Ratings and Reviews by verityvirtue
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Polished deep sea exploration, April 9, 2016*Time to completion: 20-30 minutes
In Tangaroa Deep, you are a marine biologist going down to document creatures of the deep in SS Tangaroa. The deeper you go, the stranger these creatures become. After all, there is so much we don't know about the deep sea.
The PC's only link with the outside world is their connection with Jackie, their research partner, and their banter is a delightful foil to the creatures living down below, which get weirder and weirder. Like parser IF, the world model is location-based, which means story branching is dependent on where you move, meshing wonderfully with the overall story.
Several visual features illustrate atmospheric changes as the PC goes further and further down. The air meter ticks down. The background deepens from aqua to black. The description of creatures gets weirder and weirder. Where Dalmady's writing shines, I think, is in the late game, if you choose to go as deep as you can, and then some.
Recommended.
In Rough Draft, you’re helping Denise, a writer suffering from writer’s block, decide the course of her story, a fairly generic fantasy-type story. At some points, though, the narrator decides that the story can go no further; you, as invisible editor, can go back and get her to rewrite at a certain decision-making point. It takes the concept of the meta-writing game and really runs with it.
What makes this game unusual is being able to visualise the story structure. I liked how information from one rejected branch unlocked decisions in other branches – a reflection, perhaps, of how brainstorming sparks off ideas, even if the original ideas never do make it into the final product.
Story branches are quickly pruned off, which means that players must do a bit of lawn-mowering (this is not necessarily meant as a harsh critique, goodness knows I’m guilty of that myself) to find the ‘right’ story branch that allows progress. It would have been great to be able to complete the story using a variety of ways – that, after all, is the power of the imagination.
It’s a pity that the meta-story (the fantasy story the player helps to write) is relatively bland. The fantasy story seems to follow stock tropes and template-like encounters; dialogue sometimes feels stilted. Nonetheless, it is evident that the author has spent much effort on this – the screens which show the story in progress are in reality separate images, as is the story map – and its implementation of this idea, which has so often been talked about, is laudable.
Time to completion: 30-40 minutes
You are 10-year-old Allison. When you were very young you were in a horrible accident, and since then you've used a cyborg body. But today, your parents have prepared a surprise for you... your own spaceship body!
The game is set in a space colony, in which AIs make up a major part of society. Despite that, there is still a distinct division between AIs and 'true' humans, leaving cyborgs like Allison in a grey area. The author takes full advantage of the world building by focusing more on exploration rather than plot - its approach felt a little like some of the moon scenes in Creatures Such as We. The writing is rightly described as charming.
Allison is, on the surface, about a girl's adventures, but the story world has enough detail to allow it to touch on more contentious subjects like discrimination, about identity, about growing up. It feels like a gentler version of Birdland, with its focus on relationships at school (even if those in Allison are entirely platonic), its child protagonist and its themes. Allison is a thoughtful, charming game with a nicely fleshed-out world - recommended.
In this mid-length work, you play as Wendy Little, secretary in Pickleby, Otis and Meyer, a position your father got you. You’re engaged to Derek, and, well, everything… is peachy.
Tough Beans is, on the surface, a going-to-work simulator – go to work, perform menial errands and so forth – but the story stands out. It highlights how women – especially those who fit the archetypes of femininity – are so often belittled and infantilised. The game opens with an extended musing on the names that people call you – in fact, barely anyone apart from the PC herself calls her by her given name:
Baby. Babe? Babe?
For as long as you can remember, you’ve never really had a name–never needed one. For 22 years people have swaddled you in epithets, letting you know that even though you’re not quite on the right track, the world is there to hold your hand. Your father, your friends, your boyfriend. Gas station attendants.
This game is heavily reliant on cutscenes (do I hear accusations of “not interactive enough!”?) to tell the PC’s account of a lifetime of being put down. Given that the game focuses on the story of an established character, I’d argue that it works, just that it can look daunting sometimes.
What would have made the game better would be work on the technical aspects and hinting actions that I needed to do to progress were not always obvious. The choice of verbs is not always intuitive (for me, anyway). If it were not for the walkthrough, I would have missed a puzzle altogether. Changes in location were not always clearly indicated in the text.
