Ratings and Reviews by verityvirtue

Klara has fallen asleep in her parents' charmed garden - no, not asleep - but catatonic. This is surely the work of an enemy sorcerer! As one of the dolls enchanted to guard and protect Klara, it is your duty to find you what's wrong and reverse it.

Starry Seeksorrow is delightfully charming in its writing - the flora featured are given descriptive, sometimes whimsical names linked to their function (reminding me of Caelyn Sandel's Seeds and Solutions). Yet, there's a sinister overtone: a good number of the plants you encounter are harmful. I would have loved to explore the flowers' abilities further, and explored the different ways they could be used, but that is likely beyond the remit of this game.

The puzzles in Starry Seeksorrow are well-hinted, with the systems behind the puzzles behaving consistently. But the memories that the PC carries add a much greater emotional depth to the story, fleshing the story out to something that could be placed in a wider fictional world, as well as shaping the setting as a result of its creators' personalities and pasts, instead of being merely 'magical cute garden'.

Starry Seeksorrow doesn't play with the parser as much as in Wilson's other works (I'm thinking of The Northnorth Passage and Lime Ergot, specifically), but it's nonetheless a great piece of writing.

I can't give much context on this piece, because every word in this Twine is a link. Without scenery text - text to set the scene - you see the game world solely through the decisions available to you. It's like peeking through a pinhole. Even then, the author suggests a dream sequences and segments of real life, with eerie parallels. The same actions repeat themselves, but take on deeper meanings in different contexts.

The format really works for the story. Reading only the links keeps the rhythm of the writing going. Circuitous conversations are shown through cycling links; social interactions crescendo in a series of seemingly trivial choices.

When acting as a particle was created for the Fear of Twine exhibition, organised by Richard Goodness, a collation of Twine games featuring a broad variety of styles and ways of using words. It's fairly short - reminiscent of the party game where you have to guess the story by asking the storyteller only yes/no questions - and well worth a look to consider how Twine can be used differently.

Time to completion: 20-30 minutes

(There is also a commercial/paid version of SABBAT with art and a soundtrack. This was based on the free version, linked above.)

[Warning: this game contains mentions of sexual content and self-harm, also optional animal abuse.]

It's hard to have a sabbat of one, but hopefully, once you get all the materials together, you'll be able to gather power for yourself.

SABBAT's narrator is friendly and encouraging. It was kind of like having a friend to guide and cheer you on, and in a game about making blood sacrifices to gain power, it was unexpected, but oddly cheering: I cannot hate a game which calls me witchdumpling. The mildly cynical humour here is refreshing. Instead of making trite remarks about how awful everything is, the humours slants toward the self-referential. You've made candles infused with centipede venom, and you muse how hard it was to get that venom in the first place and why did you buy a centipede again?

This game taps on the 'Living Alone in My Sad Apartment' genre, but uses this to highlight the contrast between your current state and the power that you eventually attain. Amongst other things, SABBAT draws on the idea of power through sex. Part of the PC's transformation involves a change in sexual organs, and one of the ways the transformed PC gets power from people is by having sex (or at least attempting to).

The game could be a bit of a mixed bag. The subject matter involves mixing with unknown forces, a theme usually given a more serious treatment in other fiction, but here it feels almost everyday. Yet the game remains self-aware as the PC acknowledges the strangeness of it all.

The branching reminded me of Magical Makeover, where combinations of items combine to produce different outcomes. Like MM, there are no 'bad' combinations in SABBAT (though there are some which are more amusing than others).

I wouldn't usually have plumped for the storyline, but the narrator really made the game for me. It can be polarising, but, for me, it was a charming game about the powerless seeking power and the lonely seeking companionship.

(This was originally published here: https://verityvirtue.wordpress.com/2016/01/24/sabbat/)

You are the last living inhabitant of your Habitat, your only companions the robots that maintain your living spaces. But there is hope... if you can collect enough data to feed the central computer in your Habitat, maybe you can avert catastrophe.

First, the interesting stuff. Icepunk features a procedurally generated landscape, represented on an ASCII map. Likewise, each setting is illustrated with ASCII art. I'm sure this took effort.

Data, in Icepunk's setting, takes myriad forms. Some comes from the lingering traces of mechanical life - ice golems, families and so forth - but in building your future, you must destroy them. Data also comes in the form of excerpts from (public domain) books and, in one memorable instance, tweets (which nets you '5 TB of Frivolous data'...).

However, where Icepunk is weaker is its reliance on lawn-mowering. You have to make repeated trips out into the wastes and return to your home base to deposit the data in the central computer - this is not in itself anything bad, but there seems to be little enough variation in the landscape that regions start feeling homogenous. Also, you can only travel by clicking on a map symbol adjacent to where you are - making travel back to your home base at best, mundane; at worst, frustrating. The delay that I encountered in loading the page only added to the frustration. I imagine this would deter people from playing it through to completion.

Nonetheless, Icepunk is an interesting experiment in exploration in IF, one which gives a different meaning to 'datamining', even if it was let down by tedium.

(This was first published here: https://verityvirtue.wordpress.com/2016/02/03/icepunk)

It's winter, and he's run out of food. He's hungry, he's cold, and if he doesn't go hunting, he'll freeze soon. But something wanders into his house. If he doesn't eat it, he will starve.

[This game contains sound effects.]

Tailypo belongs solidly in the desperation-horror genre: the horror that comes from doing something loathsome, even though it is a choice between that and dying. Groover makes judicious use of timed effects in Twine and repetition, building tension as creak, creak did.

Like Taghairm, Tailypo derives its premise from a creature from Appalachian folklore. While it might be easily repurposed as a story for campfires, or otherwise sanitised, I think Groover's take on this creature captures some of the desperation and terror - a terror from knowing that you are the only human in a mile's radius, and that no matter what, you have to do something - that probably inspired the original folk tale.

A short-ish Twine, published on Sub-Q, well worth playing.

Time to completion: 20-30 minutes

The family curse has activated. If you do not go north, you will die.

The Northnorth Passage plays around with restricted actions, and this is what makes it so extraordinarily suited for the parser, because the parser gives the impression of freedom, yet you can only really do one thing. Obeying the parser, though, brings you through a series of self-contained scenes, colourful and detailed; Wilson's writing sparks with life, with the kind of evocativeness reminiscent of Sunless Sea.

Yet, in each scene, you must forever remain at arm's length. In this sense, it is similar to dynamic fiction, the term coined to describe linear games which nevertheless require the player's interaction and participation to reveal the story. The PC's travel north also seems to reflect the passing of time (the movement over swathes of space and time reminded me of Victor Ojuel's Pilgrimage).

There was a very, very clever move right at the end of the game - an invisible puzzle, if you'd like - which wrapped it up perfectly. If I were to mention a game with a similar move, it would be very spoilery, but there is one...

Originally published here: https://verityvirtue.wordpress.com/2016/01/30/the-northnorth-passage/