Reviews by verityvirtue

An escape game - well, in a loose sense of the word - where you have to get out from a series of surreal, weird rooms. The overall feel of the game reminded me of Mateusz Skutnik’s Submachine games, especially the more abstract ones. Unlike Skutnik’s Submachine, though, the rooms in Recorded lacked an overarching theme, or a repeating motif - something stylistic which would have made it clearer that this was the work of one entity/being/person, and ultimately created a stronger storyline.

One problem is that there’s not much in the way of story, or puzzle. What story there is is delivered through cryptic messages, though they often felt more like flavour text - purposeless, and not hinting much at what the story was. I felt like this opportunity to build a distinct NPC had been wasted, and it’s a pity.

As far as I can tell, there was one puzzle, and it was of the ‘pick up this object and put it there’ variety. Not exactly the most inspired of puzzles, unfortunately, and it was not clear to me how to trigger the appearance of the object that I needed to solve the one puzzle (I used the walkthrough).

Recorded has the beginning of what might have been a very interesting concept in the game, but it might have gone way over my head, or it was never developed.

You are on a pilgrimage. Where to? It is uncertain.

I had mixed feelings about this game. On a micro scale, there is enough to make it infuriating, things which shouldn’t be there. On a macro scale, though, Pilgrimage is about the search for home and making things right again.

What I liked about this game was that the scale of travel in this game suggests sea voyages every time you go in a compass direction, painting the game’s geography in broad sweeps instead of tiny intricate detail. This was fitting, as the PC travels across the world, so giving a general, though evocative, impression of different countries worked better than focusing on tiny details.

Pilgrimage is structured in small scenes, typically set in a particular country. By solving a puzzle or doing the ‘right’ action, you get to the next scene, and so on and so forth. The challenge, then, is figuring out what the action is; this was not always intuitive.

When travelling, the people you meet for such a short time sometimes seem themselves to be temporary while you are the only permanent thing you know; so it is with Pilgrimage. The NPCs in this game are little more than tools to solve a puzzle- was this a good thing or bad thing? I’m not sure. (Spoiler - click to show)This got mighty weird with the gallant knight, though - he's clearly besotted with you, and for you he's just an automated sword? In the context of a prolonged pilgrimage, it made sense that the PC never formed any long-term relations with anyone.

In the end, I relied on the walkthrough to bring me through the game, and I have to say that not worrying about getting lost or putting the game in an unwinnable state let me focus more on the writing - location descriptions is definitely one of the author’s strengths.

There were small niggles which would have infuriated me if I had not had the walkthrough: it has several implementation slips characteristic to parser IF. There is some confusion between definite and indefinite nouns when taking inventory and when you manipulate objects (Spoiler - click to show)(“In boat is sailor.”), which made the prose read weirdly. The synonyms the game accepted (for objects) could be more extensive. Messages when I take objects are triggered whenever I take it again (Spoiler - click to show)(such as the longsword, instead of only when I take it the first time - which produces quite amusing messages without context. For a normal release, this would not have left a good impression. As an IFComp entry, even less so - but Pilgrimage is redeemed by its broad arc and quite lovely writing.

The title hints at something mixing alchemy and words like ‘eldritch’ and ‘esoteric’ with mundane stuff, and having played Dalmady’s previous work, I admit I come to this game with expectations.

The game hits the ground steeped in the context: symbols from what I think is the Key of Solomon, and the language used in modern-day internships.

You’re aspiring to get into book publishing, and of course if you want to go down that path then internships are the way to go. It’s just that this Precantatio Publishing seems a little different…

Dalmady’s writing is able and smooth. She uses visuals in this Twine game minimally, though attractively.

The game is divided into sections using a to-do list as a kind of progress marker - which is kind of ingenious, really. Despite the title, there’s plenty of variety in the intern-like activities and plenty of things to inspect and explore. The story branches at some of the choices - something which isn’t immediately obvious - but once you figure out how to get to the branches, the new story paths are quite satisfying.

Well-written and visually attractive, Arcane Intern (Unpaid) lives up to its title.

The Ritual is a game about summoning a tentacled god with the blood of a pesky inspector and a bunch of loyal but none too bright followers.

Tone-wise, it feels similar to Hunger Daemon or Pratchett, with its irreverence for cult-like events and its matter-of-fact treatment of the eldritch. The Ritual is quite wordy, with paragraphs of text at each decision point, but it is redeemed by Turner’s strong and snappy writing. There are also hints of a more fleshed-out backstory. There is some ambiguity, though, about the PC’s true feelings about this B'tek Mer character - it's not always clear what the PC thinks about this god and why the PC might be summoning it/him - and a smattering of typos.

In terms of structure, The Ritual has only one decision point, and then minimal clicking through. This made it easier to replay the game to tinker with the possible outcomes - and Turner is generous with each of these. It's a bit like a simpler, pruned-down version of Magical Makeover.

So... play if you like parodies of Lovecraftian horror, tentacles and all, and if you want a mildly entertaining twenty minutes!

This Twine game plays on the oft-repeated phrase ‘friend zone’, using it as a literal prison for Nice Guys. It brands itself as a horror-parody 'in the tradition of Franz Kafka’, but I’m not sure Kafka could have topped this level of bizarre imagery.

What is by far the most distinctive thing about this game is its writing and mythos, really. There are apocalyptic scenes galore, and Lovecraft inches his way into each scene. It feels like the game Neka Psaria. It feels like a slimy version of Stross’s Rule 34. It feels like some kind of regional gothic, made interactive. This game reads like Porpentine… kind of, with more effigies and less cyberpunk.

