Ratings and Reviews by verityvirtue

When you and James first set up the Orpheum, oh, what dreams you had! But now, burlesque is the only thing which brings people to the crumbling theatre.

The ‘about’ section promises just one puzzle, but without a clearly indicated goal for the PC, I found it hard to figure out what to do. (Maybe it’s just me.) (Okay, figured it out.) It took a little leap of logic for me, but once a certain step is done, things moved quickly.

This game was written for 24 Hours of Inform 2004, in which participants had to write an Inform game with 24 hours (no surprise there), and the game had to be set in a theatre, include a petticoat, an advertisement, something repainted and a trapdoor. The time limit probably explains why the environment was not as exhaustively implemented as it could have been, but at least the location descriptions are sufficiently interesting, and successfully convey the sense of dereliction and despair that now plagues the Orpheum.

The game is still buggy in places and the puzzle didn’t fully make sense, but it was still a respectable effort.

The strange painting on the wall has always bothered you. It’s your ancestor, apparently, and no matter how much you complain, your parents won’t take the painting down. So it’s up to you.

The first thing that struck me was the writing- it was a little jerky and repetitive, and it felt like the writing of someone for whom English isn’t their first language. Case in point: (Spoiler - click to show)There is a chair placed next to a table. You can see a book on the table. The cover of the book shows a horse.

In the ‘about’ text, the author had a vision of this being a window onto the bigger, fictional world of Talliston, Idaho. Perhaps because of the setting of the story (where the PC literally cannot move out of the starting room), this did not come across very strongly, since I never got a feel of what the wider community beyond the PC’s family was like.

As a side note, this game used two sound effects – I’m not quite sure what they represent, though, because I couldn't tell what types of actions produced the different sound effects.

The puzzle is classified as being ‘Tough’ on the forgiveness scale, but this is really because the single puzzle is on quite a tight timer. The game makes it additionally frustrating if you try the most straightforward action because there’s some kind built-in delay to stop you succeeding on the first try. On subsequent replays I realised there was probably an in-universe explanation for your reluctance, but this was not clearly indicated in the text.

I found it hard to enjoy playing this game, really, because the writing was too minimal to make up for the bare-bones implementation and the timed puzzle.

(This originally appeared here: https://verityvirtue.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/old-fogey/)

In recent months Chandler Groover has produced quite a number of unusual works, with quite a few edging into horror territory. creak, creak is a Twine work written for Twiny Jam which bears some similarities to Tailypo, another of Groover's works.

Something is creaking in the house. Your mother always said it's just the wind. You can't leave it at that. You have to look.

Groover uses timed appearance of text and various transitions to pace out the story, to great effect here. I found myself with a creeping sense of dread as I waited for the text to appear. The writing style is simple and some of the rhyming lines give the sense of a child's nursery rhyme - making the monster a creature of a child's nightmares, a la The Badabook.

This game may be a baby sibling of more full-fledged horror games, but creak, creak packs quite a punch and works well for such a constrained format.

Fahlstaff is a mysterious town, once a logging town, but now it boasts a vibrant arts scene and other natural attractions. Tour through this strange place with this map!

Map of Fahlstaff is written like a promotional leaflet, and has no real plot or goals. Instead, it is mostly about exploration. There are snippets alluding to the town's history and references to rumours. The writing has a distinctively 'Welcome to Night Vale' air - the commonplace mixes with news of the mysterious and the subtly ominous.

There is never really anything malevolent beyond that vague sense of dread, though, giving the game a general feeling of benign detachment. There are, however, some narrative events which are triggered by the one choice you make right at the beginning of the game, which made the game feel more like something living and active under your hands, rather than just something to be poked at.

The game is also prettily designed, with photographic backgrounds for each scene, though this sometimes made the text hard to read.

The tone fluctuates between sombre, PSA-style (again, like Night Vale) and conversational; I would have loved if the tone was a bit more consistent. Nevertheless, on the whole Fahlstaff is quite the charming town.

Two wolves go out for a night on the town. Neon. Cobblestones.

Written for Porpentine's Twiny Jam, in which one creates a Twine game within 300 words, the author eschews spartan sentences, instead using single words, linked with timed appearances.

