Reviews by verityvirtue

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.

Two wolves go out for a night on the town. Neon. Cobblestones.

Written for Porpentine's Twiny Jam, in which one creates a Twine game within 300 words, the author eschews spartan sentences, instead using single words, linked with timed appearances.

The combination of music, macros and the individual words makes Wolfgirls in Love incredibly evocative, and evokes loss and love and relief with the briefest of brushstrokes.

This game relies as much on graphics and music as it does on the text; the timed appearances give a rhythm to the text that the words alone do not. Wolfgirls in Love is a fascinating illustration of what 300 words in Twine can do, but equally also a gripping, bite-size story in itself.

(This review was originally published with modifications at https://verityvirtue.wordpress.com/2015/12/26/wolfgirls-in-love/)

Here's a game set in another cyberpunkish, dystopian world, where biotechnology is so advanced that all you need to clone an organism - and indeed a human being - is a bit of their tissue and a special reagent. This is what you've resorted to, in an attempt to bring back your fiancée.

But nothing's ever as easy as that, and you may not always get what you expected...

Her Pound of Flesh had a theme familiar to that in many of this year's IFComp games, with the theme of sacrificing something to get your heart's desire, yet ending up with less than you started with. Because the author establishes the PC's motivations and dreams so well, the PC's helplessness in the face of events taking a rather squicky turn evokes sympathy: it's clear that thoughts about her are consuming the PC's life, even to the point of appearing in the PC's dreams.

The game progresses in 'days', with each day comprising about three to four choices. In dealing with her, there's often the choice to treat her as the human you remember her to be, or as something... less. Each day reveals new and terrifying things about what she has become.

In some ways, Her Pound of Flesh wonders what the limit of humanity is. Is it worth it, to have the physical form but nothing else? But more than that, this game is a story about longing. Despite there being less and less of her humanity day by day, the PC keeps turning back to what reminds him of her: things like her scent and her hair.

Overall, it may involve quite a lot of body horror and gore, but ultimately this game is heartfelt... and tugs at the heartstrings. Read that how you will.

(This review was originally published with modifications at https://verityvirtue.wordpress.com/2015/12/19/her-pound-of-flesh/)

You wake up in an unfamiliar spaceship. Something is wrong with the ship's mainframe and it needs help.

Developed for ProcJam 2015, this game features procedurally generated locations and objects, the writing of which nonetheless felt natural. Indeed, the writing is one of the high points of Mainframe. It went in a similar direction to Her Pound of Flesh, in that what was inanimate takes on life and flesh, and your treatment of it must change accordingly.

Mainframe progresses through a series of repeated scenes which often have wildly differing endings. Because of the structure of the game, lawn-mowering is inevitable, but at least the locations are bizarre enough to make this varied.

Mainframe has a solid story at its backbone and excellent writing; it's certainly a good look at the kinds of things procedural generation can produce.

(This review was originally published with modifications on https://verityvirtue.wordpress.com/2015/12/22/mainframe/)

Pale starts with what was, for me, an off-putting technical note. Okay, I can choose to play from Tobias's (whoever that is) point of view... and I can't play from Klaudia's (whoever that is)? Perhaps this is/was a work in progress.

Anyway.

You're Tobias, the handyman around these parts. These parts, for you, is a small town in Germany, called Bree. Things are quiet; the people are a peaceable sort... until you find Stefan dead and don't tell anyone. As you try and deflect suspicion, you can only mire yourself deeper into trouble. There are some violent scenes.

The writing is a little dry, but I'm not sure how to explain this, because it's not for lack of details. The author has made the effort to include things which would be part of the daily landscape for a person living in a small community, things like grouses and small jealousies. The writing feels like it lacks emotion, though. Tobias speaks rather formally, which comes across as being emotionally flat about what would usually be emotive subjects.

I also had a grouse with the pacing, somewhat. Pale started with a halfway-promising hook - that you, the PC, had been accused to murder - but, in one branch, built up the setup rather slowly, and in another, never gave any payoff. That made one branch feel very unbalanced. The other lacked the suspense that one might find in similar 'suspicion in a small town' storylines such as in Broadchurch or Jagten.

As a side note: unless I am mistaken, the author was a little careless in releasing this... did you really leave a blank passage there?