The story appears to be set in an elaborate mythos with Priapus (in its original form, a Greek god of fertility and protector of male genitalia) worshipped as a kind of malevolent deity.

It’s no surprise that there’s sexual imagery throughout, though the imagery seems less erotic than violent. There is also quite a fair bit of violence, though at that point it felt more abstract than visceral. This was partly because the targets of the violence were nameless and, for all purposes, not distinct.

Apart from that, I found it hard to get my bearings. The way to progress through the game isn’t really clear - you start off naming a person you’re looking for, but exactly what has happened to that person is very unclear. It made it frustrating for me, half because I kept 'walking’ in circles, half because I didn’t know how to advance the story.

Nevertheless, Vance’s writing is sound. It never veers into Lovecraftian purple prose, despite its influence, and putting aside my misgivings, this is an able piece of genre writing.

scarfmemory is a short game (about 10-15 minutes' play for one play-through), in memory of a lost scarf - something beautiful, now forever gone. More accurately described as an interactive diary, it reads like a stream of tangentially connected thoughts and experiences, accompanied by occasional photos.

The game works with links which expand out, when you click on them, to a related chunk of text. How to explain? It's like how Lime Ergot worked - you click on a link, it expands out to relate a related memory or experience. It muses on the fate of the scarf, and the musings of a creator: where are these bits of yourself, whose intimate history only you know? Is anyone using it? If they use it, would they know its story - how it came about? Would it matter?

I felt the reflection made it a little more than just a 'day in life' kind of game, simply because it was thoughtful, and it was born of something which other creators of things would probably have thought about.

scarfmemory is as simple as it sounds, and to say there was nothing else remarkable about this game would be to treat this little game unfairly.

(Spoiler - click to show)As a last thought, I got a BAD END at the end of the game, which left me wondering if I could get a good ending...

Women come to her when their husbands stray. She accepts not crude cash, but things of beauty. She will fix them- for as long as they live.

The Fixer is linear, but a delight to play through. Emelumadu paints a city where spirits and humans mingle; where believing in mysticism is common sense and practicality. She merges the absurd with the filthy; the beautiful with the pragmatic.

Emelumadu’s writing is rich with flavour and beautifully detailed, even when she goes into sordid detail of a certain character. Her writing moves from being initially subtle - from hinting at the narrator’s identity - to exulting in the narrator’s strange abilities.

The Fixer also uses graphics throughout the story, though I didn’t listen to the audio, and the story art is gorgeous and unobtrusive. A delight to read.

This game was written for the Twiny Jam, meaning this game was written within 300 words. In South America, the Water Wars are raging, but, for you, you're more concerned about your own building's water ration. It starts at midnight, and if you start early enough, maybe you'll have enough for a shower, to flush the toilet and wash your clothes today.

This game, given its brevity, uses the cyclinglink macro to economise on words and to great effect: Mason used it to implement steps of a routine, such as preparing for a shower. This, combined with timed text, created a sense of urgency appropriate to the situation.

The game is limited in scope, but there are hints to a mildly dystopic future - hints of a wider world, and that made it feel less like a short game per se, but rather a limited window into the author's world.

You are a junior diplomat, though not a very good one; you probably shouldn’t have gone to that party last night, amongst other things. And now you have an angry Glorpian in front of you. And Glorpians are sticklers for etiquette.

Tea Ceremony is a simple game, in prose and in mechanics. The writing is perhaps sparser than it could be, though it serves its purpose. This game, however, has puzzles at its heart, rather than story. Whether this harms or helps the story is another creature altogether. Logic puzzles abound, which will probably be familiar to even newbies. Mechanically, Tea Ceremony is well-done; the parser handles commands for the puzzles intuitively and everything the player needs to know to solve the puzzles and win the game is clearly stated in-game.

The game’s very simple prose gives the feeling of being unsubstantial, but there are, in fact, some gems, as suggested at the end of the game, to discover. Strong, technically, imbued with a sense of playfulness, even if it doesn’t give the impression of being highly polished.

You are a prisoner for a crime you don't remember committing, and your only chance of escape is to draw a square circle.

Kafkaesque is a word many have used to describe this game, and indeed a sense of claustrophobia pervades the entire escape attempt. The writing is solid and sometimes witty; most visible objects were implemented. It was, however, marred for me with imperfect line breaks and the occasional "infodump".

Balance between story and puzzles was probably a tough call here. There is plenty of both, which provides for a rich playing experience, but the delivery of major plot points was often delivered as an uninterrupted chunk of text. Reading the 'infodump' like that broke the flow of the story and, for me, lessened the impact of the most major twists. The puzzles were well-hinted with contextual hints, and there are multiple solutions to some of the puzzles. Despite this, the puzzles are not easy. For me, solutions weren't immediately obvious and I often referred to the hints. I found it hard to find that moment of enlightenment when solving the puzzles, partly because there wasn't enough material with which I could experiment. Also, it seems to be possible to put the game into an unwinnable state, probably meriting its Nasty rating on the Forgiveness scale.

Conversation in Square Circle also merits some mention, with most topics of conversation given an appropriate response. As with Blighted Isle, Eve also includes some natural-sounding responses to topics for which the NPCs do not have an answer - a thoughtful, and also playful, gesture.

Square Circle is technically strong, with a well-thought-out story and interesting puzzles. There is a good twist towards the end, and perhaps could adopt a more strongly consistent tone, but well worth playing.