The combination of music, macros and the individual words makes Wolfgirls in Love incredibly evocative, and evokes loss and love and relief with the briefest of brushstrokes.

This game relies as much on graphics and music as it does on the text; the timed appearances give a rhythm to the text that the words alone do not. Wolfgirls in Love is a fascinating illustration of what 300 words in Twine can do, but equally also a gripping, bite-size story in itself.

(This review was originally published with modifications at https://verityvirtue.wordpress.com/2015/12/26/wolfgirls-in-love/)

Here's a game set in another cyberpunkish, dystopian world, where biotechnology is so advanced that all you need to clone an organism - and indeed a human being - is a bit of their tissue and a special reagent. This is what you've resorted to, in an attempt to bring back your fiancée.

But nothing's ever as easy as that, and you may not always get what you expected...

Her Pound of Flesh had a theme familiar to that in many of this year's IFComp games, with the theme of sacrificing something to get your heart's desire, yet ending up with less than you started with. Because the author establishes the PC's motivations and dreams so well, the PC's helplessness in the face of events taking a rather squicky turn evokes sympathy: it's clear that thoughts about her are consuming the PC's life, even to the point of appearing in the PC's dreams.

The game progresses in 'days', with each day comprising about three to four choices. In dealing with her, there's often the choice to treat her as the human you remember her to be, or as something... less. Each day reveals new and terrifying things about what she has become.

In some ways, Her Pound of Flesh wonders what the limit of humanity is. Is it worth it, to have the physical form but nothing else? But more than that, this game is a story about longing. Despite there being less and less of her humanity day by day, the PC keeps turning back to what reminds him of her: things like her scent and her hair.

Overall, it may involve quite a lot of body horror and gore, but ultimately this game is heartfelt... and tugs at the heartstrings. Read that how you will.

(This review was originally published with modifications at https://verityvirtue.wordpress.com/2015/12/19/her-pound-of-flesh/)

You wake up in an unfamiliar spaceship. Something is wrong with the ship's mainframe and it needs help.

Developed for ProcJam 2015, this game features procedurally generated locations and objects, the writing of which nonetheless felt natural. Indeed, the writing is one of the high points of Mainframe. It went in a similar direction to Her Pound of Flesh, in that what was inanimate takes on life and flesh, and your treatment of it must change accordingly.

Mainframe progresses through a series of repeated scenes which often have wildly differing endings. Because of the structure of the game, lawn-mowering is inevitable, but at least the locations are bizarre enough to make this varied.

Mainframe has a solid story at its backbone and excellent writing; it's certainly a good look at the kinds of things procedural generation can produce.

(This review was originally published with modifications on https://verityvirtue.wordpress.com/2015/12/22/mainframe/)

Pale starts with what was, for me, an off-putting technical note. Okay, I can choose to play from Tobias's (whoever that is) point of view... and I can't play from Klaudia's (whoever that is)? Perhaps this is/was a work in progress.

Anyway.

You're Tobias, the handyman around these parts. These parts, for you, is a small town in Germany, called Bree. Things are quiet; the people are a peaceable sort... until you find Stefan dead and don't tell anyone. As you try and deflect suspicion, you can only mire yourself deeper into trouble. There are some violent scenes.

The writing is a little dry, but I'm not sure how to explain this, because it's not for lack of details. The author has made the effort to include things which would be part of the daily landscape for a person living in a small community, things like grouses and small jealousies. The writing feels like it lacks emotion, though. Tobias speaks rather formally, which comes across as being emotionally flat about what would usually be emotive subjects.

I also had a grouse with the pacing, somewhat. Pale started with a halfway-promising hook - that you, the PC, had been accused to murder - but, in one branch, built up the setup rather slowly, and in another, never gave any payoff. That made one branch feel very unbalanced. The other lacked the suspense that one might find in similar 'suspicion in a small town' storylines such as in Broadchurch or Jagten.

As a side note: unless I am mistaken, the author was a little careless in releasing this... did you really leave a blank passage there?

(Originally posted here: https://verityvirtue.wordpress.com/2015/12/29/pale/)