cheesy. Still, a pleasant, well-meaning game.

DiBianca's Inside the Facility won Miss Congeniality in last year's comp, featuring a huge in-game map, a pared-down parser and puzzles which involved not much more than the simplest object manipulation.

The parser in The Wand is similar, with well-circumscribed limits to what verbs might be used. This time, though, we have a much smaller map and a configurable wand to play with, which gives the player different abilities, paring down the parser further.

Puzzle clues are given abstractly, like Flash escape room games of yore. Object manipulation is more complex, since the player can do more with each object. Puzzle-solving in The Wand doesn’t quite have the same snappiness as In the Facility, but there’s some nice framing of the central game premise here.

The Wand is overall a polished game, with a streamlined puzzle system. If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy Sub Rosa by Joey Jones and Melvin Rangasamy.

Written for ECTOCOMP, Bloodless is a short game which takes inspiration from - what else? - Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. You play a vampire on board a delayed train. Someone's had the life sucked out of them, but it definitely wasn't you. Time to investigate!

Bloodless may not be hugely surprising, but is a solid, short game, with light-hearted, bare-bones narration along with relative straightforward puzzles, of a variety familiar to IF.

Bloodless, being set on a train, has a spatial layout similar to the long, featureless corridors so beloved to this genre, but grouping rooms into carriages chunks them into more memorable sections. Bloodless is a pretty entertaining, bite-sized riff on the vampire genre.

[Time to completion: 15-20 minutes]

You are Cinderella, and you must infiltrate the ball to steal the King's secret military plans - and fret not, it's all in aid of the revolution!

The visual novel-style illustrations define the tone of the story and, in parts, deliver information relevant to the story. You, intrepid reader, will need to pay attention to detail, and, like me, you may get imprisoned a few times before figuring out how to escape in one piece.

The directions were my main stumbling block; I had trouble correlating compass directions, map and directional arrows. Otherwise, though, this is a fun one.

Taking about fifteen minutes' playtime for a runthrough, Secret Agent Cinder would make a great lunchtime game - mischievous, well-executed and often surprising.