Ratings and Reviews by verityvirtue

[This game concerns a sadistic kidnapper. Please exercise discretion.]

First Person turns the relationship between the parser and the player on its head, making your interaction with the parser into a dialogue of sorts between a kidnapper and the victim. It's very brief. Details are kept to a minimum, to the point of underimplementation - it sometimes feels more like a proof of concept rather than a full-fledged game that one may be immersed into.

First Person is unsettling once you figure out what's going on, and be warned: there are no happy endings in this one. It's worth playing to figure out what's going on with the parser.

Time to completion: 5-10 minutes

[This game contains a large, unannounced picture of a certain animal - see image files included with the download]

Boogle riffs on Google default messages and online ads to create a creeping sense of dread. The eponymous search engine is an NPC in its own right, which directs your search results to serve its own purposes. It's a mood piece more than a game, really; the story is not particularly fleshed out, but the idea is so very creepy.

This game deserves a mention of multimedia, because it makes ingenious use of otherwise basic Twine functions to replicate familiar sights.

This game takes the form of a continual uprooting and moving. Circumstances - renovation, increasing cost of living, disruptive neighbours - constantly make it impossible for you to live there. Each passage lists what you missed from the last place, a sketch of the place you've moved to, and what eventually forces you to leave. At each turn, the direction from which you came is blocked off: you can never return where you came from.

The mechanics work well to illustrate the concept. It stabs at the insidious force of gentrification and also casts a glance at the impersonal nature of urban living, where it is possible to live months in a place without ever knowing anyone.

It would have been good if I, the reader, could have been more invested in the PC. The reasons why you move out are so varied that it can be hard to tell what the PC is like, and the descriptions are always more about the environment than about the PC. I imagine, though, that each play through shows the player a different set of circumstances which drive the PC out.

This game is otherwise technically sound: each passage appears procedurally generated, making it possible to wander through this city virtually forever.

[This game involves self-mutilation and violence.]

Time to completion: 5-10 minutes

You are a city girl, seeking thrills and spills out West. You gather your petticoats, get yourself a gun, and get on the next coach.

Turns out, though, that being out West isn't quite what you imagined...

This game makes extensive use of mouseover effects (this is replaced by the normal touch on mobile), which makes moving through the story very fast. Your only interaction with NPCs and objects is to shoot them, and (on PC at least) having mouseover replace clicks means that when you, the player, interact with anything by touching it, you destroy or maim it. There's a moment where this is especially brilliantly handled, where you can only ever destroy, regardless of your best intentions.

The writing is witty and self-aware. The PC swaggers into a bar, only to be snubbed by the bartender for ordering a bourbon on the rocks; the PC's bravado has her shooting everything in sight, but this gets her told off by the woman she's fixed her eyes on.

The story's surreal overtones are buoyed by the PC's initial idealism - there's something in shooting everything in sight which doesn't strike true for me - so your mileage may vary. I'm sure there's something deeper to it, but, for now, I really just see it as a strange riff on tropes in Westerns.

This, the blurb states, is a story about growing up. Well, it isn’t wrong, not entirely, but one thing the blurb doesn’t state is that this isn’t a game. (Or IS it? The debate continues at 5…) Well, it's a game-poem.

So if you do have a look at it, know that there are no choices. As a poem, though, it does pack quite a punch.

Warning: mentions suicide and sex.

Time to completion: 20-30 minutes

This game reminded me strongly of porpentine's Ruinness, with its multiple protagonists and deliberate strangeness. Like porpentine's worlds, institutions are mostly faceless, cruel, unsentimental; mystic symbolism is commonplace; place details are but sketched out.

Here, you attempt to stop the end of days. There's no narrative conflict more often thrown around: after all, what bigger stakes could there be besides the end of the world?

Heretic Pride's view of the apocalypse is intimate, gentle. There is less of dramatic world-saving, more conversation. Who do you miss, one character asks. How was your childhood. Heretic Pride is a phlegmatic/melancholic read, with a focus on building a spare, gentle mood.