The story arc reminded me of Hedda Gabler’s play A Doll’s House, with the PC’s progress palpable through the story and contrasted clearly at the end. And I liked that (Spoiler - click to show)the asides, too, were written in a way that foreshadow troubles in the PC’s relationship (in response to examining the PC’s boyfriend’s books, you get “You’re trying to get moving, not put yourself to sleep.”
Time to completion: 20-30 minutes
From the creator of When acting as a particle / when acting as a wave comes a polished work of linear fiction about the creator of QUIMER-B, a virtual consciousness so powerful it could take over the running of a city, and, ever since its conception, a source of moral outrage. To prove QUIMER is capable of running a city, you're going to put your whole facility under its control for one day. If you can prove that, then maybe it can handle the pressure from everyone else.
Except it never really goes to plan, does it?
QUIMER-B is part epistolary, part first-person narration of an apocalypse in action. This game has a good grasp of pacing, creating tension through static and dynamic text. It sometimes uses the mechanic of clicking to draw out a scene, or to contrast it with the timed appearance of a piece of text.
Compellingly written and story-driven, this game's strength is in sketching out the story - and the relationships between the PC and NPCs - and in letting the reader draw their own conclusions from these snippets. It's a bit like watching an opera with minimal backdrops, where it just takes a few props to suggest a palace, or a battlefield.
It's worth having a click through this short, polished game.
Based on the Vanguard Trilogy by the same author, you play a newbie bike messenger working as one of the cogs in the premier courier company, Packet. One of the perks of working here is meeting the legendary Sorcha Blades... which, of course, is what happens when she needs a decoy messenger.
This game is a moderately branching story which takes the PC through an expansive setting, reminiscent of China Miéville or Emily Short's City of Secrets, and gives the sense of an extensively mapped-out city. Neighbourhoods are given characters of their own; distinct communities live in different parts of the city. The story attempts to illustrate a dangerous city running amok with criminals and secret dangers, in a city so starved of resources that fresh fruit is a minor luxury, but nothing really affects the PC directly. The story structure is simple; clearly, the focus is on the writing itself.
The writing itself, however, is not terribly polished; there are typos and missing punctuation marks, there are missing words, there could be more paragraph breaks to let the text breathe. As a spinoff from the source material, I guess it's no surprise that it ended just as it was getting interesting! If it was expanded to elaborate on the hook mentioned in the last part of the game, and polished a lot more, I think it would make for very interesting reading.
You wake in your spaceship, sluggish. What are you here for? You can't remember. Your ship's not in the best shape; you've got to explore the stars. You may not have enough power in your engines to blast off once you land...
Traveler is a small, procedurally generated exploration game, with randomly generated descriptions of the stars. The individual planets are sometimes quite shallowly implemented, but Sandel uses each star as a pacing device. As you travel through the stars, your ship's stats decline, giving a tension to Traveler. Sandel's writing is strongest, I think, as she describes what you, in your travels, have missed; thoughts of home occur at the strangest times.
Overall, Traveler feels like a much more sensible version of Porpentine's Ruiness - both are about travellers who never make meaningful connections in any one place, for whom travel is work, whose constant moving around alienates them from everyone around them. A melancholic work which nonetheless ends on a hopeful note.
The best way I can describe SKATE OUT! is as a skate sim with a dark twist. You showcase your sick (or slick) skateboarding moves to an adoring audience, but all the time half your mind is occupied thinking about other, more pressing issues at home.
The use of language in this game makes an interesting study: the skateboarding tricks are described with generic hyperbole, which alienates the reader from the narrator's external face, even though the terminology seems legitimate. The PC's monologue, on the other hand, is described more naturally, even if it occasionally verges on the melodramatic. The clash between the internal and the external formed an interesting contrast, highlighted by the visual aspects of SKATE OUT!.
This is probably one of Paperblurt's more introspective works. It works quite well as a 'concept game', as it uses a deliberate contrast in tones and styles to illustrate the divide (a divide is particularly nebulous here, compared to other works which have done this). As always, the writing could push the story further and there could be a clearer story arc for the 'internal' side of the story, but it's an interesting little game all the same.
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