Ratings and Reviews by verityvirtue

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.

You've been on this quest for so long, you can hardly figure out what's going on. All you know is that if you remain in this snow any longer, you'll die.

I enjoyed playing this game, mainly because it is more than it seems. The writing is descriptive and clear; the sense of pacing faultless. Snowquest is very much a story-based game, rather than character-based or even puzzle-based; establishing a distinctive PC voice isn't an emphasis here.

My playthrough was almost entirely free of mechanical issues, by which I mean problems with guessing verbs, not knowing what to do and so on. The puzzles are largely well-designed, with what you need to solve them usually pretty clear. I found navigation a bit of a chore sometimes, especially in the larger initial world, because the exit lister seemed to disappear without explanation - I suspect this is a technical/interpreter issue, but it disrupted the flow of the game. There is also a guess-the-verb puzzle, through which I bulldozed with the hints.

Overall, Snowquest is a linear, mildly puzzle-y game, making up a little less than an hour's play.

Time to completion: 40-45 minutes

Groover presents a game in the best tradition of the locked-room murder mystery, featuring a canine protagonist. As with other games featuring canine protagonists, the sense of smell is tremendously important. In fact, in Toby's Nose, >SMELL acts like how >EXAMINE does in Lime Ergot. In fact, the author's note acknowledges the contribution of Lime Ergot and Pacian's Castle of the Red Prince in his coming up with the game's core mechanic.

Toby's Nose is generously and lavishly written; almost everything is implemented and written in vivid, eye-catching detail. As with other games using 'telescopic' observations, the parser remains a uniquely flexible tool to shift the PC's focus from objects distant both geographically and conceptually.

There are generous hints provided, but the writing gave clear enough hints to allow the reader to figure out what's going on. That brings us to another thing unique about this game: the reader has the responsibility to make the observations and deductions. Unlike many other mystery games, the game reveals nothing of the correct answer (i.e. whodunit), not in the form of a notebook, not in the form of a list of clues, leaving any explanation of the crime to the end. Shifting the responsibility to the reader to figure out what's going on invests the reader much more in the game.

As with other dog-PC games, this game remains lighthearted, even when the PC is recalling other characters' sordid details, and maintains a gentle sense of humour throughout. A comment about the ending is below, but overall, I found Toby's Nose a very charming and highly polished game, featuring excellent writing and a good use of the core mechanic.

(Spoiler - click to show)One might complain that the ending of Toby's Nose is a bit of a wall of text. One would not be wrong! However, this echoes the structure of the original Holmes stories - Doyle's idea of a resolution was quite often to have Holmes explain what he had been doing right under the reader's nose - so Groover is perhaps justified in this aspect.

This was made in the newly released platform Texture, created by Juhana Leinonen and Jim Munroe. This system enables players to drag and drop verbs, creating hypertext games which are uniquely suited for mobile devices. The system is still in alpha/beta, having been released late last year, but is available for tinkering (http://texturewriter.com/alpha/) (caution: the site stores stories within your browser's local memory - there doesn't yet seem to be a way to download the story format, only the resulting HTML.)

Here, Zed uses the different verbs as a means for creating story branches. You are a commissary of Mother, gathering data from within your host. You can sense your host's vital signs, but, likewise, your every movement is detectible to your host. The more data you collect, the more you risk detection... and expulsion.

A Gift for Mother uses an elegant dichotomy to create branching, though I felt it didn't quite bring out the full possibilities of Texture. It would have been great if the same verb could have applied to multiple objects, but as it stands, A Gift for Mother is a striking story written from a parasite's point of view.

In a cyberpunk world where you are inextricably linked to implants, where your memories aren't just in your brain, someone's meddled with your implanted hardware, and the doctors had to do a soft reset. In the process, they damaged quite a lot of hardware and took away a big part of your 'dry' memory. You are a blank slate now.

[This game is about a D/S relationship - no overt sexual content]

I'm not entirely sure what to say about this. Reset is an exploration of relationships in a world where you can surrender all control, physically and mentally. Underlining the inseparability of the PC's implants and the PC, Reset uses the second person cleverly - there is a 'metal-you', a 'you-you' and a 'body-you' - bringing into question what identity means, in this universe. What does it mean when 'body-you', your physical self, remembers things which 'you-you' doesn't? Are your feelings just as valid when only one aspect of your identity derives pleasure from them?

Bradley delivers the story brilliantly. One bit which was particularly excellent was the description of the PC surrendering their control to Alison - the author brought out the interactions between the different aspects of the PC's personality very well. The story was also extraordinarily well-constructed. Recommended.

You're a hardened bounty hunter, the toughest this side of town, and you're riding in the sunset when you see a figure. And that rarely means good news.

The writing in Out West is elegant and spare, which suited the setting. I thought there was a little too much reflection- thoughts which could be

This game was oddly coy with the action. Every time action is promised, there are numerous little pacing devices to distance the player from the shoot-enemy-and-move-on action that one might expect from a Western. No, instead of letting you blast enemies, it takes a more reflective pace, reminding you of Ma's sayings. The contemplative air felt at odds with the sense of urgency that the game was trying to create, though it worked in the later half.

Out West features lovely pixel art and adds to the tone of the story. The game is well-thought out and I enjoyed the writing. It certainly gives a nice dark slant to the classic Western setting, but there were things that irked me, which I can't discuss without spoilers. (Warning: long spoilers)

(Spoiler - click to show)Out West works in a cyclical fashion, where you 'die' after running from the stranger or standing him down, then are given instructions. Given the nature of what we might call the antagonist, this actually made a lot of sense. What was a bit more infuriating was the game's unwillingness to let the player know if we had made any progress towards the goal. This style was done in Bigger than You Think, or Endless, Nameless, and in those games, it was clear what you were meant to do differently in each iteration. Here, there seem to be only trivial differences in the outcome of each iteration, no matter what you do. There's also no indication whether you're come anywhere closer to the goal. The PC is told that they're supposed to harvest souls for the entity, but the actual harvesting is never shown - only the aftermath (at least, that's what I thought it was) - and the entity never seems to acknowledge what you're done.

Also, an even more spoilery thing, but one which niggled at me: jul vf gur CP nqqerffrq nf Orrymroho? Vs gur CP vf nqqerffrq nf fhpu, gura jub vf nqqerffvat gur CP?

You wake up. Something in your room is different. You could sleep, yes, or you could try and find out what it is.

At once a riff on the theme of 'sleepless in your bedroom' and an exploration of dream-spaces, Hypnagogue presumably derives its name from 'hypnagogic' - the fugue state between sleep and wakefulness. The spaces you explore and look in on are likewise the spaces between sleep and wakefulness, as you catch glimpses of people's bedrooms. The author provides tantalising details of these spaces, but these are only ever glimpses. The author delights in giving strange bits of story, but the writing overall felt unfocused. Hypnagogue felt like it was trying to make a point, but I couldn't figure out what it might be referring to. Maybe there is no real-life analogue and I'm overthinking it.

That said, Hypnagogue is generally a well-written expedition through some very strange spaces. This is a game in which the setting is more of a character than the PC: you are merely the means to explore it.