Ratings and Reviews by verityvirtue

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/)

You are Tara Sue and, simply put, you lead a pretty boring life. However, things are about to get more interesting...

MNiTS follows a kind of time cave structure, which allows it to be highly branching despite it being so short; of course, the length of the story and early branching allows for easy replay. The scenarios are slightly outlandish, especially towards the end - a whim of the author's? - but veer towards the grim.

The joy in such 'boring work life' games is discovering the secret whims and fancies of the PC which lie behind their urbane exterior, but MNiTS didn't establish much specifics.

Worth mentioning is the rather attractive layout and scrollback formatting, which made the final story readable as a conventional short story.

Ultimately, MNiTS made use of a mundane concept which, ironically, could stand to be more interesting.

Weird City Interloper is a short conversation-based romp through a fantastical city in the vein of Porpentine’s works - peopled with fascinating and fantastical characters.

For a game with no location descriptions to speak of, it was surprisingly atmospheric in its descriptions of the slums and the stenchworks, and spoke of a society more well thought-out than one might expect from such a short game. The hints of detail suggested a city like Miéville's New Crobuzon: highly stratified, with each social strata having elaborate rituals and norms; and highly industrialised, with the cogs of machinery merging with the eldritch.

All we know of the NPCs are their replies in conversation, and Pacian makes full use of this by giving each character a distinct voice and take on common topics. The game also comes with a very friendly hint system, in the form of a streetwise city guide. It took a bit of a leap of logic to figure out how to progress, I must admit, but the logic in the rest of the story is consistent.

Weird City Interloper was similar to Walker and Silhouette or Castle of the Red Prince in its unusual navigation, and the game lives up to its description as being shallow but broad, and makes for short (less than an hour) but colourful play.

Content warning: this game contains sometimes unexpected descriptions of death and gore.

You wake up in a North London flat, unable to remember how you got there (sound familiar?). Tottenham is devoid of people. It's time to go.

The game is initially a lot about exploration. There isn't much of a clear goal, but as you explore, it's clear that something very bad has happened. The game never makes it clear what you're aiming for - perhaps a vague attempt at safety - even to the end.

Howwl is written with a vaguely Twine or Undum-like format, where you click links to progress.The links suggest what would be common actions in a typical parser game - taking inventory, inspecting objects and so on. The layout is attractive and neat, in which links add to a growing transcript which can be scrolled back. Header images mark changes in location. You can create an account to save your place in the story, but given that the scope of the game, as it stands (I played Beta 0.81), isn't too long, you might not need this.

Howwl aims for the gritty urban apocalyptic atmosphere in its abandoned buildings and filthy interiors, and does it quite well. You never get to see the source of ominous (and sometimes uncomfortably human) noises. You stumble over unexpectedly gruesome sights. The writing style is detached - is it resignation on the PC's part? Hopelessness?

I found the PC to be way too generic to give the reader a stake in how the story progressed- not that you get to make many significant choices, anyway; the author's method of removing options if they're not necessary makes it impossible, for example, to escape a certain place or to explore more buildings than the author intended you to.

Because the author removes links deemed unnecessary, it is possible to get impossibly stuck at some point(s?) in the game. So it's not that the game is unforgiving in its puzzles - there aren't really puzzles - it's more... a design fault, kind of. (I'll email them to let them know.)

I had some minor niggles about the writing. Brand names are mentioned, almost to the exclusion of actual description for some items. The PC is horribly generic; we know more about the PC's dressing and clothing than the PC themselves. (Spoiler - click to show)Also, when you start, the PC is somehow aware that you're on the eleventh floor despite not knowing where you are or how you got there.

(Spoiler - click to show)There are occasionally external links to illustrate what, for example, a minotaur or a Molotov cocktail is. Though I can see how they might be useful, I found them distracting.

Some things I liked, though: I liked the interface, though I found the scrollback style made it visually distracting since your gaze must constantly move from the new text to the links. (Spoiler - click to show)I also liked the unusual mix of classical monsters (there are minotaurs, for example) in a modern urban landscape, something I've not seen before.

Howwl is hugely promising, I think - I like the way it looks, the way it does atmosphere and its premise. (Urban fantasy. I dig urban fantasy.)

On a hundred florin wager, you spend the night in Count Ruggino's house. No, you are definitely not afraid of ghosts. Definitely not.

There was deeper story than I'd expected, delivered in an unexpected way. I certainly liked how the memories telescoped out and were treated as an inventory object, a la Lime Ergot. The writing is half jocular, half dignified and retains the air of quiet amusement through the game.

The one puzzle in the game is made out of very many small moving parts; I found myself picking up and dropping a lot of things. In itself, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially since the puzzle itself was relatively straightforward. It was just that, without implicit actions, the game became repetitive.

Six Gray Rats has a simple enough story with an uncomplicated puzzle. Despite my little grouse, it was still entertaining, even if not absolutely memorable.

You've lost your axe. Despite everything the Reverend might say about you being a lunkhead, you know where it is: the dark forests behind your cottage.

Cold Iron has a relatively limited scope for one of Plotkin's games, both in size and implementation. Even with my limited puzzle-solving skills, Cold Iron took me about 5 minutes to finish. The puzzles, however simple, are pleasingly quirky: the things you find are linked to stories in your book of tales. The items needed to solve the puzzles are highlighted by the writing effectively, so it should not take too much effort to figure out what's going on.

There is also a pleasing, if ambiguous, twist, which made the small puzzles that much more satisfying, even adding a bit of emotional depth to the otherwise straightforward story.