Reviews by verityvirtue

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.

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.

It's simple: you have to open that vein. But the vein is just the start of your troubles: you're chasing... something.

Open That Vein worked impressively within its self-imposed constraints, since the PC could only interact with any noun in very limited ways. Even more impressive knowing that all this was coded in three hours.

The game is linear, with extensive use of cutscenes at important points, and this is what lets Groover's descriptive, evocative writing shine. The details he gives home in on the visceral. He gives glimpses of images, gorgeous vignettes, though they didn't immediately make sense to me. There's a lot of mention about things 'feeling right', which I'm still trying to parse.

As with Midnight. Swordfight, this work also makes use of a limited verb list, but the game also supplies suggested verbs without prompting, so a player new to parser IF should not have a problem playing it. This design decision adds an example to the ongoing discussion of how to make parser IF more accessible to new players. Groover solves this by telling the player what to type, and by moulding the game environment around the constraints of the limited verb list. A limited simulation like this works well for short works, but one wonders if this couldn't be extended to more open-format/sandboxy works - maybe with a gradually expanding verb list? Commands you can 'discover'?

Originally published here: https://verityvirtue.wordpress.com/2016/01/23/open-that-vein/

Patrick is a short, mostly linear game about being mistaken for someone else. It’s not just about people calling you by the wrong name. It’s about strangers clapping you on the back and saying how glad they are to find someone from their frat; about waiters giving you ‘your usual’; about lovers whispering a familiar yet strange name in your ear.

While not as dark as my father’s long, long legs, Patrick once again showcases Lutz’s gift of making every day events subtly disturbing, bringing out the way in which a mistaken identity can be a violation of something intimate. Your alter ego seems to more a parasitic twin than a person. He is forever disrupting your life, even in your most private moments, and your life and his are pressed up against each other skin-close.

The events are uncanny, yet the narrator treats them as everyday (which, for him, probably is). In the end, it is the narrator’s tone which moves the story from surreal horror to the benignly surreal: it is matter of fact, self-aware, even joking.

Lutz does a great job of sketching vignettes of these scenes of mistaken identity, using a few details here and there to instil a sense of unease.

Originally published here: https://verityvirtue.wordpress.com/2016/01/20/patrick/

You have the unenviable role of Ambassador to Emerpus, a highly intelligent race with complex social rules. If you can make it through the entire dinner, you should be fine. If not, then you better wave goodbye to your job and, possibly, entire career.

Play Nice is, simply put, a test of whether you know how to play by the rules, a la Tea Ceremony. The rules are given, and though they look complex, I found that not all came into play in the game itself - a bit of an unfired Chekhov's gun. The NPC's responses to various social faux pas also did not quite resonate with what had been laid out in the rules.

The game presents three choices at each turn to test your memory of the in-game rules, and at each decision-making node, there is only one correct answer; selecting the wrong answer leads to instadeath. Replaying it, therefore, is like re-taking a school quiz where you already know the answers. While such linearity was not unexpected for this game, I still would have appreciated some subtlety, where you could build up or break down relations between you and any of the NPCs separately.

Still, the writing is conversational and light-hearted; the observations of the aliens feel like that which a child would make. The game would have benefited from taking itself a bit less seriously, though.

Play Nice is a bit of a mixed bag, unfortunately. On the one hand, it does have a less than serious space-age feel to it; on the other, the story structure is punishingly linear, where it could have done with a sense of playfulness.

When you and James first set up the Orpheum, oh, what dreams you had! But now, burlesque is the only thing which brings people to the crumbling theatre.

The ‘about’ section promises just one puzzle, but without a clearly indicated goal for the PC, I found it hard to figure out what to do. (Maybe it’s just me.) (Okay, figured it out.) It took a little leap of logic for me, but once a certain step is done, things moved quickly.

This game was written for 24 Hours of Inform 2004, in which participants had to write an Inform game with 24 hours (no surprise there), and the game had to be set in a theatre, include a petticoat, an advertisement, something repainted and a trapdoor. The time limit probably explains why the environment was not as exhaustively implemented as it could have been, but at least the location descriptions are sufficiently interesting, and successfully convey the sense of dereliction and despair that now plagues the Orpheum.

The game is still buggy in places and the puzzle didn’t fully make sense, but it was still a respectable effort.

The strange painting on the wall has always bothered you. It’s your ancestor, apparently, and no matter how much you complain, your parents won’t take the painting down. So it’s up to you.

The first thing that struck me was the writing- it was a little jerky and repetitive, and it felt like the writing of someone for whom English isn’t their first language. Case in point: (Spoiler - click to show)There is a chair placed next to a table. You can see a book on the table. The cover of the book shows a horse.

In the ‘about’ text, the author had a vision of this being a window onto the bigger, fictional world of Talliston, Idaho. Perhaps because of the setting of the story (where the PC literally cannot move out of the starting room), this did not come across very strongly, since I never got a feel of what the wider community beyond the PC’s family was like.

As a side note, this game used two sound effects – I’m not quite sure what they represent, though, because I couldn't tell what types of actions produced the different sound effects.

The puzzle is classified as being ‘Tough’ on the forgiveness scale, but this is really because the single puzzle is on quite a tight timer. The game makes it additionally frustrating if you try the most straightforward action because there’s some kind built-in delay to stop you succeeding on the first try. On subsequent replays I realised there was probably an in-universe explanation for your reluctance, but this was not clearly indicated in the text.

I found it hard to enjoy playing this game, really, because the writing was too minimal to make up for the bare-bones implementation and the timed puzzle.

(This originally appeared here: https://verityvirtue.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/old-fogey/)

In recent months Chandler Groover has produced quite a number of unusual works, with quite a few edging into horror territory. creak, creak is a Twine work written for Twiny Jam which bears some similarities to Tailypo, another of Groover's works.

Something is creaking in the house. Your mother always said it's just the wind. You can't leave it at that. You have to look.

Groover uses timed appearance of text and various transitions to pace out the story, to great effect here. I found myself with a creeping sense of dread as I waited for the text to appear. The writing style is simple and some of the rhyming lines give the sense of a child's nursery rhyme - making the monster a creature of a child's nightmares, a la The Badabook.

This game may be a baby sibling of more full-fledged horror games, but creak, creak packs quite a punch and works well for such a constrained format.

Fahlstaff is a mysterious town, once a logging town, but now it boasts a vibrant arts scene and other natural attractions. Tour through this strange place with this map!

Map of Fahlstaff is written like a promotional leaflet, and has no real plot or goals. Instead, it is mostly about exploration. There are snippets alluding to the town's history and references to rumours. The writing has a distinctively 'Welcome to Night Vale' air - the commonplace mixes with news of the mysterious and the subtly ominous.

There is never really anything malevolent beyond that vague sense of dread, though, giving the game a general feeling of benign detachment. There are, however, some narrative events which are triggered by the one choice you make right at the beginning of the game, which made the game feel more like something living and active under your hands, rather than just something to be poked at.

The game is also prettily designed, with photographic backgrounds for each scene, though this sometimes made the text hard to read.

The tone fluctuates between sombre, PSA-style (again, like Night Vale) and conversational; I would have loved if the tone was a bit more consistent. Nevertheless, on the whole Fahlstaff is quite the charming town.