(Originally posted here: https://verityvirtue.wordpress.com/2015/12/29/pale/)

You are Tara Sue and, simply put, you lead a pretty boring life. However, things are about to get more interesting...

MNiTS follows a kind of time cave structure, which allows it to be highly branching despite it being so short; of course, the length of the story and early branching allows for easy replay. The scenarios are slightly outlandish, especially towards the end - a whim of the author's? - but veer towards the grim.

The joy in such 'boring work life' games is discovering the secret whims and fancies of the PC which lie behind their urbane exterior, but MNiTS didn't establish much specifics.

Worth mentioning is the rather attractive layout and scrollback formatting, which made the final story readable as a conventional short story.

Ultimately, MNiTS made use of a mundane concept which, ironically, could stand to be more interesting.

Weird City Interloper is a short conversation-based romp through a fantastical city in the vein of Porpentine’s works - peopled with fascinating and fantastical characters.

For a game with no location descriptions to speak of, it was surprisingly atmospheric in its descriptions of the slums and the stenchworks, and spoke of a society more well thought-out than one might expect from such a short game. The hints of detail suggested a city like Miéville's New Crobuzon: highly stratified, with each social strata having elaborate rituals and norms; and highly industrialised, with the cogs of machinery merging with the eldritch.

All we know of the NPCs are their replies in conversation, and Pacian makes full use of this by giving each character a distinct voice and take on common topics. The game also comes with a very friendly hint system, in the form of a streetwise city guide. It took a bit of a leap of logic to figure out how to progress, I must admit, but the logic in the rest of the story is consistent.

Weird City Interloper was similar to Walker and Silhouette or Castle of the Red Prince in its unusual navigation, and the game lives up to its description as being shallow but broad, and makes for short (less than an hour) but colourful play.

Content warning: this game contains sometimes unexpected descriptions of death and gore.

You wake up in a North London flat, unable to remember how you got there (sound familiar?). Tottenham is devoid of people. It's time to go.

The game is initially a lot about exploration. There isn't much of a clear goal, but as you explore, it's clear that something very bad has happened. The game never makes it clear what you're aiming for - perhaps a vague attempt at safety - even to the end.

Howwl is written with a vaguely Twine or Undum-like format, where you click links to progress.The links suggest what would be common actions in a typical parser game - taking inventory, inspecting objects and so on. The layout is attractive and neat, in which links add to a growing transcript which can be scrolled back. Header images mark changes in location. You can create an account to save your place in the story, but given that the scope of the game, as it stands (I played Beta 0.81), isn't too long, you might not need this.

Howwl aims for the gritty urban apocalyptic atmosphere in its abandoned buildings and filthy interiors, and does it quite well. You never get to see the source of ominous (and sometimes uncomfortably human) noises. You stumble over unexpectedly gruesome sights. The writing style is detached - is it resignation on the PC's part? Hopelessness?

I found the PC to be way too generic to give the reader a stake in how the story progressed- not that you get to make many significant choices, anyway; the author's method of removing options if they're not necessary makes it impossible, for example, to escape a certain place or to explore more buildings than the author intended you to.

Because the author removes links deemed unnecessary, it is possible to get impossibly stuck at some point(s?) in the game. So it's not that the game is unforgiving in its puzzles - there aren't really puzzles - it's more... a design fault, kind of. (I'll email them to let them know.)

I had some minor niggles about the writing. Brand names are mentioned, almost to the exclusion of actual description for some items. The PC is horribly generic; we know more about the PC's dressing and clothing than the PC themselves. (Spoiler - click to show)Also, when you start, the PC is somehow aware that you're on the eleventh floor despite not knowing where you are or how you got there.

(Spoiler - click to show)There are occasionally external links to illustrate what, for example, a minotaur or a Molotov cocktail is. Though I can see how they might be useful, I found them distracting.

Some things I liked, though: I liked the interface, though I found the scrollback style made it visually distracting since your gaze must constantly move from the new text to the links. (Spoiler - click to show)I also liked the unusual mix of classical monsters (there are minotaurs, for example) in a modern urban landscape, something I've not seen before.

Howwl is hugely promising, I think - I like the way it looks, the way it does atmosphere and its premise. (Urban fantasy. I dig urban fantasy.)